Top 100 Quotes About Exile
#1. My exile was not only a physical one, motivated exclusively by political reasons; it was also a moral, social, ideological and sexual exile.
Juan Goytisolo
#2. I think there is a heritage which I'm proud of, which is a fight for democracy, a fight for social justice, a fight for freedom. My grandfather went to jail or exile six times in his life, fighting for his principles for democracy, or for his country. And my father twice.
George Papandreou
#3. The moment you've uttered the exact dimensionality of your exile, you're already turning towards home.
David Whyte
#4. No exile at the South Pole or on the summit of Mont Blanc separates us more effectively from others than the practice of a hidden vice.
Marcel Proust
#5. It is true that I am of an older fashion; much that I love has been destroyed or sent into exile.
G.K. Chesterton
#6. Look, we have existed for 4,000 years - 2,000 years in diaspora, in exile. Nobody in the Middle East speaks their original language but Israel. When we started 64 years ago, we were 650,000 people. So, you know, we are maybe swimming a little bit against the stream, but we continue to swim.
Shimon Peres
#7. For every benefit conferred, God is to be praised in his gifts. Otherwise when the time of judgment comes, that man will be punished as an ingrate who cannot say to God: 'Your statutes were my song in the land of exile.'
Saint Bernard
#8. I've participated in many demonstrations since I was a child. When I was at medical college, I was fighting King Farouk, then British colonization, against Nasser, against Sadat who pushed me into prison, Mubarak who pushed me into exile. I never stopped.
Nawal El Saadawi
#9. Don't judge me until you understand me. You can't understand me if you've already judged me.
Orson Scott Card
#10. Over there, in Europe, all was shame and anger. Here it was exile or solitude, among these languid and agitated madmen who danced in order to die.
Albert Camus
#11. It's hard to live with people willing to send you to exile or death. It's hard to become intimate with them. It's hard to love them.
Milan Kundera
#12. Here in Spain, there are Argentine Jews, children and grandchildren of immigrants of Jews who fled Germany or Austria in the thirties, and in the seventies during the dictatorship, they had to go into exile again.
Antonio Munoz Molina
#13. To hope is to see with the eye of the heart. To hope is to make the heart captain the vital and the body. To hope is to send darkness-night into exile.
Sri Chinmoy
#14. In a certain sense, a writer is an exile, an outsider, always reporting on things, and it is part of his life to keep on the move. Travel is natural.
James Salter
#15. Derailed. In exile. Deeply ashamed, despised. Yet she had so little pride, she was grateful most days simply to be alive.
There is Minimalist art; there are minimalist lives.
Joyce Carol Oates
#16. When some one reminded him that the people of Sinope had sentenced him to exile, he said, And I sentenced them to stay at home.
Diogenes Of Sinope
#17. 'Banished men should never speak their native tongue; it comes bitter from their mouth. And this language suits a traitor better, I think; drips off one's teeth like sugar-syrup.'
Ursula K. Le Guin
#18. Exile is like death. You cannot understand it until it happens to you.
Golshifteh Farahani
#19. I grew up acutely aware of the exile and distance caused by war.
Hiam Abbass
#20. It is strange how custom can mould our tastes and ideas: many could not imagine the existence of happiness in a life of such complete exile from the world.
Emily Bronte
#21. To be rich is to give; to give nothing is to be poor; to live is to love; to love nothing is to be dead; to be happy is to devote oneself; to exist only for oneself is to damn oneself, and to exile oneself to hell.
Eliphas Levi
#22. 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.
Bill Ayers
#23. He read of the Obelisk in the Place de la Concorde that weeps tears of granite in its lonely sunless exile and longs to be back by the hot, lotus-covered Nile.
Oscar Wilde
#24. I freeze and burn, love is bitter and sweet, my sighs are tempests and my tears are floods, I am in ecstasy and agony, I am possessed by memories of her and I am in exile from myself.
Francesco Petrarca
#25. Our native soil draws all of us, by I know not what sweetness, and never allows us to forget.
