Lapham’s Quarterly

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

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

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

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

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

Nature contains no one constant form.

Life’s no resting, but a moving.

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

Home is wherever I go.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

It was lonesome, the leaving.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

As man disappears from sight, the land remains.

Exile lacks the grandeur, the majesty, of expatriation.

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

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

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