Zana Marjanovic Quotes

Everyone comes back. It makes no difference how far we wander, we always have our country, our land, in our souls and our minds.

All I ever want is to return to either Bangladesh, my motherland, or India, my adopted home.

What any immigrant is after is a taste of home.

More than anything I want to be able to go back to Cuba, to have a house to visit there, to know my roots. Then, at last, I could sing for my people.

The longer you are in a place, the more you get under its layers.

I don't believe I could live in Iran again. A tree, once uprooted from the earth, is very difficult to plant again.

I have tried my whole life to represent my Mexican roots with honor and pride.

I was born in India - but never really lived there.

A writer without his country is nothing.

I'm living in California but I have a place that is mine in Chile and I belong there. I am no longer an exile.

For immigrant generations especially, family is the first structure, or shelter, for a people who are in exile.

Homeland is something one becomes aware of only through its loss.

Of course, our roots are in Germany, it always will be the feeling of home.

In America, we all come from somewhere else, and we carry along some dream myth of home: a notion that something - our point of origin, our roots, the home country - is out there.

In the poetry of immigrants, nostalgia is as common as confetti at parades or platitudes at political conventions.

Let's treasure our roots, even when we're far away.

I consider myself a brown American or a man of color before I would say Sri Lankan, to be honest. I didn't grow up there. There was a pretty brutal civil war there from 1983 until 2009. So we weren't able to go back very much. I've gone back as an adult. But I grew up in Pennsylvania.

I was born in England, but India is the only place I feel at home.

My homeland is not a suitcase, and I am no traveller

The theme of exile is attractive to me, because it's sort of like the family business. Not just music, but travel.

Uprootedness uproots everything except the need for roots.

What greater grief than the loss of one's native land.

When I first left Iran at the age of 13, Iran had become such a shining star - it was the point to which all my desires and dreams returned.

If you go anywhere, even paradise, you will miss your home.

You experience other cultures to give you a kind of shock that makes you look at your own culture. You appreciate it more as a result of being out of it, but you also realise there are some things lacking in your culture.