Exile Quotes

“How can she bear the pain of becoming human? The end of exile is the end of being.”
― Angela Carter, The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories

“That's the tragedy of exile. Things, as well as people, still exist, but you have to pretend to think of them as dead.”
― Négar Djavadi, Désorientale

“I was confronted by a world that I could see and touch but didn't know how to talk about. There were so many words and names that I just didn't have. Flowers, trees, birds, reptiles, organs. The words you learn as you grow up in a country the ones the language reserves for people who are immersed in it and denies to those who just dip their toes in every now and then. The words for Saturday-afternoon strolls and summer camps and weekends in the country. Words from peaceful lives, lives that belong to the people living them.”
― Négar Djavadi, Désorientale

“The story always starts in the same way when people ask me the simple, yet most difficult question to answer: “where are you from?” I often wonder why of all questions people start with this one that has become the hardest for me and countless other exiled people to answer. The question is especially hard when asked in crowded and fast-paced places, or during quick encounters which make a short answer inadequate and a long one potentially uncalled for…I thought to myself: why is it that the first thing people want to know about me is where I am from? If they only knew where I am from, they would perhaps know that where I am from—Iraq—happens to also be the deepest wound on the geography of my body and soul, and so they would tread gently on my wound by not asking that question in the first place. Is there something in my eyes, something written on my forehead, something in my looks, or some marks inscribed on my other body parts that immediately tell people that I am from a place that lost itself and lost me to exile on a cold, dark, and sad winter night? Why don’t these strangers just start with the more common and safer usual remarks about the weather being nice, dreadful, or whatever? Of all questions, “where are you from,” is the most delicate and complicated for people who have lost their home and all the things they loved.”
― Louis Yako

“All any alienated man can hope for is to find a livelihood that fits his expanding sense of self. Blessed is he who accepts without complaint the toil that is suited for the riot of his soul. Blessed is he who discovers a calling that he willingly devotes his entire heart and soul to accomplishing. Blessed is he who exhausts himself performing whatever his inner nature demands. Blessed is he who dares to seek, search, discover, and to create what he cannot suppress. Blessed is he who gives air to what he cannot strangle within and still live a full life any more than one can choose to stop breathing and maintain a heartbeat. Blessed is he who raises himself to a higher pitch and institutes harmony within himself. Blessed is he who loves his family, cares for his people, and radiates a vast love for the hills, rivers, creeks, mountains, tress, sky, and all the birds, plants, grasses, marshes, and the multitudes of creatures that call nature’s wonderland their paradise.”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“For how little have we lost, when the two finest things of all will accompany us wherever we go, universal nature and our individual virtue. Believe me, this was the intention of whoever formed the universe, whether all-powerful god, or incorporeal reason creating mighty works, or divine spirit penetrating all things from greatest to smallest with even pressure, or fate and the unchanging sequence of causation - this, I say, was the intention, that only the most worthless of our possessions should come into the power of another. Whatever is best for a human being lies outside human control: it can be neither given nor taken away.”
― Seneca, On the Shortness of Life: Life Is Long if You Know How to Use It

“There are all the hidden menaces of long journeys on the way.
But we shall go.
Treat it as exile or a new beginning.”
― Osama Siddique, Snuffing out the Moon

“If Cuba is Hell, Miami is Purgatory.”
― Reinaldo Arenas, Before Night Falls

“The typical Cuban machismo has attained alarming proportions in Miami. I did not want to stay too long in that place, which was like a caricature of Cuba, the worst of Cuba: the eternal gossip, the chicanery, the envy.”
― Reinaldo Arenas, Before Night Falls

“In Miami the obsession with making things work and being practical, with making lots of money, sometimes out of the fear of starving, has replaced a sense of life and, above all, of pleasure, adventure, and irreverence.”
― Reinaldo Arenas, Before Night Falls

“And a tiny looper caterpillar would be there, too, measuring, like a child’s finger and thumb, the rim of the table, and every now and then stretching upward to grope, in vain, for the shrub from which it had been dislodged.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory

