Exile Quotes
Quotes tagged as "exile"
Showing 1-30 of 230

“Never say that you can't do something, or that something seems impossible, or that something can't be done, no matter how discouraging or harrowing it may be; human beings are limited only by what we allow ourselves to be limited by: our own minds. We are each the masters of our own reality; when we become self-aware to this: absolutely anything in the world is possible.
Master yourself, and become king of the world around you. Let no odds, chastisement, exile, doubt, fear, or ANY mental virii prevent you from accomplishing your dreams. Never be a victim of life; be it's conqueror.”
―
Master yourself, and become king of the world around you. Let no odds, chastisement, exile, doubt, fear, or ANY mental virii prevent you from accomplishing your dreams. Never be a victim of life; be it's conqueror.”
―

“The world is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it.”
― A Bend in the River
― A Bend in the River

“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鈥檚 life, these are no more than efforts meant to overcome the crippling sorrow of estrangement.”
― Reflections on Exile and Other Essays
― Reflections on Exile and Other Essays

“Happiness is not only a hope, but also in some strange manner a memory ... we are all kings in exile.”
― The Thing: Why I am a Catholic
― The Thing: Why I am a Catholic

“Let鈥檚 dare to prepare for living in an unchartered terrain, in a house with no name, and no number, if the sinking feeling of a musty relationship kills our spirit and exiles us from ourselves. Retraction and reflection allow us to rediscover and renew ourselves, in time. ("Feeling like a fallen star")”
―
―

“These were the companions who justified my principles, who gave me the strength to continue against any foe, real or imagined. These were the companions who fought the helplessness, the rage, and frustration.
These were the friends who gave me my life.”
―
These were the friends who gave me my life.”
―

“Very often the test of one's allegiance to a cause or to a people is precisely the willingness to stay the course when things are boring, to run the risk of repeating an old argument just one more time, or of going one more round with a hostile or (much worse) indifferent audience. I first became involved with the Czech opposition in 1968 when it was an intoxicating and celebrated cause. Then, during the depressing 1970s and 1980s I was a member of a routine committee that tried with limited success to help the reduced forces of Czech dissent to stay nourished (and published). The most pregnant moment of that commitment was one that I managed to miss at the time: I passed an afternoon with Zdenek Mlynar, exiled former secretary of the Czech Communist Party, who in the bleak early 1950s in Moscow had formed a friendship with a young Russian militant with an evident sense of irony named Mikhail Sergeyevitch Gorbachev. In 1988 I was arrested in Prague for attending a meeting of one of Vaclav Havel's 'Charter 77' committees. That outwardly exciting experience was interesting precisely because of its almost Zen-like tedium. I had gone to Prague determined to be the first visiting writer not to make use of the name Franz Kafka, but the numbing bureaucracy got the better of me. When I asked why I was being detained, I was told that I had no need to know the reason! Totalitarianism is itself a clich茅 (as well as a tundra of pulverizing boredom) and it forced the clich茅 upon me in turn. I did have to mention Kafka in my eventual story. The regime fell not very much later, as I had slightly foreseen in that same piece that it would. (I had happened to notice that the young Czechs arrested with us were not at all frightened by the police, as their older mentors had been and still were, and also that the police themselves were almost fatigued by their job. This was totalitarianism practically yawning itself to death.) A couple of years after that I was overcome to be invited to an official reception in Prague, to thank those who had been consistent friends through the stultifying years of what 'The Party' had so perfectly termed 'normalization.' As with my tiny moment with Nelson Mandela, a whole historic stretch of nothingness and depression, combined with the long and deep insult of having to be pushed around by boring and mediocre people, could be at least partially canceled and annealed by one flash of humor and charm and generosity.”
― Hitch 22: A Memoir
― Hitch 22: A Memoir

“It's not easy to start over in a new place,' he said. 'Exile is not for everyone. Someone has to stay behind, to receive the letters and greet family members when they come back.”
― Brother, I'm Dying
― Brother, I'm Dying

“Outcasts, callused from being in exile for too long, learn to thrive on being the hated; the attention and infamy of our actions fuel us to become antiheroes. Too often do we forget: we risk self-destruction if we fail to follow what we know is right; our talents too often become misplaced, misdirected, misguided from what could have been something wonderful.”
― Fighting For Redemption
― Fighting For Redemption

