Lapham’s Quarterly

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

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

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

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

Nature contains no one constant form.

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

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

It was lonesome, the leaving.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

Exile lacks the grandeur, the majesty, of expatriation.

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

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

As man disappears from sight, the land remains.

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

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

Life’s no resting, but a moving.

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.

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

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

Home is wherever I go.

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

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

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

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