Ovid
#26. Knowledge of ourselves teaches us whence we come, where we are and whither we are going. We come from God and we are in exile; and it is because our potency of affection lends towards God that we are aware of this state of exile.
John Of Ruysbroeck
#27. Often when we think of exile we think of destruction or loss. But the Dalai Lama always says exile is reality, it's something we can make use of, and he has used it to get rid of everything that he thought was stifling and old, and to create a new, improved and much healthier Tibet.
Pico Iyer
#28. Each member of this shadowy network resented the others, who were irritating reminders that nothing was more American, whatever that means, than fleeing the American, whatever that is, and that their soft version of self-imposed exile was just another of late empire's packaged tours.
Ben Lerner
#29. We choose exile as a vantage point; from exile we look back on the rejected
James Wright
#30. Earth seemed a place of exile and I dreamt of heaven.
John Beevers
#31. He thought: Jessica, mother of Muad'Dib and grandmother of these royal twins, returns to our planet today. Why does she end her self-imposed exile at this time? Why does she leave the softness and security of Caladan for the dangers of Arrakis?
Frank Herbert
#32. We live in the age of the refugee, the age of the exile.
Ariel Dorfman
#35. 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.
Isaac Bashevis Singer
#36. All told, U.S. allies in Central America during Reagan's two terms killed over 300,000 people, tortured hundreds of thousands, and drove millions into exile.
Greg Grandin
#37. The doubt of future foes exiles my present joy.
Elizabeth I
#38. Barrayar is bred in my bones. I cannot shake it, no matter how far I travel. This struggle, God knows, has no honor in it. But exile, for no other motive than ease - that would be to give up all hope of honor. The last defeat, with no seed of future victory in it.
Lois McMaster Bujold
#39. Human skin is porous; the world flows through you. Your senses are large pores that let the world in. By being attuned to the wisdom of your senses, you will never become an exile in your own life, an outsider lost in an external spiritual place that your will and intellect, have constructed.
John O'Donohue
#40. So he immolated himself. He made the sacrifice because he was a father; he went into voluntary exile. His daughters were satisfied, so he thought that he had done the best thing he could; but it was a family crime, and father and daughters were accomplices.
Honore De Balzac
#41. Life's harrowing echo only to be faded into exiled loneliness
Munia Khan
#42. A week of sweeping fogs has passed over and given me a strange sense of exile and desolation. I walk round the island nearly every day, yet I can see nothing anywhere but a mass of wet rock, a strip of surf, and then a tumult of waves.
John Millington Synge
#43. The politics of the exile are fever,
revenge, daydream,
theater of the aging convalescent.
You wait in the wings and rehearse.
You wait and wait.
Marge Piercy
#44. Some women's arms are placed of exile; others are a native land.
Amin Maalouf
#45. Closeness can lead to emotions other than love. It's the ones who have been too intimate with you, lived in too close quarters, seen too much of your pain or envy or, perhaps more than anything, your shame, who, at the crucial moment, can be too easy to cut out, to exile, to expel, to kill off.
Daniel Mendelsohn
#46. I have found a much greater appreciation of Buddhism because I couldn't take it for granted here in exile.
Dalai Lama
#47. Exile is not a time frame. Exile is an experience. It's a sentiment.
Marco Rubio
#48. Until the blood from my pen runs dry, I shall worship the Greek body, the Greek mind, and the Greek soul.
Until my tears land upon Greek soil, I shall forever live in exile.
Pietros Maneos
#49. Mussolini never killed anyone. Mussolini used to send people on vacation in internal exile.
Silvio Berlusconi
#50. In 25 years of exile, I've never had a frozen account, either in Switzerland or elsewhere in the world.
Jean-Claude Duvalier
#51. Exile is terrible to those who have, as it were, a circumscribed habitation; but not to those who look upon the whole globe but as one city.
Marcus Tullius Cicero
#52. We try to exile ourselves more and more from nature - not always consciously: We build houses; we dismiss nature; nature has to be outside, because we're inside. God forbid something like a cockroach comes inside, or some dust.