“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. ”
― The Satanic Verses
― The Satanic Verses

“ORESTES: Never shall I see you again.
ELECTRA: Nor I see myself in your eyes.
ORESTES: This, the last time I'll talk with you ever.
ELECTRA: O my homeland, goodbye. Goodbye to you, women of home.
ORESTES: Most loyal of sisters, do you leave now?
ELECTRA: I leave with tears blurring all that I see.”
― Electra
ELECTRA: Nor I see myself in your eyes.
ORESTES: This, the last time I'll talk with you ever.
ELECTRA: O my homeland, goodbye. Goodbye to you, women of home.
ORESTES: Most loyal of sisters, do you leave now?
ELECTRA: I leave with tears blurring all that I see.”
― Electra

“It is, therefore, a great source of virtue for the practiced mind to learn, bit by bit, first to change about in visible and transitory things, so that afterwards it may be possible to leave them behind altogether. The man who finds his homeland sweet is still a tender beginner; he to whom every soil is as his native one is already strong; but he is perfect to whom the entire world is as a foreign land. The tender soul has fixed his love on one spot in the world; the strong man has extended his love to all places; the perfect man has extinguished his. From boyhood I have dwelt on foreign soil and I know with what grief sometimes the mind takes leave of the narrow hearth of a peasant's hut, and I know too how frankly it afterwards disdains marble firesides and panelled halls.”
― The Didascalicon of Hugh of Saint Victor: A Medieval Guide to the Arts
― The Didascalicon of Hugh of Saint Victor: A Medieval Guide to the Arts

“As a convinced atheist, I ought to agree with Voltaire that Judaism is not just one more religion, but in its way the root of religious evil. Without the stern, joyless rabbis and their 613 dour prohibitions, we might have avoided the whole nightmare of the Old Testament, and the brutal, crude wrenching of that into prophecy-derived Christianity, and the later plagiarism and mutation of Judaism and Christianity into the various rival forms of Islam. Much of the time, I do concur with Voltaire, but not without acknowledging that Judaism is dialectical. There is, after all, a specifically Jewish version of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, with a specifically Jewish name鈥攖he Haskalah鈥攆or itself. The term derives from the word for 'mind' or 'intellect,' and it is naturally associated with ethics rather than rituals, life rather than prohibitions, and assimilation over 'exile' or 'return.' It's everlastingly linked to the name of the great German teacher Moses Mendelssohn, one of those conspicuous Jewish hunchbacks who so upset and embarrassed Isaiah Berlin. (The other way to upset or embarrass Berlin, I found, was to mention that he himself was a cousin of Menachem Schneerson, the 'messianic' Lubavitcher rebbe.) However, even pre-enlightenment Judaism forces its adherents to study and think, it reluctantly teaches them what others think, and it may even teach them how to think also.”
― Hitch 22: A Memoir
― Hitch 22: A Memoir

“Probably all of us, writers and readers alike, set out into exile, or at least into a certain kind of exile, when we leave childhood behind...The immigrant, the nomad, the traveler, the sleepwalker all exist, but not the exile, since every writer becomes an exile simply by venturing into literature, and every reader becomes an exile simply by opening a book.”
― Between Parentheses: Essays, Articles, and Speeches, 1998-2003
― Between Parentheses: Essays, Articles, and Speeches, 1998-2003

“For the first time in years, he felt the deep sadness of exile, knowing that he was alone here, an outsider, and too alert to the ironies, the niceties, the manners, and indeed, the morals to be able to participate.”
― The Master
― The Master

“The city was lovely. There could be no place in the world to which he belonged so completely.
That was why he'd always dreamed of leaving, and why he'd always been so afraid to go.”
― At Night We Walk in Circles
That was why he'd always dreamed of leaving, and why he'd always been so afraid to go.”
― At Night We Walk in Circles

“This is the most immediate fruit of exile, of uprooting: the prevalence of the unreal over the real. Everyone dreamed past and future dreams, of slavery and redemption, of improbable paradises, of equally mythical and improbable enemies; cosmic enemies, perverse and subtle, who pervade everything like the air.”
― If This Is a Man 鈥� The Truce
― If This Is a Man 鈥� The Truce

“All writers--all beings--are exiles as a matter of course. The certainty about living is that it is a succession of expulsions of whatever carries the life force...All writers are exiles wherever they live and their work is a lifelong journey towards the lost land..”
― Janet Frame: An Autobiography
― Janet Frame: An Autobiography

