Top 55 Exile Quotes

Exile is not a time frame. Exile is an experience. It’s a sentiment.

No exile at the South Pole or on the summit of Mont Blanc separates us more effectively from others than the practice of a hidden vice.

I am the face of a refugee. I was once a refugee. I was with my family in exile.

I most certainly believe that it is the gift of God that I am what I am. And so I dwell amongst barbarians, a proselyte and an exile, for the love of God.

The concept of loneliness and exile and self-sufficiency continually bucks me up.

We learn, grow and become compassionate and generous as much through exile as homecoming, as much through loss as gain, as much through giving things away as in receiving what we believe to be our due.

In a certain sense, a writer is an exile, an outsider, always reporting on things, and it is part of his life to keep on the move. Travel is natural.

I think the only positive thing that came from Uruguay’s dictatorship was the spread of Montevideo natives around the world, and I continued writing about them from my various places of exile.

As a result of the historic catastrophe in which Titus of Rome destroyed Jerusalem and Israel was exiled from its land, I was born in one of the cities of the Exile.

The revision of the books of Judges, Samuel, and Kings, undertaken towards the end of the Babylonian exile, a revision much more thorough than is commonly assumed, condemns as heretical the whole age of the Kings.

Well, I write in exile because I cannot return to my country, so I have no choice but to see myself as an exiled writer.

I never considered myself as somebody in exile because, different to my father who, yes, was in exile because he left Haiti as an adult, for me it was just to be somewhere else. I carried Haiti with me everywhere, but I also carried, you know, my youth in a public school in Brooklyn. It’s part of who I am as well.

Emigration is no longer politically homogenous and is no longer called ‘exile,’ with the new migrants and new generations of Cubans and despite the minority and extremist current that still promotes confrontation between Cubans living abroad and their homeland.

The protest years were over, not just for me but for a whole generation, and in music, just like in politics, many of the greatest talents were dead or in exile, and their place was filled by third-rate imitators.

I sing ‘Beirut’ for what the city is for me, but I am also singing as an exile.

The more we exile ourselves from nature, the more we crave its miracle waters.

I’ve participated in many demonstrations since I was a child. When I was at medical college, I was fighting King Farouk, then British colonization, against Nasser, against Sadat who pushed me into prison, Mubarak who pushed me into exile. I never stopped.

One of the things that Ang brings to all of his projects is his deep sense of being a double exile, an outsider’s outsider.

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.

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

It’s been the most astonishing year because I’ve been having a marvelous adventure, and yet I kind of sympathize with people who have to live in exile, because I’ve so missed England.

Lots of times you can feel as an exile in a country that you were born in.

God drove Cain out of his presence and sent him into exile far away from his native land, so that he passed from a life of human kindness to one which was more akin to the rude existence of a wild beast.

I have no interest in becoming a tax exile and living somewhere I don’t want to – I just want to be at home with my family.

Doesn’t the world see the suffering of millions of Palestinians who have been living in exile around the world or in refugee camps for the past 60 years? No state, no home, no identity, no right to work. Doesn’t the world see this injustice?

Satan understands the power of men and women united in righteousness. He is still stinging from his banishment into eternal exile after Michael led the hosts of heaven, comprised of valiant men and women united in the cause of Christ, against him.

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

Exile is my power.

The Jew is at once alienated and indestructible; he is in exile from his own country and in exile even from himself, yet he survives the annihilating fury of history.

Exile is more than a geographical concept. You can be an exile in your homeland, in your own house, in a room.

New York – that unnatural city where every one is an exile, none more so than the American.

Exile is like death. You cannot understand it until it happens to you.

I would never write, ever. I might as well exile myself.

I think there is a heritage which I’m proud of, which is a fight for democracy, a fight for social justice, a fight for freedom. My grandfather went to jail or exile six times in his life, fighting for his principles for democracy, or for his country. And my father twice.

In exile, I have tried to profit by the past and prepare for the future.

Silence, exile, cunning and so on… it’s my nature to keep quiet about most things. Even the ideas in my work.

I’m interested in people who find themselves in places, either of their choosing or not, and who are forced to decide how best to live there. That feeling of both citizenship and exile, of always being an expatriate – with all the attendant problems and complications and delight.

Reformist kings can save their dynasties now by helping their countries move smoothly into democracy, or they will end their years in exile like the Russian aristocrats of a century earlier.

I have written about the dispossessed, immigrants, the condition of women who do not enjoy the same legal rights as men, the Palestinians who are deprived of their land and condemned to exile.

Our entire family is replete with sentiments of patriotism. Uncle Swarna Singh left for his heavenly abode in jail in 1910, two or three years after my birth. Uncle Ajit Singh is leading the life of an exile in foreign countries.

Keep to the middle if you wish to keep moderation. The mid way is the safe way. Moderation abides in the mean, and moderation is virtue. Every abiding place outside the bounds of moderation is only exile to the wise man.

My complaint, as an exile who once loved New York and who likes to return a half-dozen times a year, is not that it plays host to extremes of the human condition: There is grandeur in that, and necessity.

Here in Spain, there are Argentine Jews, children and grandchildren of immigrants of Jews who fled Germany or Austria in the thirties, and in the seventies during the dictatorship, they had to go into exile again.

There are nations, where people live in captivity, fear and silence. I believe, one day from prison camps and torture cells and from exile the leaders of freedom will emerge. The world should stand with those oppressed people until the day of their freedom finally arrives.

In 1994, when I went back to Haiti from exile, we established a Commission for Truth and Justice and Reconciliation. I passed the documents to the next government, and I never heard about it again.

We try to exile ourselves more and more from nature – not always consciously: We build houses; we dismiss nature; nature has to be outside, because we’re inside. God forbid something like a cockroach comes inside, or some dust.

My exile was not only a physical one, motivated exclusively by political reasons; it was also a moral, social, ideological and sexual exile.

The history of Buenos Aires is written in its telephone directory. Pompey Romanov, Emilio Rommel, Crespina D. Z. de Rose, Ladislao Radziwil, and Elizabeta Marta Callman de Rothschild – five names taken at random from among the R’s – told a story of exile, desolation, disillusion, and anxiety behind lace curtains.

New York is, of course, many cities, and an exile does not return to the one he left.

I’m living in California but I have a place that is mine in Chile and I belong there. I am no longer an exile.

Only solitary men know the full joys of friendship. Others have their family; but to a solitary and an exile, his friends are everything.

My father was a professor of political science and also a young politician fighting for democracy in Kenya, and when things got ugly, he went into political exile in Mexico.

I’m an exile. My father had the courage to leave with his wife, his mother and three children under twelve. It took more courage to leave, to sacrifice everything for freedom, than to stay.

Most writers live in self-imposed exile, even when they don’t leave their country. They prefer the undiscovered country inside their own heads.

‘The Exile’ covers approximately the first third of ‘Outlander’.