Exile Experience Quotes

My family settled in Cairo in 1980. I was nine. I missed Libya terribly, but I also took to Cairo. I perfected the accent. People assumed I was Egyptian.

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

What would I do now, at age 48, if I were deported to a country that I have not seen in more than 40 years and whose language I no longer speak? How would I work? How would I survive?

I never chose to be in Russia, and I would prefer to be in my own country, but if I can't make it home, I will continue to work very much in the same way that I have... What happens to me is not as important; I simply serve as the mechanism of disclosure.

My complaint, as an exile who once loved New York and who likes to return a half-dozen times a year, is not that it plays host to extremes of the human condition: There is grandeur in that, and necessity.

So that when I came from Panama... my family was exiled in 1973 and they went to Miami.

Trotsky was essentially a Western mind. Lenin was a Russian, and unlike most other revolutionary exiles, wherever he went he was a Russian.

I had one companion. He was a teacher from the Ukraine who spoke English so we could communicate a bit. I learnt a few Russian words, but it was hard to concentrate.

I have found a much greater appreciation of Buddhism because I couldn't take it for granted here in exile.

The Chinese were good to us. The war years for us Russians in China were very good years.

One thing that I miss because we spend a lot of time in America is English food, like cooked breakfast and Sunday dinners.

I grew up with a lot of exiles from Chile, Mexico, Argentina, Brazil, Peru, Colombia - I grew up with them, and I gained a family; I gained friends.

I sing 'Beirut' for what the city is for me, but I am also singing as an exile.

To open the Bible is to open a window toward Jerusalem, as Daniel did (6:10), no matter where our exile may have taken us.

My parents didn't agree with what was going on, you know, with the communists coming in, Fidel Castro. I didn't see the reason why I needed to go back there and be a part of that exhibition.

I didn't leave Africa, I left Nigeria, and for political reasons. But ... I've never, never left Africa, and I certainly never left what it means to be Ibo. That is something you carry with you.

The Mariel boatlift was probably one of the most strengthening events of the exile community; maybe Nietzschean, in the sense that if it doesn't kill you, it makes you stronger.

The Jewish people have been in exile for 2,000 years; they have lived in hundreds of countries, spoken hundreds of languages and still they kept their old language, Hebrew. They kept their Aramaic, later their Yiddish; they kept their books; they kept their faith.

Reading is the most rewarding form of exile and the most necessary discipline for novelists who burn with the ambition to get better.

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

In some respects I have been the most unlucky because I have spent more time living as a refugee outside my country than I have spent in Tibet. On the other hand, it has been very rewarding for me to live in a democracy and to learn about the world in a way that we Tibetans had never known before.

Those who have never suffered the iniquities of exile cannot possibly understand the significance, the gravitas, of a mattress.

Nostalgia can be extremely powerful in the right hands: think of the intense longing in the films Andrei Tarkovsky made after he left the U.S.S.R. They wring your soul.

Of all the writers I have read, Vladimir Nabokov has made the biggest impression on me because he, despite living through the 1917 February Revolution, forced exile amidst the anti-Semitism in Nazi Germany, the two World Wars and quite a lot of controversy, was an author who never gave up.

When I completed writing 'Soul Mountain,' I more or less closed the accounts with China for myself. I was 50 years old when I left, so China is already within me.