Life’s no resting, but a moving.

—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, c. 1795

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

—Sophocles, c. 441 BC

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

—Suketu Mehta, 2019

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.

—Frantz Fanon, 1961

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

—Horace, c. 20 BC

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.

—Rachel Carson, 1962

As man disappears from sight, the land remains.

—Maori proverb

Home is wherever I go.

—Indira Gandhi, 1955

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

—Heinrich Heine, 1827

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

—Romalyn Ante, 2020

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

—Barbara Grizzuti Harrison, 1989

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

—Michel de Montaigne, 1580

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

—Leviticus, c. 600 BC

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

—Jonathan Swift, c. 1730

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

—Aeschylus, c. 458 BC

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

—Arnold Toynbee, 1948

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

—Georg Büchner, 1835

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

—Gregory VII, c. 1085

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

—Dragging Canoe, 1775

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

—Victoria Wolff, 1943

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

—Socrates, c. 420 BC

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

—Gretel Ehrlich, 1994

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

—Ellsworth Huntington, 1919

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

—Virgil, c. 30 BC

Exile lacks the grandeur, the majesty, of expatriation.

—Bharati Mukherjee, 1999

Nature contains no one constant form.

—Paul-Henri Dietrich d’Holbach, 1770

It was lonesome, the leaving.

—Wetatonmi, c. 1877

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

—Simone Weil, 1943

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

—German proverb

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

—Hazel Rochman, 1995