Exile Quotes

Here, we’ve compiled a list of the best Exile Quotes from famous authors such as Shimon Peres, Yasmine Hamdan, Ariel Dorfman, Sheri L. Dew, Willa Cather. Let’s look at these pieces of wisdom. We definitely have something to learn from them!

1
Look, we have existed for 4,000 years – 2,000 years in diaspora, in exile. Nobody in the Middle East speaks their original language but Israel. When we started 64 years ago, we were 650,000 people. So, you know, we are maybe swimming a little bit against the stream, but we continue to swim.
Shimon Peres
2
I sing ‘Beirut’ for what the city is for me, but I am also singing as an exile.
Yasmine Hamdan
3
I think to be in exile is a curse, and you need to turn it into a blessing. You’ve been thrown into exile to die, really, to silence you so that your voice cannot come home. And so my whole life has been dedicated to saying, ‘I will not be silenced.’
Ariel Dorfman
4
Satan understands the power of men and women united in righteousness. He is still stinging from his banishment into eternal exile after Michael led the hosts of heaven, comprised of valiant men and women united in the cause of Christ, against him.
Sheri L. Dew
5
Only solitary men know the full joys of friendship. Others have their family; but to a solitary and an exile, his friends are everything.
Willa Cather
6
In a certain sense, a writer is an exile, an outsider, always reporting on things, and it is part of his life to keep on the move. Travel is natural.
James Salter
7
The concept of loneliness and exile and self-sufficiency continually bucks me up.
Christopher Hitchens
8
Being a Russian oligarch these days isn’t easy. The best and brightest of them are in exile or in jail; others, after feasting on leverage during the commodities boom, now have tummies full of debt.
Keith Gessen
9
Most writers live in self-imposed exile, even when they don’t leave their country. They prefer the undiscovered country inside their own heads.
Anthony McCarten
10
I’m living in California but I have a place that is mine in Chile and I belong there. I am no longer an exile.
Isabel Allende
11
We try to exile ourselves more and more from nature – not always consciously: We build houses; we dismiss nature; nature has to be outside, because we’re inside. God forbid something like a cockroach comes inside, or some dust.
Diane Ackerman
12
My exile was not only a physical one, motivated exclusively by political reasons; it was also a moral, social, ideological and sexual exile.
Juan Goytisolo
13
I think the only positive thing that came from Uruguay’s dictatorship was the spread of Montevideo natives around the world, and I continued writing about them from my various places of exile.
Mario Benedetti
14
After so many years, I feel more American than anything else, but I’m also Romanian and whatever other oddities of temperament I picked up elsewhere, in Transylvania or France, for instance. These days, everybody is both an exile and a resident – they don’t call it the global village for nothing.
Andrei Codrescu
15
Seeking to forget makes exile all the longer; the secret of redemption lies in remembrance.
Richard von Weizsaecker
16
If you exile a writer, however free the country he is sent to, there will always be a sense of internal constraint.
Ma Jian
17
I have written about the dispossessed, immigrants, the condition of women who do not enjoy the same legal rights as men, the Palestinians who are deprived of their land and condemned to exile.
Tahar Ben Jelloun
18
I’m interested in people who find themselves in places, either of their choosing or not, and who are forced to decide how best to live there. That feeling of both citizenship and exile, of always being an expatriate – with all the attendant problems and complications and delight.
Chang-Rae Lee
19
As a result of the historic catastrophe in which Titus of Rome destroyed Jerusalem and Israel was exiled from its land, I was born in one of the cities of the Exile.
Shmuel Yosef Agnon
20
I have loved justice and hated iniquity: therefore I die in exile.
Pope Gregory VII
21
No exile at the South Pole or on the summit of Mont Blanc separates us more effectively from others than the practice of a hidden vice.
Marcel Proust
22
Lots of times you can feel as an exile in a country that you were born in.
Azar Nafisi
23
Silence, exile, cunning and so on… it’s my nature to keep quiet about most things. Even the ideas in my work.
Don DeLillo
24
Exile is not a time frame. Exile is an experience. It’s a sentiment.
Marco Rubio
25
I think there is a heritage which I’m proud of, which is a fight for democracy, a fight for social justice, a fight for freedom. My grandfather went to jail or exile six times in his life, fighting for his principles for democracy, or for his country. And my father twice.
George Papandreou
26
The Opposition aren’t really the Opposition. They’re just called the Opposition. But in fact they are the Opposition in exile. The Civil Service are the Opposition in residence.
Antony Jay
27
In the ’70s I was in exile; every time I went back I wondered if they’d take my passport away.
Tahar Ben Jelloun
28
From the beginnings of literature, poets and writers have based their narratives on crossing borders, on wandering, on exile, on encounters beyond the familiar. The stranger is an archetype in epic poetry, in novels. The tension between alienation and assimilation has always been a basic theme.
Jhumpa Lahiri
29
Those who have never suffered the iniquities of exile cannot possibly understand the significance, the gravitas, of a mattress.
Ariel Dorfman
30
I never considered myself as somebody in exile because, different to my father who, yes, was in exile because he left Haiti as an adult, for me it was just to be somewhere else. I carried Haiti with me everywhere, but I also carried, you know, my youth in a public school in Brooklyn. It’s part of who I am as well.
Raoul Peck
31
I grew up acutely aware of the exile and distance caused by war.
Hiam Abbass
32
I’m very attracted to exile literature – particularly Nabokov – exactly because the idea of being away from home for any serious length of time is so inconceivable to me.
Zadie Smith
33
New York – that unnatural city where every one is an exile, none more so than the American.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
34
The Mariel boatlift was probably one of the most strengthening events of the exile community; maybe Nietzschean, in the sense that if it doesn’t kill you, it makes you stronger.
Joe Garcia
35
Pursuing employment or climatic relief, we live in voluntary exile from our extended families and our longer past, but in an involuntary exile from ourselves and our own past.
John Thorn
36
I’ve participated in many demonstrations since I was a child. When I was at medical college, I was fighting King Farouk, then British colonization, against Nasser, against Sadat who pushed me into prison, Mubarak who pushed me into exile. I never stopped.
Nawal El Saadawi
37
I know how men in exile feed on dreams.
Aeschylus
38
A week of sweeping fogs has passed over and given me a strange sense of exile and desolation. I walk round the island nearly every day, yet I can see nothing anywhere but a mass of wet rock, a strip of surf, and then a tumult of waves.
John Millington Synge
39
We live in the age of the refugee, the age of the exile.
Ariel Dorfman
40
From 1958 to 1966, I was in exile. I just wandered around teaching, waiting for an offer from Harvard.
Sheldon Lee Glashow
41
My complaint, as an exile who once loved New York and who likes to return a half-dozen times a year, is not that it plays host to extremes of the human condition: There is grandeur in that, and necessity.
John Updike
42
The more we exile ourselves from nature, the more we crave its miracle waters.
Diane Ackerman
43
Exile is more than a geographical concept. You can be an exile in your homeland, in your own house, in a room.
Mahmoud Darwish
44
I consider myself a kind of a one-man government-in-exile. I don’t want to call it a government – let’s call it one man’s idea of American freedom in exile.
Michael Moriarty