“My sisters and I sit together on a pair of suitcases. If we've forgotten anything, it's already too late -- our rooms have all been sealed and photographed. Anyway, Tatiana would say it's bad luck to return for something you've forgotten.”
― The Lost Crown
― The Lost Crown

“Exile is a dream of 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. He hangs there, frozen in time, translated into a photograph; denied motion, suspended impossibly above his native earth, he awaits the inevitable moment at which the photograph must begin to move, and the earth reclaim its own.”
― The Satanic Verses
― The Satanic Verses

“Let us put it generally: if a regime is immoral, its subjects are free from all obligations to it.”
― The Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation, Books V-VII
― The Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation, Books V-VII

“Mathematicians still don鈥檛 understand
the ball our hands made, or how
your electrocuted grandparents made it possible
for you to light my cigarettes with your eyes.
It isn鈥檛 as simple as me climbing into the window
to leave six ounces of orange juice
and a doughnut by the bed, or me becoming
the sand you dug your toes in,
on the beach, when you wished
to hide them from the sun and the fixed eyes
of strangers, and your breath broke in waves
over my earlobe, splashing through my head, spilling out
over the opposite lobe, and my first poems
under your door in the unshaven light of dawn:
Your eyes remind me of a brick wall
about to be hammered by a drunk
driver. I鈥檓 that driver. All night
I鈥檝e swallowed you in the bar.
Once I kissed the scar, stretching its sealed
eyelid along your inner arm, dried
raining strands of hair, full of pheromones, discovered
all your idiosyncratic passageways, so I鈥檇 know
where to run when the cops came.
Your body is the country I鈥檒l never return to.
The man in charge of what crosses my mind
will lose fingernails, for not turning you
away at the border. But at this moment
when sweat tingles from me, and
blame is as meaningless as shooting up a cow with milk,
I realise my kisses filled the halls of your body
with smoke, and the lies came
like a season. Most drunks don鈥檛 die in accidents
they orchestrate, and I swallowed
a hand grenade that never stops exploding.”
―
the ball our hands made, or how
your electrocuted grandparents made it possible
for you to light my cigarettes with your eyes.
It isn鈥檛 as simple as me climbing into the window
to leave six ounces of orange juice
and a doughnut by the bed, or me becoming
the sand you dug your toes in,
on the beach, when you wished
to hide them from the sun and the fixed eyes
of strangers, and your breath broke in waves
over my earlobe, splashing through my head, spilling out
over the opposite lobe, and my first poems
under your door in the unshaven light of dawn:
Your eyes remind me of a brick wall
about to be hammered by a drunk
driver. I鈥檓 that driver. All night
I鈥檝e swallowed you in the bar.
Once I kissed the scar, stretching its sealed
eyelid along your inner arm, dried
raining strands of hair, full of pheromones, discovered
all your idiosyncratic passageways, so I鈥檇 know
where to run when the cops came.
Your body is the country I鈥檒l never return to.
The man in charge of what crosses my mind
will lose fingernails, for not turning you
away at the border. But at this moment
when sweat tingles from me, and
blame is as meaningless as shooting up a cow with milk,
I realise my kisses filled the halls of your body
with smoke, and the lies came
like a season. Most drunks don鈥檛 die in accidents
they orchestrate, and I swallowed
a hand grenade that never stops exploding.”
―
“Most people are principally aware of one culture, one setting, one home;exiles are are aware of at least two, and this plurality gives rise to an awareness of simultaneous dimensions...”
―
―

