Exile Quotes

From the moment that man believes neither in God nor in immortal life, he becomes 'responsible for everything alive, for everything that, born of suffering, is condemned to suffer from life.' It is he, and he alone, who must discover law and order. Then the time of exile begins, the endless search for justification, the aimless nostalgia, 'the most painful, the most heartbreaking question, that of the heart which asks itself: where can I feel at home?

~ Albert Camus

It's the exile's dilemma. The home they yearn for is never the home to which they return. If they return.

~ Lauren Willig

Exile from society allows person to disengage from meaningless activities and develop conscious awareness. A person’s courageous struggle to eliminate the trepidation of social exile produces insights into what it means to be human. We can displace emotional disquiet by living a heightened state of existence. How a person’s resolves the tremendous anxiety and dizziness that impetus comes from contemplating the inevitability of death, human freedom of choice, the moral responsibilities attendant to living in a selected manner, existential isolation, and the possibility of nothingness establishes a governing philosophical framework. A person must not rue ouster from society because release from moral and societal constraints spurs learning and advanced consciousness.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

I didn't want to be an immigrant. I was forced to be an immigrant. Alexis de Tocqueville, the French writer, said that the powerful and the happy never go into exile. He was right.

~ Jorge Ramos

Knight, of course, felt that anyone's willing assistance tainted the whole thing. Either you are hidden or you're not, no middle ground. He wished to be unconditionally alone, exiled to an island of his own creation, an uncontacted tribe of one.

~ Michael Finkel

The world is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it.

~ V.s. Naipaul

exile is strangely compelling to think about but terrible to experience. It is the unhealable rift forced between a human being and a native place, between the self and its true home: its essential sadness can never be surmounted. And while it is true that literature and history contain heroic, romantic, glorious, even triumphant episodes in an exile’s life, these are no more than efforts meant to overcome the crippling sorrow of estrangement.

~ Edward Said

And I tell her about his description because I want her to know what I now know, which is that the place where the pepper grows is not a place to be afraid of…I tell her: Mama, exile is not always the darkest corner of the earth. Sometimes it is lush and plentiful, sometimes it is full of life…

~ Carola Perla

I would even argue that, for many displaced people, nostalgia is also blended with fear - the fear of uncertainty and of facing the challenges posed by the larger world and the fear of the absence of the clarity and confidence provided by the past. In essence, nostalgia is associated mostly with the experience of a particular type of migrants, namely, exiles.

~ Ha Jin

The price one pays when choosing exile is the loss of all that defines you as an individual. The only thing that makes this immense loss tolerable is the discovery of a self you did not know existed - of a true independence. That is the real gift of America, not its fabled wealth and prosperity.

~ Azar Nafisi

Give me the waters of Lethe that numb the heart, if they exist, I will still not have the power to forget you.

~ Ovid

An exile, said Zafar, is a refugee with a library.

~ Zia Haider Rahman

I thought that exile meant you had to leave your country and you could go anywhere--somewhere in the sun, a tropical island, say, or America. But exile doesn't mean that; it means you are banished to a specific place, and guess what, that place isn't in the sun and is no paradise, it's not even America. It's some cold, miserable place like Siberia, where you don't know anyone and you can barely survive. It's another prison.

~ Sally Green

This unhoused, exiled Satan was perhaps the heavenly patron of all exiles, all unhoused people, all those who were torn from their place and left floating, half-this, half-that, denied the rooted person's comforting, defining sense of having solid ground beneath their feet.

~ Salman Rushdie

I’m by myself,” she said finally. “No family to speak of.”“I see.” Leaning forward again, he rested his arms against the table. “That must be rather difficult.”“Sometimes.”“And lonely, I imagine. Perhaps that is why you came here tonight?”Her jaw popped under the strain of maintaining decorum. “First: I said I was alone, not lonely. There's a big difference. And second: is that really why you think I'm here?”“I do not know what to think. I know you must have reasons for being here other than what you have already hinted at. Reasons important enough to make an otherwise intelligent woman not only bring food to a stranger so late at night, but also accept his invitation to sit inside an empty motel room without a second thought.”“Why don't you just call me a hooker while you're at it?

~ Angela B. Wade

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

~ Ariel Dorfman