Lawrence Ferlinghetti Quotes

Exile is my power.

No one in this country has any root anywhere; we don't live in America, we board here, we are like spiders that run over the surface of the water.

Stranger in a strange country.

I not only lived physically away from my native land, but the values and critical judgments of those closest to me became stranger and stranger.

Exile is not a time frame. Exile is an experience. It's a sentiment.

I have to live within my memories, within my private universe, and continually return to China, the land where my thoughts are locked. This is a very painful kind of existence, this feeling of nowhereness.

I've always been an outsider. Even in London. If I returned to Scotland, I'd feel a complete foreigner.

Exile is more than a geographical concept. You can be an exile in your homeland, in your own house, in a room.

Being sent away to school was no different from my biological mother giving me away.

When I was 18, I left Dublin and moved to Paris. I didn't speak French. I didn't know anyone. I felt like a fish out of water.

Lots of times you can feel as an exile in a country that you were born in.

The hardest thing about being at Sony was not the travel; it was being divorced from the public and private life I had in New York. Travelling as much as I did, while I didn't lose connection with my friends, I lost a sense of belonging.

I had crossed the line. I was free; but there was no one to welcome me to the land of freedom. I was a stranger in a strange land.

I desire to know wherefore why I am banished.

I came to Washington where I knew I would be farther away from America than I could be on some foreign shore.

In South Africa, I feel I am a stranger, at best an animal.

I never felt truly at home in Switzerland.

I am thrice homeless, as a native of Bohemia in Austria, as an Austrian among Germans, and as a Jew throughout the world. Everywhere an intruder, never welcomed.

I don't feel that I belong anywhere. Or rather, if there's a place I belong, I don't feel I'm there.

Here in Canada, I haven't people, I haven't family, I haven't friends. So I'm not happy here.

'Deracine' is French for uprooting, or someone who's been displaced from their natural environment.

We moved around a lot when I was younger. I never really felt at home until we moved to Canada, but even then, I always felt strangely out of place and alien.

Now I am an outcast. I loathe my country. The best thing for me is a drunken sleep on the beach.

If there is anything good about exile, it is that it teaches one humility. It accelerates one’s drift into isolation, an absolute perspective. Into the condition at which all one is left with is oneself and one’s language, with nobody or nothing in between. Exile brings you overnight where it would normally take a lifetime to go.

Exile, for no other motive than ease, would be the last defeat, with no seed of future victory in it.