Migration Quotes

“exile is strangely compelling to think about but terrible to experience. It is the unhealable rift forced between a human being and a native place, between the self and its true home: its essential sadness can never be surmounted. And while it is true that literature and history contain heroic, romantic, glorious, even triumphant episodes in an exile’s life, these are no more than efforts meant to overcome the crippling sorrow of estrangement.”
― Edward W. Said, Reflections on Exile and Other Essays

“أليس من الأفضل أن نهاجر بدلاً من أن نتزوج؟
فالزواج هجرة داخلية”
― نجيب محفوظ, الحب تحت المطر

“Exile is a dream of a glorious return. Exile is a vision of revolution: Elba, not St Helena. It is an endless paradox: looking forward by always looking back. The exile is a ball hurled high into the air. ”
― Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses

“When this flood blocks the road
I am worried more
by my soil getting washed,
than by getting late
to reach my destination.”
― Suman Pokhrel

“Let him who has not a single speck of migration to blot his family escutcheon cast the first stone...if you didn't migrate then your father did, and if your father didn't need to move from place to place, then it was only because your grandfather before him had no choice but to go, put his old life behind him in search of the bread that his own land denied him...”
― José Saramago, The Notebook

“The past was like a bad dream; the future was all happy holiday as I moved Southwards week by week, easily, lazily, lingering as long as I dared, but always heeding the call!”
― Kenneth Grahame, The Wind in the Willows

“mingling with the remains of the plane, equally fragmented, equally absurd, there floated the debris of the soul, broken memories, sloughed-off selves, severed mother tongues, violated privacies, untranslatable jokes, extinguished futures, lost loves, the forgotten meaning of hollow, booming words, land, belonging, home.”
― Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses

“The news in those days was full of war and migrants and nativists, and it was full of fracturing too, of regions pulling away from nations, and cities pulling away from hinterlands, and it seemed that as everyone was coming together everyone was also moving apart. Without borders nations appeared to be becoming somewhat illusory, and people were questioning what role they had to play.”
― Mohsin Hamid, Exit West

“ब्याह औरतों से आँगन छीनता है और व्यापार मर्दों से गाँव.”
― Satya Vyas, Chaurasi/चौरासी/84

“Isn't content also context? I ask him. Your experiences, your circumstances, the time you live in? Consciousness isn't free-floating; it's enmeshed.

That is true, he says, but you know, I believe that the modern diaspora--that so many of us find ourselves somewhere else, migrants of some kind--global, multicultural, less rooted, less dependent on our immediate history of family or country to shape ourselves--all of that is preparing us for a looser and freer understanding of ourselves as content whose context can change.

Nationalism is on the rise, I say.

He nods. That's a throwback. A fear. A refusal of the future. But the future cannot be refused.”
― Jeanette Winterson, Frankissstein: A Love Story

“Before you ask other people to respect the borders of the West, ask yourself if the West has ever respected anybody else's border.”
― Suketu Mehta, This Land Is Our Land: An Immigrant’s Manifesto

“I didn't know where it would lead. I wanted things to develop naturally.”
― Earl Lovelace

“A new remote and unfamiliar place can make the prior remote and unfamiliar place seem like home.”
― Jennifer Egan, The Candy House

“More broadly, it is vital for leaders to work across international boundaries to minimize the number of people who feel the need to leave their home countries in the first place. That requires building healthy democracies, fostering peace, and generating prosperity from the ground up. However, success in that endeavor demands a way of looking at the world that recognizes the humanity we share with one another, and the interests that nations have in common. Those who are content to look inward, and who see no higher purpose than to shield themselves from the different, the new, and the unknown, will be of no help.”
― Madeleine K. Albright, Fascism: A Warning

