Quotes About Exile

The Gnostics believed that exile was the essential condition of man. Do you agree? I do. The artist and the addict both wrestle with this experience of exile. They share an acute, even excruciating sensitivity to the state of separation and isolation, and both actively seek a way to overcome it, to transcend it, or at least to make the pain go away. What is the pain of being human? It's the condition of being suspended between two worlds and being unable to fully enter into either.

I know how men in exile feed on dreams.

In a word, neither death, nor exile, nor pain, nor anything of this kind is the real cause of our doing or not doing any action, but our inward opinions and principles.

Is it in these bottomless nights that you sleep in exile?

I don't think of myself as a dissident, and I'm more of an immigrant than an exile.

Where [Albert Camus] is in exile isn't especially in Paris or elsewhere, but from the intellectual world, because of his origins.

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

The artistic reward for refuting the received national tradition is liberation. The price is homelessness. Interior exile.

The church of Jesus needs to wake up from the exile of passivity and embrace liminality and adventure or continue to remain a religious ghetto for culturally co-opted, fearful, middle-class folk.

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.

I believe in the pursuit of happiness. Not its attainment, nor its final definition, but its pursuit. I believe in the journey, not the arrival; in conversation, not monologues; in multiple questions rather than any single answer. I believe in the struggle to remake ourselves and challenge each other in the spirit of eternal forgiveness, in the awareness that none of us knows for sure what happiness truly is, but each of us knows the imperative to keep searching. I believe in the possibility of surprising joy, of serenity through pain, of homecoming through exile.

Silence, exile, cunning and so on... it's my nature to keep quiet about most things. Even the ideas in my work.

Gears of War: Exile was an unannounced game that I can't give any details about that has since been cancelled.

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

Don't follow a defeated foe. Follow Christ. It is costly. You will be an exile in this age. But you will be free.

Life without music is only error, exhaustion, exile... Indeed, there is nothing that concerns me more than the fate of music.

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

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.

Saddam Hussein is dead, and Osama bin Laden is dead. If you’re Moammar Gadhafi, living in exile is starting to sound really good.

It is a sad hardship and slavery to people who live in towns, that in their movements they know of one dimension only; they walk along the line as if they were led on a string. The transition from the line to the plane into the two dimensions, when you wander across a field or through a wood, is a splendid liberation to the slaves, like the French Revolution. But in the air you are taken into the full freedom of the three dimensions; after long ages of exile and dreams the homesick heart throws itself into the arms of space.

An adventurer can always return home; an exile cannot. So I decided that my home would be culture.

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.

The bond between a man and his profession is similar to that which ties him to his country; it is just as complex, often ambivalent, and in general it is understood completely only when it is broken: by exile or emigration in the case of one's country, by retirement in the case of a trade or profession.

Pound was silly, bumptious, extravagantly generous, annoying, exhibitionistic; Eliot was sensible, cautious, retiring, soothing, shy. Though Pound wrote some brilliant passages, on the whole he was a failure as a poet (sometimes even in his own estimation); Eliot went from success to success and is still quoted--and misquoted--by thousands of people who have never read him. Both men were expatriates by choice, but Eliot renounced his American citizenship and did his best to become assimilated with his fellow British subjects, while Pound always remained an American in exile.

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.

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

Vain are the beliefs and teachings that make man miserable, and false is the goodness that leads him into sorrow and despair, for it is man's purpose to be happy on this earth and lead the way to felicity and preach its gospel wherever he goes. He who does not see the kingdom of heaven in this life will never see it in the coming life. We came not into this life by exile, but we came as innocent creatures of God, to learn how to worship the holy and eternal spirit and seek the hidden secrets within ourselves from the beauty of life.

I stand as I always have with the Cuban people who love, cherish and celebrate liberty. Hard-working, helpful people who open their hearts and homes to all, whether in Cuba or in exile.