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Emigration Quotes

Browse 60 quotes about Emigration.

Emigration Quotes

“To love a country as if you’ve lost one: as if it were you on a plane departing from America forever, clouds closing like curtains on your country, the last scene in which you’re a madman scribbling the names of your favorite flowers, trees, and birds you’d never see again, your address and phone number you’d never use again, the color of your father’s eyes, your mother’s hair, terrified you could forget these. To love a country as if I was my mother last spring hobbling, insisting I help her climb all the way up to the U.S. Capitol, as if she were here before you today instead of me, explaining her tears, cheeks pink as the cherry blossoms coloring the air that day when she stopped, turned to me, and said: You know, mijo, it isn’t where you’re born that matters, it’s where you choose to die—that’s your country.”

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Book:How to Love a Country
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“Does anyone ever want to leave their home? The fresh fruit that drops from their backyard? The neighbors who wiped their snot? Does anyone ever want to believe they won't come back? To the dog that sniffs their heel, to the bed that holds the echo of their body? Is there relief in pretending it is temporary, that one day it will be safe? That I will once again wave to the kind school bus driver; that I'll hold Carline's baby before he grows, having never known me? They have no palm trees in New York City, no leaves to shade me, to brush against my cheeks like my mother's hands. There is no one over there, alive or buried, who held me as a child, who cradled me close, who fed me from their table, who wiped my knees when I fell & scraped them. Here, despite the bad & ugly, is my home. & now I wish that I could stay. Does anyone ever want to leave the place they love?”

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Book:Clap When You Land
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“and yet there was cement in her soul. It had been there for a while, an early morning disease of fatigue, a bleakness and borderlessness. It brought with it amorphous longings, shapeless desires, brief imaginary glints of other lives she could be living, that over the months melded into a piercing homesickness. She scoured Nigerian websites, Nigerian pro files on Facebook, Nigerian blogs, and each click brought yet another story of a young person who had recently moved back home, clothed in American or British degrees, to start an investment company, a music production business, a fashion label, a magazine, a fast-food franchise She looked at photographs of these men and women and felt the dull ache of loss, as though they had prised open her hand and taken some thing of hers. They were living her life.”

HomeRaceTravelRacismImmigrationHomesicknessHomesickEmigration
Book:Americanah
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“Mind ennek az országnak a földjében pihennek. A halottak könnyen lépnek át minden határt. Ő lesz az első közülük, aki hamvaiban már nem fog hazatérni. De a Fiú lesz az első, aki majd megtagadja, hogy fizesse az ismeretlen halottak utáni kötelező temetői díjat. Mi már ide úgysem fogunk visszatérni, magyarázza neki, ez mind fölösleges pazarlás. Valakinek ki kell mondani, hogy a visszatérés sosem fog megtörténni.”

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Book:Haza
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“И передо мной, естественно, как перед всяким “изгнанником” (по Ахматовой) вставал выбор меж двумя ценностями — родина иль свобода? Не задумываясь, я взял свободу, ибо родина без свободы уж не родина, а свобода без родины, хоть и очень тяжела, может быть, даже страшна, но все-таки — моя свобода.. Так что “надменные строки” Ахматовой о каком-то “изгнаннике” меня всегда необыкновенно отталкивали.”

FreedomEmigrationMotherland
Author:Роман Гуль
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“Something must be radically wrong with a culture and a civilisation when its youth begins to desert it. Youth is the natural time for revolt, for experiment, for a generous idealism that is eager for action. Any civilisation which has the wisdom of self-preservation will allow a certain margin of freedom for the expression of this youthful mood. But the plain, unpalatable fact is that in America today that margin of freedom has been reduced to the vanishing point. Rebellious youth is not wanted here. In our environment there is nothing to challenge our young men; there is no flexibility, no colour, no possibility for adventure, no chance to shape events more generously than is permitted under the rules of highly organised looting. All our institutional life combines for the common purpose of blackjacking our youth into the acceptance of the status quo; and not acceptance of it merely, but rather its glorification.”

AmericaFreedomPossibilityAcceptanceYouthAdventureCivilizationRebellionIdealismStatus QuoFlexibilityRevoltExperimentationLootingEmigrationLost GenerationDesertionInstitutionalized
Book:America and the young intellectual
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“No one would choose to crawl under fences, beaten until your shadow leaves, raped, forced off the boat because you are darker, drowned, sold, starved, shot at the border like a sick animal, pitied. No one would choose to make a refugee camp home for a year or two or ten, stripped and searched, finding prison everywhere. And if you were to survive, greeted on the other side--Go home Blacks, dirty refugees, sucking our country dry of milk, dark with their hands out, smell strange, savage, look what they've done to their own countries, what will they do to ours?”

