Primo Levi Quotes

What greater grief than the loss of one's native land.

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

Do you ever want to go home?' I asked Paul. He brushed an ash from my face. 'It's the century of the displaced person,' he said. 'You can never go home.

Since I've been in the U.S. I've lost the back of my heart, 15 ft. of intestine and my marriage - and God, I miss my intestine.

I don't believe I could live in Iran again. A tree, once uprooted from the earth, is very difficult to plant again.

I wrote a techno song after I was deported. I was in America for a little bit, but then I was deported back to Germany. I was very sad.

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

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

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.

For a man who no longer has a homeland, writing becomes a place to live.

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.

You know, those of us who leave our homes in the morning and expect to find them there when we go back - it's hard for us to understand what the experience of a refugee might be like.

Homeland is something one becomes aware of only through its loss.

I am not with those who abandoned their land.

Most human experience has been that of statelessness.

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.

An exile reads change the way he reads time, memory, self, love, fear, beauty: in the key of loss.

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

Educate yourself, learn about what refugees face when they don't have homes, after they have lost everything.

Refugee today means somebody who has no home. No homeland. No security. No government to protect him or her. And it is of course one feels not only uprooted, one feels useless. One feels always surrounded by hostile forces. Arousing suspicion.

But do you know this idea of the imaginary homeland? Once you set out from shore on your little boat, once you embark, you'll never truly be at home again. What you've left behind exists only in your memory, and your ideal place becomes some strange imaginary concoction of all you've left behind at every stop.

For the whole world, without a native home, Is nothing but a prison of larger room.

I never had a sense of home.