Rainer Maria Rilke Quotes

Freedom so often means that one isn't needed anywhere. Here you are an individual, you have a background of your own, you would be missed. But off there in the cities there are thousands of rolling stones like me. We are all alike; we have no ties, we know nobody, we own nothing.

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

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

I don't belong on this earth. I always feel out of place - like a visitor.

L.A. really doesn't feel like home to me anymore.

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

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

I had never had a deep sense of belonging anywhere. I always felt I was an outsider.

I belong nowhere and to no one.

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

I am realising this now more as I grow up: that I never really felt connected to locations. In some sense, I always kind of felt a little lost in that I never had any hometown pride. While I experience a lot different places and experiences, I always felt a little detached.

I've very aware of my rootlessness.

I moved schools seven or eight times, but I never thought of it as a problem. I didn't become attached to people.

I am truly a "lone traveler" and have never belonged to my country, my home, my friends, or even my immediate family, with my whole heart.

All dash to and fro in motor cars. Familiar with the roads and settled nowhere.

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.

If I had my wilderness, nature could be my lover. What can I do in the paved streets for my thirsty roots? I waste time. I encourage fools. I slip the vital hours into penny slot machines -- to pass time, to start my stuck wheels only love can oil.

There are all these people here I don't know by sight or by name. And we pass alongside each other and don't have any connection. And they don't know me and I don't know them. And now I'm leaving town and there are all these people I will never know.

I do desire we may be better strangers.

Exile is terrible to those who have, as it were, a circumscribed habitation; but not to those who look upon the whole globe but as one city.

I felt as if I was the only person awake in a city of sleepwalkers. That's an illusion, of course. When you walk through a crowd of strangers it's next door to impossible not to imagine that they're all waxworks, but probably they're thinking just the same about you.

Traveling carries with it the curse of being at home everywhere and yet nowhere, for wherever one is some part of oneself remains on another continent.