Diane Ackerman
#53. Sometimes he felt like he'd been gone his whole life
in exile, away from the place he was supposed to be, and that, soldier-like, he was pining to be returned. Homesick for a place he'd never been.
Gillian Flynn
#54. If there is anything that can bind the mind of man to this dreary exile of our earthly home and can reconcile us with our fate so that one can enjoy living, - then it is verily the enjoyment of the mathematical sciences and astronomy.
Johannes Kepler
#55. If you wish to stand and progress as you ought, hold yourself an exile and a pilgrim on the earth.
Thomas A Kempis
#56. By engaging in a delusive quest for happiness, we bring only suffering upon ourselves. In our frantic search for something to quench our thirst, we overlook the water all around us and drive ourselves into exile from our own lives.
Sharon Salzberg
#57. An exile, ill in heart and frame,
A wanderer, weary of the way;
A stranger, without love's sweet claim
On any heart, go where I may!
Frances Sargent Osgood
#58. Love will kill us all." He said sadly. "First it makes us lie furiously so we can be what me must in order to appear deserving. Then, it tears us apart with raw truth. Whether we are man, exile or angel - It doesn't matter. For us all, the nature of truth is unforgiving.
Jessica Shirvington
#59. We were being offered exile on condition that we were silent about the reason we needed it. The silence chafed; it made us feel we were betraying those we had left behind. The British government was insisting on dealing with Hitler as a reasonable fellow, as if hoping he'd turn into one.
Anna Funder
#60. Questioned by a Companion about the best possible hijrah, the Prophet was to answer: "It is to exile yourself [to move away] from evil [abominations, lies, sins]."12 This requirement of spiritual exile was to be repeated in different forms.
Tariq Ramadan
#61. Reading is the most rewarding form of exile and the most necessary discipline for novelists who burn with the ambition to get better.
Pat Conroy
#62. Is it possible to write a poem or are these words just screams of outlaws exiled to the desert?
Dejan Stojanovic
#63. I would never write, ever. I might as well exile myself.
Dree Hemingway
#64. You too are an exile, I thought. You morn for the broad open steppes where you have room to spread your icy wings. Here you feel stifled and constricted, like an eagle that cries and beats against the bars of its iron cage.
Mikhail Lermontov
#65. In exile, I have tried to profit by the past and prepare for the future.
Lajos Kossuth
#66. We have decided to bring to an end the most unequal, most unjust, most barbarous war of our age, and have chosen the road to exile in order that our people will not be exterminated and in order to consecrate ourselves wholly and in peace to the preservation of our empire's independence.
Haile Selassie
#67. Time wounds all wholes. To exist in Time is to suffer through an endless exile, a successive severing from those precious few moments of feeling at home in the world.
Simon Reynolds
#68. Every now and again it would be considered wholesome for me to be more with people of my own age. Demotion to such company was a sapless exile. Their inanity was insufferable ...
Miles Franklin
#69. The artistic reward for refuting the received national tradition is liberation. The price is homelessness. Interior exile.
C.D. Wright
#70. The more we exile ourselves from nature, the more we crave its miracle waters.
Diane Ackerman
#71. I'm interested in people who find themselves in places, either of their choosing or not, and who are forced to decide how best to live there. That feeling of both citizenship and exile, of always being an expatriate - with all the attendant problems and complications and delight.
Chang-rae Lee
#72. An adventurer can always return home; an exile cannot. So I decided that my home would be culture.
Jonas Mekas
#73. O, a kiss
Long as my exile, sweet as my revenge!
Now, by the jealous queen of heaven, that kiss I carried from thee, dear, and my true lip
Hath virgined it e'er since.
William Shakespeare
#74. Must all of them and their families be physically abolished? Of course not? They must be 'liquidated' or melted in the hot fire of exile and labor into the proletarian masses.
Walter Duranty
#75. The older I get, the more I feel like an exile, that I don't belong here. And I don't. I was made for heaven, and my heart is longing for it.
