Quotes About Displacement

Globally, about 145 million people live three feet or less above the current sea level. As the waters rise, millions of these people will be displaced, many of them in poor countries, creating generations of climate refugees that will make today's Syrian war refugee crisis look like a high school drama production.

There is no road home.

qué mundo es este en que los migrantes, al verse imposibilitados para mínimamente sobrevivir, pierden su condición de humanos, adultos, racionales?

Our backyard looked like a marketplace. Valuable objects, precious rugs, silver candlesticks, Bibles and other ritual objects were strewn over the dusty grounds- pitiful relics that seemed never to have had a home. All this under a magnificent blue sky.

I am a stranger in a world I never made

A poor man is like a foreigner in his own country.

All the other houses have been pulled out of the street like bad teeth.

I want to migrate, but there's nowhere left to go. If I could only find an unclaimed space.

I am someone who couldn't find her place

They are caught between one world and another, and they no longer belong anywhere.

Estoy cansada de no saber dónde morirme. Ésa es la mayor tristeza del emigrado. ¿Qué tenemos nosotros que ver con los cementerios de los países donde vivimos? [...] ¿No comprendéis? Nosotros somos aquellos que miraron sus pensamientos uno por uno durante treinta años. Durante treinta años suspiramos por nuestro paraíso perdido, un paraíso nuestro, único, especial.

Dès que j'ai atteint mon indépendance, un logement habité par moi a d'emblée ressemblé à un débarras squatté par des réfugiés politiques, prêts à déguerpir à la moindre descente de police.

I met a landlord who will pay you to move at the end of the week and let you use his van. That's a really nice kind of eviction. I met a landlord who will take your door off. There are 101 ways to move a family out.

Poland was once a powerful imperial country that disappeared from maps of Europe for more than 100 years. It was partitioned and occupied by the Nazis and the Russians... We pop up and disappear and we do not trust what we are told to believe.

A lot of Polish and Russian Jews had this experience: they would emigrate, thinking they were on their way to New York. Then their captains would stop in Dublin and say, 'Everybody off.' They would leave, and by the time they discovered they weren't in America, they didn't have enough money to continue.

A poor man is like a foreigner in his own country.

Land degradation, rising sea levels, famine, and conflict will continue to drive people from their homes and towards cities, with megacities like Mexico City and Lagos becoming increasingly common in some of the poorest parts of the world.

There is not one single place built in this country that did not have a former Arab population.

Many writers today are wanderers. There is not only an unhousedness in language - how to convey, to say nothing of converge - but an unhousedness of place.

I am nowhere. I am home.

Forgive me. It's true. I wander. I wander in my heart and my thoughts. Such is the curse of any emigrant, to abandon one's home and never find another, to always flounder in a sea of remorse.

ALL POST-COMMUNIST SOCIETIES ARE uprooted ones because Communism uprooted traditions, so nothing fits with anything else," explained the philosopher Patapievici.

Sembrava sempre barcollare in una sorta di stordimento, come se avesse perso qualcosa e non riuscisse a ricordare cosa né dove cercare.

I foresaw my life unfolding as an interminable stretch of nothingness and so I spent my years on Tinos floundering, feeling like a stand-in for myself, a proxy, as though my real self resided elsewhere, waiting to unite someday with this dimmer, more hollow self. I felt marooned. An exile in my own home