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...

As for you girls, you must risk everything for Freedom, and give everything for Passion, loving everything that your hearts and your bodies love. The only thing higher for a girl and more sacred for...

You have asked me what I would do and what I would not do. I will tell you what I will do and what I will not do. I will not serve that in which...

i am an exile in my own life.

The realization that he is white in a black country, and respected for it, is the turning point in the expatriate’s career. He can either forget it, or capitalize on it. Most choose the latter.

Even people whose lives have been made various by learning sometimes find it hard to keep a fast hold on their habitual views of life, on their faith in the Invisible – nay, on the...

When you are a long way from where you think you belong, you will attach yourself to people you would otherwise ignore or even dislike.

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...

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...

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...

Fuck words, nothing spokencomprehends the defiantly ephemeral.I take my incompleteness with the rest, an exilein any language.

With her enchanting songs, her rare beauty, and clever tricks, this wild ‘wanderess’ ensnared my soul like a gypsy-thief, and led me foolish and blind to where you find me now. The first time I...

The plant that’s been uprooted has only courage to hold it up.

Why don’t you just call me a hooker while you’re at it?

Everyone must come out of his Exile in his own way.

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.

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

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

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...

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

We are exiles in Time’s abyss, strangers now in the Promised Land.

The world you see, nature’s greatest and most glorious creation, and the human mind which gazes and wonders at it, and is the most splendid part of it, these are our own everlasting possessions and...

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...

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....

There are places we fear, places we dream, places whose exiles we became and never learned it until, sometimes, too late.

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...

Should one continue to follow the faith of a group that’s cast him out? Shouldn’t it stand to reason that if he was true to that faith that the group should have been true to...

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...

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...

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...

It was so important that she should understand something of what his life in this country had been; that she should grasp the nature of the loneliness that he wanted her to nullify. And it...

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...

Mathematicians still don’t understandthe ball our hands made, or howyour electrocuted grandparents made it possiblefor you to light my cigarettes with your eyes.It isn’t as simple as me climbing into the windowto leave six ounces...

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’t much respect (Mosaic Law, the Nuremberg Laws, and the Israeli Law...

She is free in her wildness, she is a wanderess, a drop of free water. She knows nothing of borders and cares nothing for rules or customs. ‘Time’ for her isn’t something to fight against....

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...

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,...

Life’s harrowing echo only to be faded into exiled loneliness

Is it possible to write a poem or are these words just screams of outlaws exiled to the desert?

You must give everything to make your life as beautiful as the dreams that dance in your imagination.

Happiness is not only a hope, but also in some strange manner a memory … we are all kings in exile.

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...

In all memory there is a degree of fallenness; we are all exiles from our own pasts, just as, on looking up from a book, we discover anew our banishment from the bright worlds of...

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...

I was an adventurer, but she was not an adventuress. She was a ‘wanderess.’ Thus, she didn’t care about money, only experiences – whether they came from wealth or from poverty, it was all the...

I had come from wondrous lands, from landscapes more enchanting than life, but only to myself did I ever mention these lands, and I said nothing about the landscapes which I saw in dreams. My...

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...

I have forsaken her for a place I will never belong, but will always remain under her spell, forever to be, a child of my motherland.

Exile on Main Street.

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...