Exile Quotes

• Only the misfortune of exile can provide the in-depth understanding and the overview into the realities of the world.

  Stefan Zweig

  Reality, Understanding, Depth

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• 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

  Home, Sadness, Thinking

  Edward W. Said (2013). “Reflections On Exile: And Other Literary And Cultural Essays”, p.212, Granta Books

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• Only the mind cannot be sent into exile.

  Ovid

  Education, Teacher, Mind

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• I am too far away from what I love and my distance is without remedy.

  Albert Camus

  Distance, Far Away, Alienation

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• Merely by being born intelligent, you right away find yourself in absolute exile.

  Milan Kundera

  Intelligent, Finding Yourself, Born

  "Farewell Waltz: A Novel". Book by Milan Kundera, 1976.

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• Exile is a dream of a glorious return. Exile is a vision of revolution: Elba, not St Helena. It is an endless paradox: looking forward by always looking back. The exile is a ball hurled high into the air.

  Salman Rushdie

  Dream, Air, Vision

  Salman Rushdie (1989). “The Satanic Verses”, New York, N.Y. : Viking

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• If there is anything good about exile, it is that it teaches one humility. It accelerates one’s drift into isolation, an absolute perspective. Into the condition at which all one is left with is oneself and one’s language, with nobody or nothing in between. Exile brings you overnight where it would normally take a lifetime to go.

  Joseph Brodsky

  Humility, Perspective, Language

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

  Azar Nafisi

  Country, Born, Feels

  Interview with Robert Birnbaum, www.identitytheory.com. February 5, 2004.

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• Everyone is born a king, and most people die in exile.

  Oscar Wilde

  Kings, People, Self Help

  Oscar Wilde, General Press (2016). “The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde: Novel, Short Stories, Poetry, Essays and Plays”, p.823, GENERAL PRESS

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• I know how men in exile feed on dreams.

  Aeschylus

  Dream, Men, Literature

  Aeschylus (2013). “Agamemnon in Plain and Simple English (Translated)”, p.137, BookCaps Study Guides

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• We live in an era where masses of people come and go across a hostile planet, desolate and violent. Refugees, emigrants, exiles, deportees. We are a tragic contingent.

  Isabel Allende

  Peace, People, Eras

  Isabel Allende, John Rodden (2004). “Conversations with Isabel Allende: Revised Edition”, p.58, University of Texas Press

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• I will tell you what I will do and what I will not do. I will not serve that in which I no longer believe, whether it calls itself my home, my fatherland, or my church: and I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can and as wholly as I can, using for my defense the only arms I allow myself to use -- silence, exile, and cunning.

  James Joyce

  Life, Art, Believe

  A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man ch. 5 (1916)

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• What exile from his country is able to escape from himself?

  Horace

  Country, Country Love, Able

  "Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations" by Jehiel Keeler Hoyt, p. 141-42, Carmina II. 16. 19, 1922.

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• They came to know the incorrigible sorrow of all prisoners and exiles, which is to live in company with a memory that serves no purpose.

  Albert Camus

  Memories, Sorrow, Purpose

  Albert Camus (1960). “The plague: translated from the French”

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• Exile (being where we don't want to be with people we don't want to be with) forces a decision: Will I focus my attention on what is wrong with the world and feel sorry for myself? Or will I focus my energies on how I can live at my best in this place I find myself?...'I will do my best with what is here.'

  Eugene H. Peterson

  Sorry, People, Focus

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• No man can be an exile if he remembers that all the world is one city.

  C. S. Lewis

  Men, Cities, Together

  C. S. Lewis (1980). “Till We Have Faces: A Myth Retold”, p.13, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• I am an exile; citizen of the country of longing.

  Suketu Mehta

  Country, Citizens, Longing

  Suketu Mehta (2006). “Maximum city: Bombay lost and found”, p.33, Penguin Books India

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• We all long for Eden, and we are constantly glimpsing it: our whole nature at its best and least corrupted, its gentlest and most human, is still soaked with the sense of exile.

  J. R. R. Tolkien

  Eden, Long, Humans

  J.R.R. Tolkien (2014). “The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien”, p.110, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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

  Richard von Weizsaecker

  Lying, Remembrance, Secret

  Sang-Jin Han, Kim Dae-Jung, Richard Von Weizsaecker (2015). “Divided Nations and Transitional Justice: What Germany, Japan and South Korea Can Teach the World”, p.60, Routledge

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• We must be afraid of neither poverty nor exile nor imprisonment; of fear itself only should we be afraid.

  Epictetus

  Fear, Poverty, Should

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

  Pope Gregory VII

  Love, Justice, Hated

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• An exile, ill in heart and frame,--
  A wanderer, weary of the way;--
  A stranger, without love's sweet claim
  On any heart, go where I may!

  Frances Sargent Osgood

  Sweet, Heart, May

  Frances Sargent Osgood (1838). “A wreath of wild flowers from New England”, p.134

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• Only yesterday I was no different than them, yet I was saved. I am explaining to you the way of life of a people who say every sort of wicked thing about me because I sacrificed their friendship to gain my own soul. I left the dark paths of their duplicity and turned my eyes toward the light where there is salvation, truth, and justice. They have exiled me now from their society, yet I am content. Mankind only exiles the one whose large spirit rebels against injustice and tyranny. He who does not prefer exile to servility is not free in the true and necessary sense of freedom.

  Khalil Gibran

  Spiritual, Eye, Dark

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• My imagination makes me human and makes me a fool; it gives me all the world, and exiles me from it.

  Ursula K. Le Guin

  Inspirational, Stupid, Equality

  Ursula K. Le Guin (1996). “Unlocking the Air and Other Stories”, HarperCollins Publishers

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• The mere passage of time makes us all exiles.

  Joyce Carol Oates

  Philosophical, Passage Of Time, Passages

  Joyce Carol Oates (2006). “Joyce Carol Oates: Conversations, 1970-2006”

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