Lapham’s Quarterly

Exile lacks the grandeur, the majesty, of expatriation.

When the root lives on, the new leaves come back.

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.

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

Better free in a strange land than a slave at home.

Let us leave this Europe which never stops talking of Man yet massacres him at every one of its street corners, at every corner of the world.

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

As man disappears from sight, the land remains.

Whole nations have melted away like balls of snow before the sun.

They exchange their home and sweet thresholds for exile, and seek under another sun another home.

Those who go overseas find a change of climate, not a change of soul.

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

Where shall I, of wandering weary, find my resting place at last?

It was lonesome, the leaving.

Life’s no resting, but a moving.

One should always have one’s boots on and be ready to leave.

History in its broadest aspect is a record of man’s migrations from one environment to another.

The first thing that a new migrant sends to his family back home isn’t money; it’s a story.

I have loved justice and hated iniquity: therefore I die in exile.

Home is wherever I go.

Usually speaking, the worst-bred person in company is a young traveler just returned from abroad.

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

I am not Athenian or Greek but a citizen of the world.

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

The foreigner residing among you must be treated as your native-born. Love them as yourself, for you were foreigners in Egypt.

To live exiled from a place you have known intimately is to experience sensory deprivation. A wide-awake coma.

Nature contains no one constant form.

Do not fear the clatter of wheels, the bumps and slops in corridors. It is only turbulence.