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Exile

Voyagers discover that the world can never be larger than the person that is in the world; but it is impossible to foresee this, it is impossible to be warned. – James Baldwin

It would be enough for me to have the system of a jury of twelve versus the system of one judge as a basis for preferring the U.S. to the Soviet Union. I would prefer the country you can leave to the country you cannot. – Joseph Brodsky

The ideal place for me is the one in which it is most natural to live as a foreigner. – Italo Calvino

It is a mistake to expect good work from expatriates for it is not what they do that matters but what they are not doing. – Cyril Connolly

Exile as a mode of genius no longer exists; in place of Joyce we have the fragments of work appearing in Index on Censorship. – Nadine Gordimer

Youre an expatriate. Youve lost touch with the soil. You get precious. Fake European standards have ruined you. You drink yourself to death. You become obsessed by sex. You spend all your time talking, not working. You are an expatriate, see? You hang around caf?s. – Ernest Hemingway

If I were to live my life over again, I would be an American. I would steep myself in America, I would know no other land. – Henry James

We make a mistake forsaking England and moving out into the periphery of life. After all, Taormina, Ceylon, Africa, America — as far as we go, they are only the negation of what we ourselves stand for and are: and were rather like Jonahs running away from the place we belong. – D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence

Let those who desire a secure homeland conquer it. Let those who do not conquer it live under the whip and in exile, watched over like wild animals, cast from one country to another, concealing the death of their souls with a beggars smile from the scorn of free men. – Jose Marti

I have loved justice and hated iniquity: therefore I die in exile. – Pope Gregory VII

I dunno what my 23 infantile years in America signify. I left as soon as motion was autarchic — I mean my motion. – Ezra Pound

The realization that he is white in a black country, and respected for it, is the turning point in the expatriates career. He can either forget it, or capitalize on it. Most choose the latter. – Paul Theroux

For his mourners will be outcast men, and outcasts always mourn. – Oscar Wilde