Exile Quotes - Page 2

• The ideal place for me is the one in which it is most natural to live as a foreigner.

  Italo Calvino

  Travel, Natural, Foreigners

  Italo Calvino (2017). “The Uses of Literature”, p.347, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• Exile is terrible to those who have, as it were, a circumscribed habitation; but not to those who look upon the whole globe but as one city.

  Marcus Tullius Cicero

  Cities, Looks, Look Up

  Marcus Tullius Cicero (1871). “Three Books of Offices ; Or, Moral Duties: Also His Cato Major, an Essay on Old Age; Laelius, an Essay on Friendship; Paradoxes; Scipio's Dream; and Letter to Quintus on the Duties of a Magistrate. Literally Translated, with Notes, Designed to Exhibit a Comparative View of the Opinions of Cicero, and Those of Modern Moralists and Ethical Philosophers”, p.271

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• 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

  Dust, House, Trying

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• The biblical lifestyle is always a witness of resistance to the status quo in politics, economics, and all society. It is a witness of resurrection from death. Paradoxically, those who embark on the biblical witness constantly risk death - through execution, exile, imprisonment, persecution, defamation, or harassment - at the behest of the rulers of this age. Yet those who do not resist the rulers of the present darkness are consigned to a moral death, the death of their humanness. That, of all the ways of dying, is the most ignominious.

  William Stringfellow

  Biblical, Darkness, Risk

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• Voyagers discover that the world can never be larger than the person that is in the world; but it is impossible to foresee this, it is impossible to be warned.

  James A. Baldwin

  Travel, War, World

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• The explorer who will not come back or send back his ships to tell his tale is not an explorer, only an adventurer; and his sons are born in exile.

  Ursula K. Le Guin

  Travel, Son, Ships

  "The Dispossessed". Book by Ursula K. Le Guin, May 1974.

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• 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

  Political, Redemption, Moral

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• The Gnostics believed that exile was the essential condition of man. Do you agree? I do. The artist and the addict both wrestle with this experience of exile. They share an acute, even excruciating sensitivity to the state of separation and isolation, and both actively seek a way to overcome it, to transcend it, or at least to make the pain go away. What is the pain of being human? It's the condition of being suspended between two worlds and being unable to fully enter into either.

  Steven Pressfield

  Pain, Artist, Men

  Steven Pressfield (2012). “Turning Pro: Tap Your Inner Power and Create Your Life's Work”, p.45, Black Irish Entertainment LLC

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• Over there, in Europe, all was shame and anger. Here it was exile or solitude, among these languid and agitated madmen who danced in order to die.

  Albert Camus

  Anger, Order, Europe

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• Exile as a mode of genius no longer exists; in place of Joyce we have the fragments of work appearing in Index on Censorship.

  Nadine Gordimer

  Genius, Censorship, Fragments

  Nadine Gordimer (2011). “Telling Times: Writing and Living, 1950-2008”, p.411, A&C Black

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• We were exiles from reality that summer. We were refugees from ourselves.

  Chris Cleave

  Summer, Reality, Refugee

  Chris Cleave (2010). “Little Bee: A Novel”, p.22, Simon and Schuster

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• EXILE, n. One who serves his country by residing abroad, yet is not an ambassador.

  Ambrose Bierce

  Country, Ambassadors

  Ambrose Bierce (2016). “The Devil's Dictionary: The Devil World”, p.60, 谷月社

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

  Willa Cather

  Friendship, Men, Joy

  Willa Cather (1938). “The novels and stories of Willa Cather ...”

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

  Don DeLillo

  Ideas, Silence, Literature

  Don DeLillo, Thomas DePietro (2005). “Conversations with Don DeLillo”, p.4, Univ. Press of Mississippi

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• In exile, I have tried to profit by the past and prepare for the future.

  Lajos Kossuth

  Past, Profit

  Lajos Kossuth (1853). “Select speeches, condensed and abridged by F.W. Newman”, p.30

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• But me, not destined such delights to share,
  My prime of life in wandering spent and care;
  Impell'd, with steps unceasing, to pursue
  Some fleeting good, that mocks me with the view
  That, like the circle bounding earth and skies,
  Allures from far, yet, as I follow, flies;
  My fortune leads to traverse reams alone,
  And find no spot of all the world my own.

  Oliver Goldsmith

  Views, Sky, Circles

  Oliver Goldsmith (1841). “Goldsmith's miscellaneous works”, p.2

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• They say the sky is the same everywhere. Travellers, the shipwrecked, exiles, and the dying draw comfort from the thought.

  Virginia Woolf

  Travel, Sky, Dying

  Virginia Woolf (2007). “Selected Works of Virginia Woolf”, p.27, Wordsworth Editions

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• Let those who desire a secure homeland conquer it. Let those who do not conquer it live under the whip and in exile, watched over like wild animals, cast from one country to another, concealing the death of their souls with a beggar's smile from the scorn of free men.

  Jose Marti

  Country, Men, Animal

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• She is Cuba. If you want to love her, you have to be with her, but you can't be with her in her current state. It's the point of view of all exiles - you have to leave the thing you cherish most.

  Andy Garcia

  Views, Want, Cuba

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• Men know they are sexual exiles. They wander the earth seeking satisfaction, craving and despising, never content. There is nothing in that anguished motion for women to envy.

  Camille Paglia

  Men, Envy, Earth

  Camille Paglia (2018). “Free Women, Free Men: Sex, Gender, Feminism”, p.48, Canongate Books

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• Public employment contributes neither to advantage nor happiness. It is but honorable exile from one's family and affairs.

  Thomas Jefferson

  Happiness, Employment, Affair

  Thomas Jefferson, Andrew M. Allison (1983). “The Real Thomas Jefferson”, Natl Center for Constitutional

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• Excluded by my birth and tastes from the social order, I was not aware of its diversity. Nothing in the world was irrelevant: the stars on a general's sleeve, the stock-market quotations, the olive harvest, the style of the judiciary, the wheat exchange, flower-beds. Nothing. This order, fearful and feared, whose details were all inter-related, had a meaning: my exile.

  Jean Genet

  Stars, Flower, Order

  Jean Genet (1973). “The Thief's Journal”

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• My first few weeks in America are always miserable, because the tastes I am cursed with are all of a kind that cannot be gratified here, and I am not enough in sympathy with our gross public to make up for the lack on the aesthetic side. One's friends are delightful; but we are none of us Americans, we don't think or feel as the Americans do, we are the wretched exotics produced in a European glass-house, the most displaced and useless class on earth!

  Edith Wharton

  Thinking, Class, America

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• Such is the miraculous nature of the future of exiles: what is first uttered in the impotence of an overheated apartment becomes the fate of nations.

  Salman Rushdie

  Nature, Fate, Firsts

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

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

  Tahar Ben Jelloun

  Passports, Ifs

  "Voice of the Maghreb". Interview with Maya Jaggi, www.theguardian.com. May 5, 2006.

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