Quotes About Rootlessness

Exile is more than a geographical concept. You can be an exile in your homeland, in your own house, in a room.

A Jew without Jews, without Judaism, without Zionism, without Jewishness, without a temple or an army or even a pistol, a Jew clearly without a home, just the object itself, like a glass or an apple.

Je dis : c'est pour cette raison que tu as précisé que tu avais quelque chose d'étranger ? Il dit : oui, les yeux sombres, la peau brune. Et ce sentiment, qui sait, de ne pas être tout à fait à sa place, ici, d'être une sorte de déraciné, comme si on pouvait avoir le déracinement en héritage.

I don't belong much anywhere.

When I was growing up, I never felt that I belonged anywhere because we never lived in a house for more than three months. That's all I knew, and that's why I don't really belong anywhere.

Although I hold a German passport, I feel very much alienated when I'm there.

I'm British - ostensibly British - but I don't know where I really belong, you know?

I am sick of living out of a suitcase.

It's funny. When you leave your home and wander really far, you always think, 'I want to go home.' But then you come home, and of course it's not the same. You can't live with it, you can't live away from it. And it seems like from then on there's always this yearning for some place that doesn't exist. I felt that. Still do. I'm never completely at home anywhere.

A self-respecting man is a man without a country. A fatherland is birdlime.

Men become utilitarian out of fear of the alternative the chaos of tangled or tepid desires, of rootlessness and boredom.

particular rootlessness of the society had always lent itself to powerful extremes of both the left and the right, there was, in the volatility and evanescence of the culture an atmosphere ripe for extremism, each side with its own Utopian dreams, each side driving the other to a more polarized position.

I couldn't say who I am, I haven't the remotest notion of myself; I am someone without antecedents, without a history, without a country, and on that I insist!

And there are new kinds of nomads, not people who are at home everywhere, but who are at home nowhere. I was one of them

In the mind of a woman for whom no place is home the thought of an end to all flight is unbearable.

The traveler feels at home everywhere, because she is never at home anywhere.

She herself had grown up without any one spot of earth being dearer than another: there was no center of earth pieties, of grave endearing traditions, to which her heart could revert and from which it could draw strength for itself and tenderness for others.

I never felt truly at home in Switzerland.

Loneliness and rootlessness are just symptoms of an insecurity that assails us all when hitting this midlife moment. The world appears intent on blanking you out.

All the literature of this century is somewhat burdened by the theme of uprootedness.

He could survive anywhere but he belonged nowhere.

I grew up all over the world. My father was in the army and was posted to a new place every two and a half years. I have no geographical roots.

You can become quite blase, and also, I have no sense of home; I don't have roots. I've never had that feeling that someone else is going to take care of me, ever. I don't trust people.

Sadness is a feeling of loss. There is something one wanted, and one doesn't have it—or there is a way one wanted things to be, and things aren't that way. That is sadness. Instead, you feel rootlessness.