on "exile". . .g
good reads. . .
N.B. This collection of quotes was begun on Jan. 14, 2006. We cannot guarantee the accuracy of these quotes, though we believe them to be accurate.

"Nor is there any refuge in memory. For most writers-in-exile. . . recollections of childhood are a literary food source and have been hoarded, squirrel-wise, against the winter. . . "
--Mary McCarthy: "Exiles, Expatriates,and Internal Emigrés"


"Exile is strangel;y 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 can never be surmounted. . . The achievements of exile are permanently undermined by the loss of something left behind forever."

". . . [T]he interplay between nationalism and exile is ilke Hegel's dialectic of servant and master, opposites informing and constituting each other. All nationalisms in their early stages develop from a condition of estrangement. . ."

"Exile is sometimes better than staying behind or not getting out: but only sometimes.
Because nothing is secure. Exile is a jealous state. "

"Exiles look at non-exiles with resentment. They belong in their surroundings, you feel, whereas an exile is always out of place. What is it like to be born in a place, to stay and live there, to kow that you are of it, more or less forever?"
--Edward Said: "Reflections on Exile"



"To be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul."---Simone Weil