Self-Exile Quotes

To be ourselves causes us to be exiled by many others, and yet to comply with what others want causes us to be exiled from ourselves.

I owe my solitude to other people.

It was as far as I could send him ..., where he could do the least harm. I would have sent him to the North Pole if we had kept a minister there.

So I decided the only place I can speak to the world is from outside Israel.

I have a grim outlook on the world, and in particular on humanity. Spent years denying it, but I am very misanthropic. And I live alone on a mountain for a reason.

I feel like when I was an adolescent, and felt so unworthy of love and so empty, I moved outside of myself.

The world doesn't understand me and I don't understand the world, that's why I've withdrawn from it.

Even in the presence of others he was completely alone.

I have always written about characters who fall somewhere in the spectrum between solitary and totally alienated.

A former Erdogan ally, Gulen has been living in self-imposed exile in Saylorsburg, Pennsylvania, since 1999.

We were exiles from reality that summer. We were refugees from ourselves.

Writing in English made me become a foreigner in my own country. It helped me create the necessary distance to my homeland.

I would never write, ever. I might as well exile myself.

Most writers live in self-imposed exile, even when they don't leave their country. They prefer the undiscovered country inside their own heads.

In exiling myself I am not exiling a monster, but a man whom society will not allow to live, since it considers one of the mysterious cogs in God's masterpiece to be a mistake.

I've been alienating my public since I was 20 years old.

We all want to believe this American pastoral, but there's more to it. We have to be willing to exile ourselves from the fantasies and the mythology that we create around ourselves, or we're doomed to kind of innocently blunder into every country in the world and murder people.

Well, I write in exile because I cannot return to my country, so I have no choice but to see myself as an exiled writer.

It is better to be an outcast, a stranger in one’s own country, than an outcast from one’s self. It is better to see what is about to befall us and to resist than to retreat into the fantasies embraced by a nation of the blind.

What exile from his country is able to escape from himself?

The German journalists still ring me and ask me to come back because without me their newspapers are empty - but I'm happy for that.

Got a wife and kid in Baltimore Jack, I went out for a ride and I never went back. Like a river that don't know where it's flowing, I took a wrong turn and I just kept going.