“One thing protects us from change: exile. In unreality or at the other end of the world, in melancholy or the South, exile is a marvellous and comfortable structure.
Only the exiled have a land. I know some people who are only close to their country when they are 10,000 kilometres away, driven out by their own brothers. The others are nomads chasing their shadows in the deserts of culture.”
― Jean Baudrillard, Cool Memories

“Attaining the creative plain of human consciousness entails more than simply rebelling against social norms. In the rebellious stage, a person seeks freedom, but lacks the maturity to understand what they seek. A typical rebel lacks comprehension of the attendant responsibilities that personal liberation requires.”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“People in exile are rich -- rich with the accumulated sum of their contradictory identities.”
― Nancy Huston, Losing North: Essays on Cultural Exile

“Our region pays the dues of foreigners at the expense of the people that gives power to its region. It's pillage, plunder, insult, betrayal, and swindling but it's a due punishment for what is sown is reaped. How can one expect to sow seeds of hate and get love in return?
An association of a nation to reserve its scheme to other nations, payed in full from cradle to grave, it's a lesson learned for those willing to behave.
A settlement internationally known only to the Credit Masters; signing away our rights of our Mother Land and settling at the bottom of the barrel. It's dictatorship at its finest subliminally, they lock us away for committing fictitious felonies when they're the ones that are the true menaces of society.”
― Jose R. Coronado, The Land Flowing With Milk And Honey

“Writing requires a degree of both detachment and immersion. People banished from a community find themselves perfectly positioned to become writers. No one can silence an exile. An exile encapsulates no need to placate anybody except for himself or herself.”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“How will I leave his realm, Bizhad wondered, clutching Akbar’s order. Had the emperor played a cruel joke on him, condemning him to roam the length and breadth of this world? He would lie awake at night worrying, confer with passing travelers during the day, starting to distrust his driver’s motives…”
― Kunal Basu, The Miniaturist

“It is your final gift
to me: this room
where I shall bleed and knit,
as spinsters do.”
― Jill Alexander Essbaum, Heaven

“When I am asked why I have left England, I say that I am in "Brexile". It goes down well.”
― Cliff James, Life As A Kite

“England sinks, the waters rise, but exile is not all about weeping by the rivers. There are also insights in the wilderness.”
― Cliff James, Life As A Kite

“Because this life is fragile, and we have all lost something great or small... We are all exiles April Chu-Lin. Take it from a historian, it is not what you know about the past that matters, it is how you plan to live with it; to use it. Godspeed, Captain."

Chu-Lin remained, looking after the brown-clad figure in the cold, empty hall. She wondered who he was talking to, himself or her... or perhaps the whole of a dying world.”
― Jesse R. Page

“Like a rite of life
I take a book in my hands.
In it the earth burns, scorched,
the syllables,
the verses,
the mythical horizon blinded by the sun.
El Cid rides, lost in words,
way of the poem and exile.

The steppe is a bonfire of fire and loneliness.

The hero and his hosts are already smoke.”
― Jose Veron Gormaz, En las Orillas del Cielo

“He illuminates the landscape of society with an intense, ultra sensitive light and brings out a strange, hyperreal relief - a coherent reading, precisely like the light of a laser.

The local is a shabby thing. There's nothing worse than bringing us back down to our own little corner, our own territory, the radiant promiscuity of the face to face. A culture which has taken the risk of the universal, must perish by the universal.

Exile always offers a marvellous - pathetic or dramatic - distance, a distance which aids judgement, a serenity orphaned by its own world. Deterritorialization, on the other hand, is a demented deprivation. It is like a lobotomy. It has in it something of agony, of the inconstancy and disconnection of circuits.

You need an infinite stretch of time ahead of you to start to think, infinite energy to make the smallest decision. The world is getting denser. The immense number of useless projects is bewildering. Too many things have to be put in to balance up an uncertain scale. You can't disappear any more. You die in a state of total indecision.

