Lapham’s Quarterly

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

Life’s no resting, but a moving.

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

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

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

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.

It was lonesome, the leaving.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

Exile lacks the grandeur, the majesty, of expatriation.

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

As man disappears from sight, the land remains.

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

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

Home is wherever I go.