exile

They miss the whisper that runsany day in your mind,"Who are you really, wanderer?"--and the answer you have to giveno matter how dark and coldthe world around you is:"Maybe I'm a king.

An exile, said Zafar, is a refugee with a library.

Mathematicians still don__ understandthe ball our hands made, or howyour electrocuted grandparents made it possiblefor you to light my cigarettes with your eyes.It isn__ as simple as me climbing into the windowto leave six ounces of orange juiceand a doughnut by the bed, or me becomingthe sand you dug your toes in,on the beach, when you wishedto hide them from the sun and the fixed eyesof strangers, and your breath broke in wavesover my earlobe, splashing through my head, spilling outover the opposite lobe, and my first poemsunder your door in the unshaven light of dawn:Your eyes remind me of a brick wallabout to be hammered by a drunkdriver. I__ that driver. All nightI__e swallowed you in the bar.Once I kissed the scar, stretching its sealedeyelid along your inner arm, driedraining strands of hair, full of pheromones, discoveredall your idiosyncratic passageways, so I__ knowwhere to run when the cops came.Your body is the country I__l never return to.The man in charge of what crosses my mindwill lose fingernails, for not turning youaway at the border. But at this momentwhen sweat tingles from me, andblame is as meaningless as shooting up a cow with milk,I realise my kisses filled the halls of your bodywith smoke, and the lies camelike a season. Most drunks don__ die in accidentsthey orchestrate, and I swalloweda hand grenade that never stops exploding.

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

The price one pays when choosing exile is the loss of all that defines you as an individual. The only thing that makes this immense loss tolerable is the discovery of a self you did not know existed - of a true independence. That is the real gift of America, not its fabled wealth and prosperity.

I would even argue that, for many displaced people, nostalgia is also blended with fear - the fear of uncertainty and of facing the challenges posed by the larger world and the fear of the absence of the clarity and confidence provided by the past. In essence, nostalgia is associated mostly with the experience of a particular type of migrants, namely, exiles.

And I tell her about his description because I want her to know what I now know, which is that the place where the pepper grows is not a place to be afraid of_I tell her: Mama, exile is not always the darkest corner of the earth. Sometimes it is lush and plentiful, sometimes it is full of life_

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__ life, these are no more than efforts meant to overcome the crippling sorrow of estrangement.

The world is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it.

Knight, of course, felt that anyone's willing assistance tainted the whole thing. Either you are hidden or you're not, no middle ground. He wished to be unconditionally alone, exiled to an island of his own creation, an uncontacted tribe of one.

I didn't want to be an immigrant. I was forced to be an immigrant. Alexis de Tocqueville, the French writer, said that the powerful and the happy never go into exile. He was right.

Exile from society allows person to disengage from meaningless activities and develop conscious awareness. A person__ courageous struggle to eliminate the trepidation of social exile produces insights into what it means to be human. We can displace emotional disquiet by living a heightened state of existence. How a person__ resolves the tremendous anxiety and dizziness that impetus comes from contemplating the inevitability of death, human freedom of choice, the moral responsibilities attendant to living in a selected manner, existential isolation, and the possibility of nothingness establishes a governing philosophical framework. A person must not rue ouster from society because release from moral and societal constraints spurs learning and advanced consciousness.

It's the exile's dilemma. The home they yearn for is never the home to which they return. If they return.

From the moment that man believes neither in God nor in immortal life, he becomes 'responsible for everything alive, for everything that, born of suffering, is condemned to suffer from life.' It is he, and he alone, who must discover law and order. Then the time of exile begins, the endless search for justification, the aimless nostalgia, 'the most painful, the most heartbreaking question, that of the heart which asks itself: where can I feel at home?

The city was lovely. There could be no place in the world to which he belonged so completely.That was why he'd always dreamed of leaving, and why he'd always been so afraid to go.

The world you see, nature's greatest and most glorious creation, and the human mind which gazes and wonders at it, and is the most splendid part of it, these are our own everlasting possessions and will remain with us as long as we ourselves remain. So, eager and upright, let us hasten with bold steps wherever circumstances take us, and let us journey through any countries whatever: there can be no place of exile within the world since nothing within the world is alien to men.

I have forsaken her for a place I will never belong, but will always remain under her spell, forever to be, a child of my motherland.

Outcasts, callused from being in exile for too long, learn to thrive on being the hated; the attention and infamy of our actions fuel us to become antiheroes. Too often do we forget: we risk self-destruction if we fail to follow what we know is right; our talents too often become misplaced, misdirected, misguided from what could have been something wonderful.