John Corapi
#76. From the beginnings of literature, poets and writers have based their narratives on crossing borders, on wandering, on exile, on encounters beyond the familiar. The stranger is an archetype in epic poetry, in novels. The tension between alienation and assimilation has always been a basic theme.
Jhumpa Lahiri
#77. Life itself is an exile. The way home is not the way back.
Colin Wilson
#78. 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.
Isabel Allende
#79. Exile is a dream of a glorious return. Exile is a vision of revolution: Elba, not St Helena. It is an endless paradox: looking forward by always looking back. The exile is a ball hurled high into the air.
Salman Rushdie
#80. Terry Farish seems to breathe the reader into the emotional spaces of war, exile, and refugee life. The Good Braider is a delicate stunning exploration of its young protagonist's life and heart.
Uma Krishnaswami
#81. EXILE, n. One who serves his country by residing abroad, yet is not an ambassador.
Ambrose Bierce
#82. Whether the darken'd room to muse invite, Or whiten'd wall provoke the skew'r to write; In durance, exile, Bedlam, or the Mint, Like Lee or Budgel I will rhyme and print.
Alexander Pope
#83. You can imprison a man, but not an idea. You can exile a man, but not an idea.
You can kill a man, but not an idea.
Benazir Bhutto
#84. Poland remains undzer heym, our home, no matter how bitter the memories, how filled with disappointment and betrayal. Amerike iz goles, America is exile, a foreign land in which I speak a foreign tongue. But I will never live in Poland. I do not want to, though I do not see an end to the mourning.
Irena Klepfisz
#85. For, ultimately, isn't all laughter only the echo of an original revolt against the almighty: a never-ending scream against the absurdity of our exile from him?
D.P. Watt
#87. Watanabe would later admit that in the beginning of his life in exile, he had pondered the question of whether or not he had committed any crime. In the end, he laid the blame not on himself but on "sinful, absurd, insane war." He saw himself as a victim.
Laura Hillenbrand
#88. Sick and yet happy, in peril and yet happy, dying and yet happy, in exile and happy, in disgrace and happy.
Epictetus
#89. I saw you with your envoy A consenting adult Technique in moderation But vogue to the cult Me I've got my strangers To exile in the night I guess I'm just addicted To the pain of delight
Melissa Etheridge
#90. All writers
all beings
are exiles as a matter of course. The certainty about living is that it is a succession of expulsions of whatever carries the life force ... All writers are exiles wherever they live and their work is a lifelong journey towards the lost land..
Janet Frame
#91. We must be afraid of neither poverty nor exile nor imprisonment; of fear itself only should we be afraid.
Epictetus
#92. Alex Robichek had survived their Italian exile; that Uncle Richard and Aunt Roszi were safe in Sacramento.
Edith Hahn Beer
#93. [To Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford, on his return from self-imposed exile, occasioned by the embarrassing flatulence he had experienced in the presence of the Queen:] My Lord, I had forgot the fart.
Elizabeth I
#94. As he left the room it seemed to him that he was walking between two eternities, on one side a list of the living, with its inevitable crossings-out, on the other - eternal exile. Eternal as the stars, as the galaxies.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
#95. If the Irish programme did not insist on the Irish language I suppose I could call myself a nationalist. As it is, I am content torecognize myself an exile: and, prophetically, a repudiated one.
James Joyce
#96. Now, my co-mates and brothers in exile,
Hath not old custom made this life more sweet
Than that of painted pomp? Are not these woods
More free from peril than the envious court?
William Shakespeare
#97. Other men condemned to exile and captivity, if they survive, despair; the man of letters may reckon those days as the sweetest of his life
Benjamin Disraeli
#98. Our kingdom is our life, and our life is our kingdom. We are all meant to rule from a glorious place. When God is on the throne, then so are we. When God is in exile, our lands are at war and our kingdoms are in chaos.
Marianne Williamson
#99. The Jew is at once alienated and indestructible; he is in exile from his own country and in exile even from himself, yet he survives the annihilating fury of history.
Delmore Schwartz
#100. I have loved justice and hated iniquity: therefore I die in exile.
Pope Gregory VII
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top
