Lapham’s Quarterly

Life’s no resting, but a moving.

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

Home is wherever I go.

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

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

Nature contains no one constant form.

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

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

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

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

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

As man disappears from sight, the land remains.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

Exile lacks the grandeur, the majesty, of expatriation.

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

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

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

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

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.