Quotes About Rootlessness

planting a root in the very center of my rootlessness.

It was the rootlessness that went with being the son of an RAF officer that shaped me. I had been to 11 schools by the time I was 9.

ORPHAN TRAIN is a specifically American story of mobility and rootlessness, highlighting a little-known but historically significant moment in our country's past. Between 1854 and 1929, so-called orphan trains transported more than two hundred thousand orphaned, abandoned, and homeless children—many

Cut off from his religious, metaphysical and transcendental roots, man is lost; all his actions become senseless, absurd, useless.

Their delight in posing as aliens, as transients, made a boast out of what should properly have been a cause of shame. 'To them, a homeland is a foreign country, and a foreign country a homeland

It's the price of rootlessness. Motion sickness. The only cure: to keep moving.

We learn we cannot form deep roots because we do not have the right to place or citizenship, and because we do not have citizenship to a place we do not have the right to a voice. We are alienated from our own past and from the future of the countries we live in. Where we are is the best we can hope for. We learn to be grateful.

Those who don't belong to any specific place can't, in fact, return anywhere.

Celui qui n'appartient à aucun lieu spécifique ne peut, en réalité, retourner nulle part.

And underneath it all, there remained an ever-present anger and hurt, the feeling of belonging nowhere that comes to people who belong everywhere. It

But the other tribe — the passionate, tragic, rootless tree — man? Alas! He is a creature whose highest privileges are a curse. In his mouth is ever the bitter-sweet taste of life and death, unknown to the trees. Without respite he is dragged by the two wild horses, memory and hope; and he is tormented by a secret that he can never tell. For every man worthy of the name is an initiate; but each one into different Mysteries.

My dear brother Barack Obama has a certain fear of free black men. As a young brother who grows up in a white context, brilliant African father, he's always had to fear being a white man with black skin. All he has known culturally is white. He has a certain rootlessness, a deracination.

The people who live everywhere are the same as those who live nowhere.

Another husband, another new house, another new country, but I never belong anywhere and I never own anything in my own right.

I no longer knew what it was like to feel Australian.

We are not native. We have no generations of Americans behind us. We have roots elsewhere. We are looking in from the outside. To me, that seems to be perfectly natural.

We're a long, long way from home. Home's a long, long way from us.

It is very hard. Man longs for a permanent home. But he does not know it until it is torn away from him.

For people like us, home doesn't exist.

all of them had lost the home in their minds for good.

I looked around almost in surprise, as though I had not been born here, but had suddenly dropped from the skies, or emerged from somewhere deep down in the earth, to find myself in a place where I did not belong, in a home which was not mine, born from a father who was not my father, and from a mother who was not my mother.

Clearly I did not inherit whatever gene it is that makes it so that when you linger in a place you start to put down roots.