Quotessence
Home / Quotes / Quote by Louis Yako

Quote by Louis Yako

“Over the years, I have grown to love airports, despite all the travel inconveniences which are getting worse every year. I don’t know why I have this strong desire to depart; to always be somewhere else. Maybe getting displaced and being forced out of my home as a result of war has turned me into a permanent nomad? Since I left Iraq for the first time in 2005, I almost always have a plane, bus, or train ticket to go somewhere. Sometimes I think of the mothers who abandon their unwanted babies at the doors of churches and mosques. I imagine that my mother, too, had left me at the door of an airport with a plane ticket instead of a pacifier in my mouth! And since then, I have been moving everywhere and arriving nowhere. Could it be that disillusion takes place precisely at the moment we arrive at a certain destination?”

Quote by Louis Yako

Create image

Author

Louis Yako

Browse famous quotes and profile details for Louis Yako. more

You May Also Like

“If men and women need freedom and mobility, they also need a sense of tradition and belonging. There is nothing retrograde about roots. The postmodern cult of the migrant, which sometimes succeeds in making migrants sound even more enviable than rock stars, is a good deal too supercilious in this respect. It is a hangover from the modernist cult of the exile, the Satanic artist who scorns the suburban masses and plucks an elitist virtue out of his enforced dispossession. The problem at the moment is that the rich have mobility while the poor have locality. Or rather, the poor have locality until the rich get their hands on it. The rich are global and the poor are local - though just as poverty is a global fact, so the rich are coming to appreciate the benefits of locality.”

TraditionMigrationMobilityGlobalismLocalityTransnationalism
Book:After Theory
Create image

“But while women were able to capitalize on Vietnam's rapid development, it is important to situate their mobility as constrained within structures of patriarchy.”

WomenSituationDevelopmentImportanceVietnamPatriarchyMobilityStructuresCapitalizationConstrainment
Book:Dealing in Desire: Asian Ascendancy, Western Decline, and the Hidden Currencies of Global Sex Work
Create image

“Even two hundred years ago, when the British finally defeated the divided yet dominant Marathas in the Third Anglo-Maratha War of 1817, India was a very static place. Most Indians could not have just packed their bags and easily relocated from Maratha Pune to Mughal Delhi, or from British Calcutta to Sikh Lahore—much less from a small fort–town in Rajputana to rural Mysore. Besides logistics, language was a significant barrier and so were social acceptance and job opportunities. The average Indian had almost nothing to fall back on without backing from the biraadri or gotra. The farm and the local market defined most people’s lives, punctuated occasionally by a rare long-distance pilgrimage. Large-scale relocations mostly happened during times of distress. Marrying contrary to parental wishes was unimaginable. Life was ‘nasty, brutish and short’, to borrow the famous Hobbesian description, and solace was found in the Gods.”

KingdomsSolaceMobilityAncient India
Book:A New Idea of India: Individual Rights in a Civilisational State
Create image