Theodor W. Adorno Quotes

I never felt truly at home in Switzerland.

I come from no country, from no city, no tribe. I am the son of the road... all tongues and all prayers belong to me. But I belong to none of them.

In England I am not English, in India I am not Indian. I am chained to the 1,000 square miles that is Trinidad; but I will evade that fate yet.

I'd always somehow felt slightly as if I'd been born in the wrong country.

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

I belong nowhere and to no one.

I feel like I've never had a home, you know? I feel related to the country, to this country, and yet I don't know exactly where I fit in... There's always this kind of nostalgia for a place, a place where you can reckon with yourself.

I liked the idea of being from 'somewhere else.' I do think that's inherited. My father never had a fixed sense of where home was, and for my sister and me, it is much easier not to belong than to belong.

North Korea is still my homeland, my country. I suffered on the outside because I was alien, without identity. I was nobody. I was in the worst situation, fighting for everything, to survive.

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.

I've never been in a place where I've walked in the street and actually feel home, where I don't feel like a refugee.

Home is a notion that only nations of the homeless fully appreciate and only the uprooted comprehend.

Because I cannot write my native language and have no native home anymore, and am amazed by that horrible homelessness of all French-Canadian s abroad in America.

A man could not always be where he belonged, though.

I don't believe in a sense of home.

The moment you’ve uttered the exact dimensionality of your exile, you’re already turning towards home.

But do you know this idea of the imaginary homeland? Once you set out from shore on your little boat, once you embark, you'll never truly be at home again. What you've left behind exists only in your memory, and your ideal place becomes some strange imaginary concoction of all you've left behind at every stop.

I never had a sense of home.

We make a mistake forsaking England and moving out into the periphery of life. After all, Taormina, Ceylon, Africa, America -- as far as we go, they are only the negation of what we ourselves stand for and are: and we're rather like Jonahs running away from the place we belong.

But I believe above all that I wanted to build the palace of my memory, because my memory is my only homeland.

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.

When I was growing up, I never felt that I belonged anywhere because we never lived in a house for more than three months. That's all I knew, and that's why I don't really belong anywhere.

New York - that unnatural city where every one is an exile, none more so than the American.

I'm stuck somewhere a small island in the middle of the Atlantic where I'm alone. Because in France, they're like, 'No, you're not like us, you're not a French guy.' And in America, they're like, 'You're not like us.' I'm really alone in my little thing.