PoetryDangerPoemRacismPrejudiceImmigrationRefugeesEmigration
Book:Bless the Daughter Raised by a Voice in Her Head
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“an emigres artistic problem: the numerically equal blocks of a lifetime are unequal in weight, depending on whether they comprise young or adult years. The adult years may be richer and more important for life and for creative activity both, but the subconscious, memory, language, all the understructure of creativity, are formed very early; for a doctor, that won't make problems, but for a novelist or a composer, leaving the place to which his imagination, his obsessions, and thus his fundamental themes are bound could make for a kind of ripping apart. He must mobilize all his powers, all his artists wiles, to turn the disadvantages of that situation to benefits. [...] Only returning to the native land after a long absence can reveal the substantial strangeness of the world and of existence.”

ExistenceNostalgiaEmigration
Book:Testaments Betrayed: An Essay in Nine Parts
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“She had always taken it as a given that emigrating was a misfortune. But, now she wonders, wasn't it instead an illusion of misfortune, an illusion suggested by the way people perceive an émigré? Wasn't she interpreting her own life according to the operating instructions other people had handed her? And she thought that even though it had been imposed from the outside and against her will, her emigration was perhaps, without her knowing it, the best outcome for her life.”

EmigrationEmigrants
Book:Ignorance
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“Doseljenici su, otkrio je to posmatrajući tetku i teču, a docnije je to primetio i kod sebe, razapeti između svojih maštarija. Budućnost uvek dolazi i stoga nikada nije tu, prošlost uvek odlazi. Vreme je dvostruko, razdvojeno u sebi. Prostor, takođe. Ovde smo ali nismo odavde; odande smo, ali nismo tamo. Život je neprestano premošćavanje, ukrštenica na dva jezika; svet je volja i predstava koja se odigrava, simultano, na dve pozornice postavljenje jedna do druge. Predstave su složene, bogatih kostima, šminka je operska, scena je prepuna realističnih detalja, mehanička pomagala konstruisana su sa preciznošću časovničara. Možda baš zbog te složenosti, ponekad se dogodi da se namah dotaknu, da se na jednoj od pozornica odigra nešto što predstavlja drugu predstavu i ukazuje na nju. Kanapi skriveni u tami iza kulisa međusobno se zapliću, neobjašnjivo, bog iz mašine iznenada aterira na pogrešnu binu i progovara drugim jezikom, privlači pažnju glumca koji vidi drugog glumca kako na susednoj bini igra osobu istog imena, i zastaje, muca, čuje šaptača ali ne reaguje, zbunjen slikom koja, budući da je on glumac, nije ništa manje stvarna od njega”

EmigrationEmigrants
Book:Kiša i hartija
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“Another principle that I believe can be justified by scientific evidence so far is that nobody is going to emigrate from this planet not ever....It will be far cheaper, and entail no risk to human life, to explore space with robots. The technology is already well along....the real thrill will be in learning in detail what is out there...It is an especially dangerous delusion if we see emigration into space as a solution to be taken when we have used up this planet....Earth, by the twenty-second century, can be turned, if we so wish, into a permanent paradise for human beings...”

TechnologySustainabilityRobotsSpace ExplorationSpace ProgramEmigrationFuture Of Man
Book:The Social Conquest of Earth
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“It’s that time of the year when I yearn to reunite with my soul, that hapless wanderer. That part of me which resides in an exalted state in the ancient kingdom of Ojoto. A place where my beloved soul saunters unchecked, whispering my name in the quietness of the night, whistling same with the wind, and yelling it during thunderstorms. Since my prolonged absence, it mumbles and sobs for me, a titular truant.”

Soul QuotesAfrican AuthorsNigerian AuthorsEmigrationIgbo AuthorsNigerian WritersCountry Of OriginAfrican Immigrants
Author:Fidelis O. Mkparu
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“There's a certain freshness and innocence in people who have always lived in one place and can count on witnesses to their passage through the world. In contrast, those of us who have moved on many times develop tough skin out of necessity. Since we lack roots or corroboration of who we are, we must put our trust in memory to give continuity to our lives...but memory is always cloudy, we can't trust it.”

