Quotes About Self Exile

#1. Were you indeed not blinded by the Curse Of Self-exile, that still grows worse and worse, Yourselves would know that, though you see him not, He is with you this Moment, on this Spot ...

Farid Al-Din Attar

#2. I turned what was a wonderful case of self-reliance into a case of self-exile. Which is not uncommon, I think, in people who grow really early and have to learn how to take care of themselves. They have trouble hinging their lives with anybody else.

Leigh Newman

#3. 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

#4. I'm in self-imposed exile, cradled between split branches, in my favorite tree in the woods behind school. I've been coming here every day at lunch, hiding out until the bell rings, whittling words into the branches with my pen, allowing my heart to break in private.

Jandy Nelson

#5. 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

#6. We choose exile as a vantage point; from exile we look back on the rejected

James Wright

#7. Earth seemed a place of exile and I dreamt of heaven.

John Beevers

#8. 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

#9. We live in the age of the refugee, the age of the exile.

Ariel Dorfman

#10. Thou Paradise of exiles, Italy!

Percy Bysshe Shelley

#11. Rome is no longer in Rome, it is here where I am.

Pierre Corneille

#12. 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

#13. 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

#14. The doubt of future foes exiles my present joy.

Elizabeth I

#15. 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

#16. 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

#17. 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

#18. Life's harrowing echo only to be faded into exiled loneliness

Munia Khan

#19. 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

#20. 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

#21. Some women's arms are placed of exile; others are a native land.

Amin Maalouf

#22. [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

#23. It's not good to live so much inside oneself. It's a self-imposed exile, really. It makes you different.

Nancy Horan

#24. The price one pays when choosing exile is the loss of all that defines you as an individual. The only thing that makes this immense loss tolerable is the discovery of a self you did not know existed - of a true independence. That is the real gift of America, not its fabled wealth and prosperity.

Azar Nafisi

#25. The concept of loneliness and exile and self-sufficiency continually bucks me up.

Christopher Hitchens

#26. One of the things that people sense is that you are not doing this for self-glorification, you are doing it for the sake of others. The Dalai Lama has been in exile for so many years, yet the Chinese are running scared of him.

Desmond Tutu

#27. Exile, like memory, may be a place of hope and delusion. But there are rules of light there and principles of darkness ... The expatriate is in search of a country, the exile in search of a self. - Eavan Boland, OBJECT LESSONS

Kathleen Norris

#28. This would become a lifelong pattern, sitting in my comfort zone high above the world in some sort of self-imposed exile.

Peggy Kopman-Owens

#29. 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

#30. 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

#31. 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

#32. The moment you've uttered the exact dimensionality of your exile, you're already turning towards home.

David Whyte

#33. 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

#34. It is true that I am of an older fashion; much that I love has been destroyed or sent into exile.

G.K. Chesterton

#35. 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

#36. 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

#37. 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

#38. Don't judge me until you understand me. You can't understand me if you've already judged me.

Orson Scott Card

#39. 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

#40. 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

#41. 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

#42. 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

#43. 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

#44. 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

#45. 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

#46. '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

#47. Exile is like death. You cannot understand it until it happens to you.

Golshifteh Farahani

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

Hiam Abbass

#49. 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

#50. 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

#51. 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

#52. 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

#53. 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

#54. Our native soil draws all of us, by I know not what sweetness, and never allows us to forget.

Ovid