Lapham’s Quarterly

There are places one comes home to that one has never been to.

Can you take your country with you on the soles of your shoes?

I have been a stranger here in my own land all my life.

Spring now comes unheralded by the return of the birds, and the early mornings are strangely silent where once they were filled with the beauty of birdsong.

Life’s no resting, but a moving.

Uprootedness is by far the most dangerous malady to which human societies are exposed, for it is a self-propagating one.

It was lonesome, the leaving.

Emigration is easy, but immigration is something else. To flee, yes; but to be accepted?

Reading makes immigrants of us all. It takes us away from home, but most important, it finds homes for us everywhere.

Civilization, as we know it, is a movement and not a condition, a voyage and not a harbor.