Exile Quotes

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.

I sing ‘Beirut’ for what the city is for me, but I am also singing as an exile.

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.’

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.

Only solitary men know the full joys of friendship. Others have their family; but to a solitary and an exile, his friends are everything.

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.

The concept of loneliness and exile and self-sufficiency continually bucks me up.

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.

Most writers live in self-imposed exile, even when they don’t leave their country. They prefer the undiscovered country inside their own heads.

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.

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.

My exile was not only a physical one, motivated exclusively by political reasons; it was also a moral, social, ideological and sexual exile.

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.

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.

Seeking to forget makes exile all the longer; the secret of redemption lies in remembrance.

If you exile a writer, however free the country he is sent to, there will always be a sense of internal constraint.

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.

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.

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.

I have loved justice and hated iniquity: therefore I die in exile.

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.

Lots of times you can feel as an exile in a country that you were born in.

Silence, exile, cunning and so on… it’s my nature to keep quiet about most things. Even the ideas in my work.

Exile is not a time frame. Exile is an experience. It’s a sentiment.

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.

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.

In the ’70s I was in exile; every time I went back I wondered if they’d take my passport away.

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.

Those who have never suffered the iniquities of exile cannot possibly understand the significance, the gravitas, of a mattress.

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.

I grew up acutely aware of the exile and distance caused by war.

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.

New York – that unnatural city where every one is an exile, none more so than the American.

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.

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.

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.

I know how men in exile feed on dreams.

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.

We live in the age of the refugee, the age of the exile.

From 1958 to 1966, I was in exile. I just wandered around teaching, waiting for an offer from Harvard.

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.

The more we exile ourselves from nature, the more we crave its miracle waters.

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

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.