Abbas Kiarostami Quotes

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

What any immigrant is after is a taste of home.

Instead of a homeland I hold the metamorphoses of the world.

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

All I ever want is to return to either Bangladesh, my motherland, or India, my adopted home.

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

I'm living in California but I have a place that is mine in Chile and I belong there. I am no longer an exile.

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

I never considered myself as somebody in exile because, different to my father who, yes, was in exile because he left Haiti as an adult, for me it was just to be somewhere else. I carried Haiti with me everywhere, but I also carried, you know, my youth in a public school in Brooklyn. It's part of who I am as well.

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

An adventurer can always return home; an exile cannot. So I decided that my home would be culture.

My birthplace was California, but I couldn't forget Armenia, so what is one's country? Is it land of the earth, in a specific place? Rivers there? Lakes? The sky there? The way the moon comes up there? And the sun? Is one's country the trees, the vineyards, the grass, the birds, the rocks, the hills and summer and winter? Is it the animal rhythm of the living there? The huts and houses, the streets of cities, the tables and chairs, and the drinking of tea and talking? Is it the peach ripening in summer heat on the bough? Is it the dead in the earth there?

James Joyce wrote the definitive work about Dublin while he was living in Switzerland. We're all where we come from. We all have our roots.

Everyone comes back. It makes no difference how far we wander, we always have our country, our land, in our souls and our minds.

It is more than twenty years since we left the city. This is a serious chunk of time, longer than the years we spent living there. Yet we still think of Jerusalem as our home. Not home in the sense of the place that you conduct your daily life or constantly return to. In fact, Jerusalem is our home almost against our wills. It is our home because it defines us, whether we like it or not.

It is a well-known fact that we always recognize our homeland at the moment we are about to lose it.

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

He said it was better to belong where you don't belong than not to belong where you used to belong, remembering when you used to belong there.

I'm interested in people who find themselves in places, either of their choosing or not, and who are forced to decide how best to live there. That feeling of both citizenship and exile, of always being an expatriate - with all the attendant problems and complications and delight.

You carry your country with you, it's part of your baggage.

Europe has been in my bones.

I was eight when I left Sarajevo, so I didn't really know very much about my culture and it was so important for me to go back to my roots and meet the people.

America took me into her bosom when there was no longer a country worthy of the name, but in my heart I am German - German in my soul.

This is my homeland no one can kick me out.