Quotes about Exile

I have fled my country and gone to the heather.

It is strange how custom can mould our tastes and ideas: many could not imagine the existence of happiness in a life of such complete exile from the world as you spend

I must be exiled; but is there anything to keep me from going with a smile, calm and self-composed?

The most remarkable observation one can make about this interface of exilic circumstance and scriptural resource is this: Exile did not lead Jews in the Old Testament to abandon faith or to settle for abdicating despair, nor to retreat to privatistic religion. On the contrary, exile evoked the most brilliant literature and the most daring theological articulation in the Old Testament.

the threat of life, so palpable among us, is a threat that can and will be countered by the Creator who continues the work of governance, order, and sustenance. Creation faith is the summons and invitation to trust the Subject of these verbs, even in the face of day-to-day, palpable incursions of chaos. The testimony of Israel pushes toward a verdict that the One embedded in these doxological statements can be trusted in the midst of any chaos, even that of exile and finally that of death.

Where there is no speech we must live in despair. And exile is first of all where our speech has been silenced and God's speech has been banished. But the prophetic poet asserts hope precisely in exile.

Powerful societies do not silence their poietai in order that they may go to war; they go to war as a way of silencing their poietai. Original thinkers can be suppressed through execution and exile, or they can be encouraged through subsidy and flattery to praise the society's heroes. Alexander and Napoleon took their poets and their scholars into battle with them, saving themselves the nuisance of repression and along the way drawing ever larger audiences to their triumph.

We live in an era where masses of people come and go across a hostile planet, desolate and violent. Refugees, emigrants, exiles, deportees. We are a tragic contingent.