#exile

Give me the waters of Lethe that numb the heart, if they exist, I will still not have the power to forget you. ↗

— Ovid

#homesickness #longing #love #love

I’m by myself,” she said finally. “No family to speak of.” “I see.” Leaning forward again, he rested his arms against the table. “That must be rather difficult.” “Sometimes.” “And lonely, I imagine. Perhaps that is why you came here tonight?” Her jaw popped under the strain of maintaining decorum. “First: I said I was alone, not lonely. There's a big difference. And second: is that really why you think I'm here?” “I do not know what to think. I know you must have reasons for being here other than what you have already hinted at. Reasons important enough to make an otherwise intelligent woman not only bring food to a stranger so late at night, but also accept his invitation to sit inside an empty motel room without a second thought.” “Why don't you just call me a hooker while you're at it? ↗

— Angela B. Wade

#angel #demon #exile #nicholas #family

A week of sweeping fogs has passed over and given me a strange sense of exile and desolation. I walk round the island nearly every day, yet I can see nothing anywhere but a mass of wet rock, a strip of surf, and then a tumult of waves. ↗

— John Millington Synge

#day #desolation #every #every day #exile

It is strange, how quickly people want to obligate their poets, as it were, on the exile. ↗

— Peter Bichsel

#how #people #poets #quickly #strange

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

— Pope Gregory VII

#exile #hated #i #iniquity #justice

The Opposition aren't really the Opposition. They're just called the Opposition. But in fact they are the Opposition in exile. The Civil Service are the Opposition in residence. ↗

— Antony Jay

#civil #civil service #exile #fact #in fact

exile is strangely compelling to think about but terrible to experience. It is the unhealable rift forced between a human being and a native place, between the self and its true home: its essential sadness can never be surmounted. And while it is true that literature and history contain heroic, romantic, glorious, even triumphant episodes in an exile’s life, these are no more than efforts meant to overcome the crippling sorrow of estrangement. ↗

— Edward W. Said

#exile #migration #sorrow #experience

When the Jewish people, after nearly 2,000 years of exile, under relentless persecution, became a nation again on 14 May 1948 the 'fig tree' put forth its first leaves. Jesus said that this would indicate that He was 'at the door,' ready to return. ↗

— Hal Lindsey

#again #became #door #exile #fig

This is the most immediate fruit of exile, of uprooting: the prevalence of the unreal over the real. Everyone dreamed past and future dreams, of slavery and redemption, of improbable paradises, of equally mythical and improbable enemies; cosmic enemies, perverse and subtle, who pervade everything like the air. ↗

— Primo Levi

#exile #prisoner #dreams

Life is a relentless expulsion from where we come from and an ongoing deportation to alien realms. We are in exile and our greatest dream is to return to the lost land. It is the greatest dream because no matter how long our exile is going to last, the dream will remain. It is the greatest dream because when we finally care only for this dream, then our exile will be over. ↗

— Franco Santoro

#exile #dreams