A frenzy of indifference in these times of 'speed'. In the same way as you can counter the acceleration of your molecules with an iced drink, you have to head off artificial euphoria by pulling on the brake of melancholy.
Science and technologies could have become extensions of our human faculties, as MacLuhan wanted. Instead, they have devoured them. They have become sarcastic, like the laugh of the same name which devours flesh or like the creatures on the banks of the Styx which destroy the substance of the mental faculties.”
― Jean Baudrillard, Cool Memories

“Saigon time was fourteen hours off, although if one judged time by this clock, it was we who were fourteen hours off. Refugee, exile, immigrant--whatever species of displaced human we were, we did not simply live in two cultures, as celebrants of the great American melting pot imagined. Displaced people also lived in two time zones, the here and the there, the present and the past, being as we were reluctant time travelers. But while science fiction imagined time travelers as moving forward or backward in time, this timepiece demonstrated a different chronology. The open secret of the clock, naked for all to see, was that we were only going in circles.”
― Viet Thanh Nguyen, The Sympathizer

“Who am I then? Am I everybody and nobody? Am I everywhere and nowhere? Is a state of multiple existence the only thing that captures my reality and the reality of countless other exiled and displaced peoples around the world today? Is a multiple existence a good thing or is it akin to nonexistence? Am I like God who is everywhere for those who believe in him and nowhere for those who do not?”
― Louis Yako

“Life has taught me to omit the word “Iraq” from my responses when encountering strangers, because the word has been so demonized, stigmatized, and misunderstood that it may potentially cause unexpected reactions from strangers about whom I know nothing but my first instinct as a guiding compass. The word “Iraq” has the potential to drag me into long conversations I may not be prepared to have, either due to the wrong time, the wrong place, the unenlightened politics of the questioner, or all of the above.”
― Louis Yako

“The intimate relationship between the military-industrial-complex and the refugee-industrial complex is that they serve each other by first destroying nations and controlling their resources; and second by bringing to the West cheap laborers who do both menial and highly skilled work. This means that the system benefits from the victims twice: once by destroying their nations and stealing their resources, and twice by capitalizing on their labor and skills. More ironically, refugees often make ideal consumers for goods produced and promoted by the same corporations and warmongers who destroyed their countries, lives, histories, and memories forever.”
― Louis Yako

“Because of the wars and devastation of the last few decades, the only way an Iraqi could be treated with dignity, whether in Iraq or elsewhere, was to hold a foreign—meaning Western—passport. A 'good' or a 'fortunate' Iraqi is almost by definition one who holds a Western passport. An Iraqi passport is paralyzing. It’s ‘suspect’ at every airport, checkpoint, or point of entry. As an Iraqi, one is unwelcome almost everywhere. One is questioned almost to death before being allowed entry to any country, and one is always welcome to exit with no questions asked. Every authority and official think they have the right to interrogate an Iraqi without a second thought. Iraqis know well that holding that useless document called an ‘Iraqi passport’ is a curse at this point in history…Most passport holders who come from nations whose people count as, using Frantz Fanon’s words, ‘the wretched of the earth’, experience different forms of discrimination and exclusion. Some experiences are harsher than others. It is all about power, or lack thereof. Your passport has power. It is not just a document that helps you pass; it can become a symbol of humiliation that prevents you from passing.”
― Louis Yako, Bullets in Envelopes: Iraqi Academics in Exile

“While an extreme and violent case, Bullets in Envelopes shows that the conditions of Iraqi academics in exile are part and parcel of global trends marked by the commercialization and corporatization of higher education adversely affecting academic, social, and political freedoms of writing, thinking, and speaking truth to power. As such, countries and societies are being totally reshaped (and destroyed) in alarming ways. Bullets in Envelopes is about academics, but it’s not written for academics only. The stories in the book prove that the Iraq war is far from over. Instead, it has been happening over and over in other countries too.”
― Louis Yako, Bullets in Envelopes: Iraqi Academics in Exile

“It occurred to me that there are some striking similarities between God and exiled people. Like these people, God has often been a political and a politicized figure in history. Like exiled people, God’s power lies in his existence everywhere and nowhere. That is how many exiled people feel. They have a multiple existence, but multiple existence can also be akin to nonexistence. God, therefore, is the ultimate expression of exile. God, if exists, should understand the meaning of exile more than anyone else.”
― Louis Yako, Bullets in Envelopes: Iraqi Academics in Exile