When the root lives on, the new leaves come back.
—Aeschylus, c. 458 BCWhere shall I, of wandering weary, find my resting place at last?
—Heinrich Heine, 1827Life’s no resting, but a moving.
—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, c. 1795Emigration is easy, but immigration is something else. To flee, yes; but to be accepted?
—Victoria Wolff, 1943Home is wherever I go.
—Indira Gandhi, 1955Those who go overseas find a change of climate, not a change of soul.
—Horace, c. 20 BCIt was lonesome, the leaving.
—Wetatonmi, c. 1877I have loved justice and hated iniquity: therefore I die in exile.
—Gregory VII, c. 1085Reading makes immigrants of us all. It takes us away from home, but most important, it finds homes for us everywhere.
—Hazel Rochman, 1995Exile lacks the grandeur, the majesty, of expatriation.
—Bharati Mukherjee, 1999Let 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, 1961Usually speaking, the worst-bred person in company is a young traveler just returned from abroad.
—Jonathan Swift, c. 1730Better free in a strange land than a slave at home.
—German proverbI am not Athenian or Greek but a citizen of the world.
—Socrates, c. 420 BCAs man disappears from sight, the land remains.
—Maori proverbHistory in its broadest aspect is a record of man’s migrations from one environment to another.
—Ellsworth Huntington, 1919There are places one comes home to that one has never been to.
—Barbara Grizzuti Harrison, 1989Uprootedness is by far the most dangerous malady to which human societies are exposed, for it is a self-propagating one.
—Simone Weil, 1943They exchange their home and sweet thresholds for exile, and seek under another sun another home.
—Virgil, c. 30 BCCivilization, as we know it, is a movement and not a condition, a voyage and not a harbor.
—Arnold Toynbee, 1948Do not fear the clatter of wheels, the bumps and slops in corridors. It is only turbulence.
—Romalyn Ante, 2020One should always have one’s boots on and be ready to leave.
—Michel de Montaigne, 1580The first thing that a new migrant sends to his family back home isn’t money; it’s a story.
—Suketu Mehta, 2019Can you take your country with you on the soles of your shoes?
—Georg Büchner, 1835Spring 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, 1962I have been a stranger here in my own land all my life.
—Sophocles, c. 441 BCThe foreigner residing among you must be treated as your native-born. Love them as yourself, for you were foreigners in Egypt.
—Leviticus, c. 600 BCWhole nations have melted away like balls of snow before the sun.
—Dragging Canoe, 1775Nature contains no one constant form.
—Paul-Henri Dietrich d’Holbach, 1770To live exiled from a place you have known intimately is to experience sensory deprivation. A wide-awake coma.
—Gretel Ehrlich, 1994