MemorySelf ImageNomadicEmigrationItinerant
Book:My Invented Country: A Nostalgic Journey Through Chile
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“All the pale horses of the apocalypse have stormed through my life, revolution, starvation, devaluation of currency and terror, epidemics, emigration; I have seen the great ideologies of the masses grow and spread out before my eyes. Fascism in Italy, National Socialism in Germany, Bolshevism in Russia, and, above all, that archpestilence, nationalism, which poisoned our flourishing European culture.”

EyeCultureGrowsRevolutionMassHorseTerrorSpreadRussiaSocialismIdeologyGermanyNationalismFascismPaleCurrencyApocalypseStarvationEpidemicsFlourishingEmigrationBolshevism
Author:Stefan Zweig
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“Not only did waging war against Hitler fail to save the Jews, it may be that the war itself brought on the Final Solution of genocide. This is not to remove the responsibility from Hitler and the Nazis, but there is much evidence that Germany's anti-Semitic actions, cruel as they were, would not have turned to mass murder were it not for the psychic distortions of war, acting on already distorted minds. Hitler's early aim was forced emigration, not extermination, but the frenzy of it created an atmosphere in which the policy turned to genocide.”

MindMayWarActionActingResponsibilityFailingPolicyMassSolutionsEvidenceMurderAimFinalsJewAtmosphereGermanyRemoveGenocideNaziPsychicsDistortionFrenzyExterminationAnti SemiticEmigrationWaging War
Book:The Zinn Reader: Writings on Disobedience and Democracy
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“The young nobles, of whom there were many, were volunteers, who had paid their own expenses in expectation of a golden harvest, and they chafed in impatience and disgust. The religious element in the colony-unlike the former Huguenot emigration to Brazil--was evidently subordinate. The adventurers thought more of their fortunes than of their faith.”

YoungReligiousElementsExpectationsPaidFortuneGoldenFormerExpensesDisgustingVolunteerHarvestImpatienceColonySubordinatesBrazilAdventurerEmigration
Book:Pioneers of France in the New World
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“To take the place of emigration, and with the prior approval of the Führer, the evacuation of the Jews to the East has become another possible solution. Although both courses of action emigration and evacuation, must, of course, be considered as nothing more than temporary expedients, they do help to provide practical experience which should be of great importance in view of the coming Endlösung (Final Solution) of the Jewish question.”

ShouldHelpingActionCoursesViewsSolutionsImportanceFinalsJewEastPracticalsTemporaryApprovalEmigrationEvacuationPractical Experience
Author:Reinhard Heydrich
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“Sixty thousand blacks are annually embarked from the coast of Guinea, never to return to their native country; but they are embarked in chains: and this constant emigration, which, in the space of two centuries, might have furnished armies to overrun the globe, accuses the guilt of Europe and the weakness of Africa.”

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Book:The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
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“I live just outside of Salt Lake City in a place called Emigration Canyon. It's on the Mormon trail. So I feel deeply connected, not only because of my Mormon roots, which are five or six generations, but because of where we live. There isn't a day that goes by that I'm not mindful of the spiritual sovereignty that was sought by my people in coming to Utah.”

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Author:Terry Tempest Williams
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“In the olden times, the diversity of groups was largely a geographical matter. There were many societies, but each, within its own territory, was comparatively homogeneous. But with the development of commerce, transportation, intercommunication, and emigration, countries like the United States are composed of a combination of different groups with different traditional customs. It is this situation which has, perhaps more than any other one cause, forced the demand for an educational institution which shall provide something like a homogeneous and balanced environment for the young.”

DifferentCountryMatterStatesYoungCausesUnitedSituationUnited StatesEnvironmentGroupsDevelopmentDemandDiversityInstitutionsEducationalTraditionalCombinationCustomsTerritoryBalancedCommerceTransportationEmigrationHomogeneousEducational InstitutionsOlden Times
Author:John Dewey
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“We have long had emigration in Ireland. But the nature of emigration has changed. With ferries to Britain and the continent, as well as air travel, emigration isn't the cut­off it used to be. In addition, some of our young people are being educated to levels beyond our present capacity to provide the jobs they are qualified to do. So they go abroad. Many want to come back, especially when they have children they would want to be raised in the Irish society and in the Irish educational system.”

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Author:Mary Robinson
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“It is a simple logic truth that, short of mass emigration into space, with rockets taking off at the rate of several million per second, uncontrolled birth-rates are bound to lead to horribly increased death –rates. It is hard to believe that this simple truth is not understood by those leaders who forbid their followers to use effective contraceptive methods. They express a preference for ‘natural’ methods of population limitation, and a natural method is exactly what they are going to get. It is called starvation.”

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Author:Richard Dawkins
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