Displaced Quotes

“I've always tried to make a home for myself, but I have not felt at home in myself. I've worked hard at being the hero of my own life. But every time I checked the register of displaced persons, I was still on it. I didn't know how to belong. Longing? Yes. Belonging? No.”
― Jeanette Winterson, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

“Do you ever want to go home?' I asked Paul.
He brushed an ash from my face. 'It's the century of the displaced person,' he said. 'You can never go home.”
― Janet Fitch, White Oleander

“When you’re talking about the culture, maybe there is something that just permeates sort of thing, you know you pass it on or take it in, without ever being aware of it. - Ivan Pavelić, Croatia”
― Peter Brune, Suffering, Redemption and Triumph: The first wave of post-war Australian immigrants 1945-66

“Bring Down The Walls

I will bring down the walls
that surround me today.
I will no longer be kept quiet
Meek enough to drown today....”
― Muse, Enigmatic Evolution

“I was born walking, born in the nowhere between galaxies.”
― Hannah Lillith Assadi, Sonora

“It was never easy being a refugee, regardless of what people might never be able to see. Displaced from your truth, running away from the shell, counting the fears over the scars and the hell. It was never easy having a bullet at your head, scattering thoughts, dreams, ideas, on the pot of shame, left behind your day by prejudices and faked games.
It was never easy being a refugee… But a torture of the body and the mind, shaping storylines to fit in, concealing the self in the maze of a pipe dream. Just to find the peace, the one that many of us takes for granted.”
― Simona Prilogan

“She never saw it again. Day and night the river flows down into England, day after day the sun retreats into the Welsh mountains, and the tower chimes: 'See the Conquering Hero.' But the Wilcoxes have no part in the place, nor in any place. It is not their names that recur in the parish register. It is not their ghosts that sigh among the alders at evening. They have swept into the valley and swept out of it, leaving a little dust and a little money behind.”
― E.M. Forster, Howards End

“I had never seen this type of clock, carved from hardwood into the shape of our homeland (...) Some craftsman in exile had understood that this was exactly the timepiece his countrymen desired. We were displaced persons, but it was time more than space that defined us. While the distance to return to our lost country was far but finite, the number of years it would take to close that distance was potentially infinite. Thus, for displaced people, the first question was always about time: When can I return?

Refugee, exile, immigrant — whatever species of displaced human we were, we did not simply live in two cultures, as celebrants of the great American melting pot imagined. Displaced people also lived in two time zones, the here and the there, the present and the past, being as we were reluctant time-travelers. But while science fiction imagined time-travelers as moving forwards and backwards in time, this timepiece demonstrated a different chronology. The open secret of the clock, naked for all to see, was that we were only going in circles”
― Viet Thanh Nguyen, The Sympathizer

“For those I come from, there is nothing more devouring than the feeling of want for home, the feeling of need for home. We are all waiting for a form of transport, a ship, a saucer to carry us out of the too-dark night.”
― Hannah Lillith Assadi, Sonora

“You and I, your mother, Ahlam, we are from up there,' my father continued. 'We come from the stunning stars. We were just born in the wrong place. We were meant to live on another planet. The people who come to the desert are those who know this, deep inside of them, we are from up there. From far, far away.”
― Hannah Lillith Assadi, Sonora

“I don't think I'm from this galaxy at all. I believe I came from the Andromeda galaxy, not so far, but far enough. Maybe that's why I'm an outcast.' He drew the spiral of Andromeda close to the Milky Way, almost touching. Then he pointed to Andromeda in the night sky above us.

'Maybe that's where I'm from too,' my father said. We could still see the stars.”
― Hannah Lillith Assadi, Sonora

“and home isn't here
and home isn't there”
― Deborah Landau, The Last Usable Hour

“Why can't we go home, then?'
'Because Puteaux isn't out home, it belonged to Grandpère and Mère. We have not got a home, you and I. Paris is not our city, France is not our country. We are Lévys, we are Jews.”
― Daphne du Maurier, Julius

“maar zij werd
ontheemd
geboren.”
― Anna Jae

“She remembered the old man in the bar in the Mission District telling her, ‘We are the biggest tribe of all, us displaced ones, us urban Indians, us sidewalk redskins.”
― Janet Campbell Hale, The Jailing of Cecelia Capture

“I know how it feels to be someplace you no longer belong, or to no longer be in the place you do belong, because that place has ceased to exist. I know what it’s like to be robbed of your foundation walls, how difficult it becomes to stand firm or stand at all, to provide others with protection. It’s impossible to imagine; it must be experienced, although best avoided. I wouldn’t wish it upon anyone.”
― Hans von Trotha, Pollaks Arm

“There is a striking correlation between the levels of fragility and levels of displacement. Fragile states are those that have no defence against mass violence. They are not invariably beset by mass violence: but each state is a house of cards.”
― Alexander Betts, Refuge: Transforming a Broken Refugee System

“Volodymyr Zelensky appears to be losing the support of the Ukrainians as they are watching their people being displaced, their country being destroyed and their men being killed instead of negotiating a peace deal with the Russians.”
― Steven Magee