“One of the questions asked by al-Balkhi, and often repeated to this day, is this: Why do the children of Israel continue to suffer? My grandmother Dodo thought it was because the goyim were jealous. The seder for Passover (which is a shame-faced simulacrum of a Hellenic question-and-answer session, even including the wine) tells the children that it's one of those things that happens to every Jewish generation. After the Shoah or 贰苍诲濒枚蝉耻苍驳 or Holocaust, many rabbis tried to tell the survivors that the immolation had been a punishment for 'exile,' or for insufficient attention to the Covenant. This explanation was something of a flop with those whose parents or children had been the raw material for the 'proof,' so for a time the professional interpreters of god's will went decently quiet. This interval of ambivalence lasted until the war of 1967, when it was announced that the divine purpose could be discerned after all. How wrong, how foolish, to have announced its discovery prematurely! The exile and the Shoah could now both be understood, as part of a heavenly if somewhat roundabout scheme to recover the Western Wall in Jerusalem and other pieces of biblically mandated real estate.
I regard it as a matter of self-respect to spit in public on rationalizations of this kind. (They are almost as repellent, in their combination of arrogance, masochism, and affected false modesty, as Edith Stein's 'offer' of her life to expiate the regrettable unbelief in Jesus of her former fellow Jews.) The sage Jews are those who have put religion behind them and become in so many societies the leaven of the secular and the atheist.”
― Hitch 22: A Memoir
I regard it as a matter of self-respect to spit in public on rationalizations of this kind. (They are almost as repellent, in their combination of arrogance, masochism, and affected false modesty, as Edith Stein's 'offer' of her life to expiate the regrettable unbelief in Jesus of her former fellow Jews.) The sage Jews are those who have put religion behind them and become in so many societies the leaven of the secular and the atheist.”
― Hitch 22: A Memoir

“There's a certain amount of ambiguity in my background, what with intermarriages and conversions, but under various readings of three codes which I don鈥檛 much respect (Mosaic Law, the Nuremberg Laws, and the Israeli Law of Return) I do qualify as a member of the tribe, and any denial of that in my family has ceased with me. But I would not remove myself to Israel if it meant the continuing expropriation of another people, and if anti-Jewish fascism comes again to the Christian world鈥攐r more probably comes at us via the Muslim world鈥擨 already consider it an obligation to resist it wherever I live. I would detest myself if I fled from it in any direction. Leo Strauss was right. The Jews will not be 'saved' or 'redeemed.' (Cheer up: neither will anyone else.) They/we will always be in exile whether they are in the greater Jerusalem area or not, and this in some ways is as it should be. They are, or we are, as a friend of Victor Klemperer's once put it to him in a very dark time, condemned and privileged to be 'a seismic people.' A critical register of the general health of civilization is the status of 'the Jewish question.' No insurance policy has ever been devised that can or will cover this risk.”
― Hitch 22: A Memoir
― Hitch 22: A Memoir

“Is it possible to write a poem or are these words just screams of outlaws exiled to the desert?”
― The Sun Watches the Sun
― The Sun Watches the Sun

“Life is a relentless expulsion from where we come from and an ongoing deportation to alien realms. We are in exile and our greatest dream is to return to the lost land. It is the greatest dream because no matter how long our exile is going to last, the dream will remain. It is the greatest dream because when we finally care only for this dream, then our exile will be over.”
―
―

“He enjoyed dancing with a fair stranger, enjoyed the vacuous, chaste talk, through which you listen closely to that bewitching, vague something going on inside you and inside her, which will last a couple of bars more and then, finding no resolution, will vanish forever and be utterly forgotten. But while the bond of bodies is still unbroken, the outlines of a potential love affair begin to form, and the rough draft already comprises everything: the sudden silence between two people in some dimly lit room; the man carefully placing with trembling fingers on the edge of an ashtray the just-lit bit impedient cigarette; the woman鈥檚 eyes slowly closing in as in a film scene..”
―
―
All Quotes
|
My Quotes
|
Add A Quote
Browse By Tag
- Love Quotes 99k
- Life Quotes 78k
- Inspirational Quotes 74.5k
- Humor Quotes 43.5k
- Philosophy Quotes 30.5k
- Inspirational Quotes Quotes 28k
- God Quotes 26.5k
- Truth Quotes 24k
- Wisdom Quotes 24k
- Romance Quotes 23.5k
- Poetry Quotes 22.5k
- Life Lessons Quotes 21.5k
- Death Quotes 20k
- Quotes Quotes 19.5k
- Happiness Quotes 19k
- Hope Quotes 18k
- Faith Quotes 18k
- Inspiration Quotes 17k
- Spirituality Quotes 15.5k
- Motivational Quotes 15k
- Religion Quotes 15k
- Relationships Quotes 15k
- Life Quotes Quotes 14.5k
- Writing Quotes 14.5k
- Love Quotes Quotes 14.5k
- Success Quotes 13.5k
- Motivation Quotes 13k
- Time Quotes 12.5k
- Science Quotes 12k
- Motivational Quotes Quotes 11.5k