Tom Stoppard Quotes

One of the things that really got to me was talking to parents who had been burned out of their villages, had family members killed, and then when men showed up at the wells to get water, they were shot.

I was born in Budapest, Hungary, and moved to the United States in 1956. It was during the Hungarian Revolution when Russian tanks rolled into Budapest, and my family - me, my brother, and my parents - escaped over the border to Austria. We just took whatever we could carry. It was perilous, but we made it across.

Ours is the century of enforced travel of disappearances. The century of people helplessly seeing others, who were close to them, disappear over the horizon.

I grew up acutely aware of the exile and distance caused by war.

After the outbreak of war, in April 1940, we left Geneva with our three children aged 4 years, 2 years and 2 weeks only to become part of the disordered refugee crowds fleeing across France from the German army.

One man’s exile is but a drop in the sea of human misery

People traverse the dangerous journey to the US because of deep fear. They are often escaping brutality, even life-or-death situations.

While migration is inevitable, the fact remains that most people leave their homes to escape violence and the certain persecution that comes from it.

I left Cambodia when I was 12 or 13. I didn't really escape, but I needed to go away.

When I was 10 years old, I fled my homeland amid the bomb blasts of civil war in Sudan.

Leaving southern Sudan as a child was terrifying. It was 1985, and my family and I were trying to escape to Khartoum, the capital in the North, to safety.

When the war started, we became refugees, and it was a really tough time. I was six years old. These were really hard times. I remember them vividly, but it's not something you want to remember or think about.

On the whole, more men had perhaps escaped into the war than from it.

In Kurdistan, there's a lot of hardship - a lot of wars, a lot of bitter and difficult lifestyles. And witnessing all those made me a director.

But I am Armenian and I understand what it is to lose a country and lose a family and have massacres and genocides and everything against my people.

When I found myself in the U.S., and the war was at full swing in Bosnia, I read for survival - it was a means of thought resuscitation.

When I was six, the Korean War broke out, and all the classrooms were destroyed by war. We studied under the trees or in whatever buildings were left.

When I did 'Bumble-ardy,' I was so intensely aware of death. Eugene, my friend and partner, was dying here in the house when I did 'Bumble-ardy'. I did 'Bumble-ardy' to save myself. I did not want to die with him. I wanted to live, as any human being does.

Exile is like death. You cannot understand it until it happens to you.

My mother was born in Latvia. She and most of her family fled from the capital city of Riga in 1944 with the final approach of the Soviet army.

When men talk about war, the stories and terminology vary - it's this battle, these weapons, this terrain. But no matter where you go in the world, women use the same language to speak of war. They speak of fire, they speak of death, and they speak of starvation.

In the '70s I was in exile; every time I went back I wondered if they'd take my passport away.

War taught me that not everything is glamorous.

Thousand got away to other countries; thousands returned to Spain tempted by false promises of kindness. By the tens of thousands, these Spaniards died of neglect in the concentration camps.

Since the 1960s, exile for Haitians is a condition that ends only to begin again.