Taslima Nasrin Quotes

In America, we all come from somewhere else, and we carry along some dream myth of home: a notion that something - our point of origin, our roots, the home country - is out there.

I'm living in California but I have a place that is mine in Chile and I belong there. I am no longer an exile.

What any immigrant is after is a taste of home.

When I first left Iran at the age of 13, Iran had become such a shining star - it was the point to which all my desires and dreams returned.

I sing 'Beirut' for what the city is for me, but I am also singing as an exile.

In the poetry of immigrants, nostalgia is as common as confetti at parades or platitudes at political conventions.

What greater grief than the loss of one's native land.

I'm interested in people who find themselves in places, either of their choosing or not, and who are forced to decide how best to live there. That feeling of both citizenship and exile, of always being an expatriate - with all the attendant problems and complications and delight.

I don't believe I could live in Iran again. A tree, once uprooted from the earth, is very difficult to plant again.

I have two homes, like someone who leaves their hometown and/or parents and then establishes a life elsewhere. They might say that they're going home when they return to see old friends or parents, but then they go home as well when they go to where they live now. Sarajevo is home, Chicago is home.

During my youth, the idea of moving from Lebanon was unthinkable. Then I began to realise I might have to go, like my grandfather, uncles and others who left for America, Egypt, Australia, Cuba.

If I knew I could never come back to Ireland, to England, I think I'd fall off the tree.

I was born in Peru, and we moved to Scotland when I was 15, but I've not lived here for a long time. But I would always say that I am Scottish, and Scotland is as close to a home as I have.

One of my clearest impressions about India as a child was that my parents' stories would have been impossible had they stayed. Of course, such a vision was self-serving, for it made a virtue of our displacement.

Language, identity, place, home: these are all of a piece - just different elements of belonging and not-belonging.

It's strange coming back to Northern Ireland, but it feels like a home away from home.

It's possible that Israel will be my second home, but it won't be my only home.

On the flight over to the Gulf of Mexico, I wondered about how they say you can never go home again, but maybe an equally expensive reality is how many people, regardless of how many years or miles they put between themselves and where they were born, are never truly able to leave home.

I never seem to leave L.A., though I left L.A.

I've lived in Texas now longer than anywhere and then California and then Oklahoma, but yet Oklahoma is what I consider home.

I never considered myself as somebody in exile because, different to my father who, yes, was in exile because he left Haiti as an adult, for me it was just to be somewhere else. I carried Haiti with me everywhere, but I also carried, you know, my youth in a public school in Brooklyn. It's part of who I am as well.

I was born in England, but India is the only place I feel at home.

All exiles carry a map within them that points the way homeward.

Everyone comes back. It makes no difference how far we wander, we always have our country, our land, in our souls and our minds.

Uprootedness uproots everything except the need for roots.