Primo Levi Quotes

Departure beyond the borders of my country is for me equivalent to death.

If I knew I could never come back to Ireland, to England, I think I'd fall off the tree.

and if the City falls and one survives he shall carry the City within on the roads of exile he shall be the City

I sing 'Beirut' for what the city is for me, but I am also singing as an exile.

I remember reading about the astounding number of people in this country who die within three years of retiring, which proves to me that if you lose the sense that you are producing or contributing in some way, you literally lose the will to live, and that if you do have a reason to hang on, you will.

When you take a tree that is rooted in the ground, and transfer it from one place to another, the tree will no longer bear fruit. And if it does, the fruit will not be as good as it was in its original place. This is a rule of nature. I think if I had left my country, I would be the same as the tree.

How can I turn from Africa and live?

It may be argued that the past is a country from which we have all emigrated, that its loss is part of our common humanity.

I could come back to America..to die..but never, never to live.

Let him go abroad to a distant country; let him go to some place where he is not known. Don't let him go to the devil, where he is known.

I must like my profession, since I can hardly distinguish myself from it.

My homeland is not a suitcase, and I am no traveller

He that hath no good trade, it is to his losse.

To live and die amongst foreigners may seem less absurd than to live persecuted or tortured by one's fellow countrymen.... But toemigrate is always to dismantle the centre of the world, and so to move into a lost, disoriented one of fragments.

The end of exile is the end of being.

The theme of exile is attractive to me, because it's sort of like the family business. Not just music, but travel.

I left Cuba when I was two years old. They took away my country, they stole the most intimate thing a human being can have. How could I forget that Fidel Castro was the person who did me so much harm?

A chef is a chef, a cook is a cook; a lorry driver is a lorry driver and a designer is a designer. I've never heard anyone say that Philippe Starck is a chef. The important thing is dialogue. If I said to Norman Foster that he was a chef he'd say "No", but he might have a dialogue with chefs. People have said to me for many years that I'm not a chef and that I'm an artist instead, but I always say, "No, I'm a chef." I just have dialogues with designers.

I'm a refugee from the past, and like other refugees I go over the customs and habits of being I've left or been forced to leave behind me, and it all seems just as quaint, from here, and I am just as obsessive about it.

Freedom and diversity guard each other, and if a country could form the whole of one's character, Napoleon III and Victor Hugo would have been the same person... if national identity means anything, it means something that comes with you wherever you go, and stays with you no matter how long you stay away.

I see Edward Snowden as someone who has chosen, at best, exile from the country he loves-with a serious risk of his assassination by agents of his government or life in prison (in solitary confinement)-to awaken us to the danger of our loss of democracy to a total-surveilla nce state

I wish I could say farewell and retire but there is nothing for me to retire from.

Our state cannot be severed, we are one, One flesh; to lose thee were to lose myself.

It's quite difficult for me not to be able to return to my country, but in my country justice has been murdered.

America, the country of my heart, my second home.