Aharon Appelfeld Quotes

Sometimes I wonder where I am from. I am either way ahead or I come from another world. I don't recognise this world.

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

I stand on the end platform of the tram and am completely unsure of my footing in this world, in this town, in my family. Not even casually could I indicate any claims that I might rightly advance in any direction. I have not even any defense to offer for standing on this platform, holding on to this strap, letting myself be carried along by this tram, nor for the people who give way to the tram or walk quietly along or stand gazing into shop windows. Nobody asks me to put up a defense, indeed, but that is irrelevant.

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

The first thing I remember about the world and I pray that it may be the last is that I was a stranger in it. This feeling, which everyone has in some degree, and which is, at once, the glory and desolation of homo sapiens , provides the only thread of consistency that I can detect in my life.

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

It is about this very abstract sense of displacement that he feels the moment he turns off the television.

Just having the pain of being alive without anything else, whether it's good or bad. There's a lot of serious songs on the record, you know. That song is just about feeling like a fish out of water, feeling like you don't belong on the planet sometimes.

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.

I've always been an outsider; a displaced person.

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

Most of my films seem to be about people bewildered by the world around them, who don't fit into it and are trying to understand it.

I belong nowhere and to no one.

I'm a misplaced American, but don't know where I was misplaced.

I don't really feel like I belong anywhere.

In Mumbai, I feel like a stranger.

Sometimes I'm not into being a human.

I don't associate myself with anything. I don't associate myself with where I'm from or where I am.

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 am in truth the Steppenwolf that I often call myself; that beast astray that finds neither home nor joy nor nourishment in a world that is strange and incomprehensible to him.

More and more I feel like a letter—deposited here, collected there. But a letter addressed to no one.

For as long as he could remember, he’d suffered from a vague nagging feeling of being not all there.

When I was younger I felt lonely... In terms of my thought processes. I had the constant feeling that I thought differently to everyone around me. So, I suppose I felt lonely for a home. I didn't know where I wanted to be, but I knew I wasn't there yet.

Americans love to pick up, move on, start over. But instead of being somebody fresh and new, they become somebody lonely and lost, or, far too often these days, they become nobody at all, a machine for satisfying hunger, without loyalty or honor or duty.