Abraham Cowley Quotes

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 have no nationality, no country.

And there are new kinds of nomads, not people who are at home everywhere, but who are at home nowhere. I was one of them

I do not have any home. So why should I be homesick?

If you can't go home, there is nowhere to go, and nowhere is the biggest place in the world-indeed, nowhere is the world.

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.

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

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

Once a refugee, always a refugee. I can't ever remember not being all right wherever I was, but you don't give your whole allegiance to a place or want to be entirely identified with the society you're living in.

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

I'm very attracted to exile literature - particularly Nabokov - exactly because the idea of being away from home for any serious length of time is so inconceivable to me.

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.

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.

To be an outlaw you must first have a base in law to reject and get out of, I never had such a base. I never had a place I could call home that meant any more than a key to a house, apartment or hotel room. ... Am I alien? Alien from what exactly? Perhaps my home is my dream city, more real than my waking life precisely because it has no relation to waking life.

I have no protection at home, or resting place abroad. ... I am an outcast from the society of my childhood, and an outlaw in the land of my birth. I am a stranger with thee, and a sojourner as all my fathers were.

Without a home must the soldier go, a changeful wanderer, and can warm himself at no home-lit hearth.

I feel completely detached from any country, any group. I am a metaphysically displaced person

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.

Sometimes I feel very alone. I am a bit of a nomad. Many people in sort of emerging countries, emerging economies, find themselves displaced. So there is that sense, and so I'm part of a whole, I think, group of displaced people.

I don't know what 'home' or 'abroad' is any more.

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.

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

I feel like a visitor just about everywhere.