Loss of Homeland Quotes

... a man leaves much when he leaves his own country.

The act of migration puts into crisis everything about the migrating individual or group, everything about identity and selfhood and culture and belief. So if this is a novel about migration it must be that act of putting in question. It must perform the crisis it describes.

That my old bitter heart was pierced in this black gloom. That foreign devils have made my land a tomb That the sun that was Munster's glory has gone down Has made me a beggar before you, Valentine Brown

I think - you know, the big trauma in my life, personally, was the fact that at 14, I was taken out of Poland unwittingly because my parents were divorced. Left the country - my mother left for England with her new husband. I wasn't even aware that she'd married him.

And I, as I lived, in an alien landWill die a slave and an orphan.

The origins of my career as a peace mediator can be found from my childhood years. I was born in the city of Viipuri, then still part of Finland. We lost Viipuri when the Soviet Union attacked my country. Along with 400,000 fellow Karelians, I became an eternally displaced person in the rest of Finland.

Because I cannot write my native language and have no native home anymore, and am amazed by that horrible homelessness of all French-Canadian s abroad in America.

I left Cuba when I was two years old. They took away my country, they stole the most intimate thing a human being can have. How could I forget that Fidel Castro was the person who did me so much harm?

I grew up acutely aware of the exile and distance caused by war.