“I look through the window at the huge valley lit up with different colors. The town is cradled by the dark mountains. From afar it looks as if nothing can get in or out, but judging by the stillness of the view it's as if the citizens have made peace with it and have settled without worry into their insular but protected haven each evening. There are people in the world, I imagine, who are born and die in the same town, maybe even in the same house, or bed. Creatures without migration: have they not lived a life because they have not moved? What of the migratory los González, moving from one place to another and marking every stopping place with angst? What kind of alternative is that? For once my father and I are thinking thinking the same way, sharing a similar yearning for our starting points to have been different, for our final destination to be anything other than the tearful, resentful arrival it is likely to be.”
― Rigoberto Gonzalez, Butterfly Boy: Memories of a Chicano Mariposa

“The choice is not between the current crisis and blissful isolation. The choice is between the current crisis and an orderly, managed system of mass migration. You can have one or the other. There is no easy middle ground”
― Patrick Kingsley, The New Odyssey: The Story of Europe's Refugee Crisis

“One day, my sister said, Bri, who is really good with machines and tech, is going to invent a technology that eats all the data that exists about people online so people can be free of being made to be what data says they are.

I am? I said.

Yeah, and then you're going to invent a technology that means you can stop surveillance following people who are travelling from one place to another, because that surveillance isn't anything to do with the real journeys people have to make in the world. And we're going to call that technology Campervan.

Yep, I said. And we'll call the tech that eats all the saved data Colon.

Colon and Campervan, my sister said. They're the future. We're the future. It is this simple.”
― Ali Smith, Gliff

“Some historians, in fact, suggest Hartford recruiters may have pioneered strategies that spurred the great migration of Southern rural blacks to Northern cities.”
― Susan Eaton, The Children in Room E4: American Education on Trial

“Then I walked down the Cours Belsunce. The nets were stretched out to dry. A couple of women mending them looked quite lost in the huge square. I had never seen them doing this before. I'm sure that I haven't seen most of the really important things that happen in this city. To see the things that matter, you have to feel that you want to stay. Cities shroud themselves from those who're just passing through. I picked my way carefully among the nets. The first stores were just opening, and the first newspaper boys were yelling the headlines.

The newspaper boys, the fishermen's wives on the Belsunce, the shopkeepers opening their stores, the workers going to work the early shift - they were all part of the masses who would never leave no matter what happened. The thought of leaving this place was as unlikely to occur to them as to a tree or a clump of grass.”
― Anna Seghers, Transit

“Without knowing El Paso, we do not know our nation. We do not understand that there is no invasion of Texas or of the United States by Mexicans, Hispanics, or "others." Mexican and Mexican American culture and history have always been a part of who we are as Americans because the United States was formed on land that was Native before it was Spanish, and Spanish before it was Mexican, and Mexican before it was American.”
― Jazmine Ulloa, El Paso: Five Families and One Hundred Years of Blood, Migration, Race, and Memory

“To me, migration means movement. While I was painting, I thought about trains and people walking to the stations. I thought about field hands leaving their farms to become factory workers, and about the families that sometimes got left behind. The choices made were hard ones, so I wanted to show what made the people get on those northbound trains. I also wanted to show just what it cost to ride them. Uprooting yourself from one way of life to make your way in another involves conflict and struggle. But out of the struggle comes a kind of power, and even beauty. I tried to convey this in the rhythm of the pictures, and in the repetition of certain images.

"And the migrants kept coming" is a refrain of triumph over adversity. My family and others left the South on a quest for freedom, justice, and dignity. If our story rings true for you today, then it must still strike a chord in our American experience.”
― Jacob Lawrence, The Great Migration: An American Story

“Immigration is an attempt to
bloom and blossom
and brighten a new place
with the colors and scents
you've brought with you.
It is an attempt to remember
where you are from, and the place that made you,
and also unfurl to the possibilities
of the new place you call home.”
― Elizabeth Acevedo, Woke: A Young Poet's Call to Justice

“I walk with sand in my shoes.”
― Squally Throwinka, THE HARMATTAN ORACLE

“Why can passports
no longer answer
for who we are?”

— The Geography of Your Absence
from The Gathering of Solitude”
― Nasrina Rezaei, The Gathering of Solitude: A Collection of Poems

“A bridge is not built to choose between two banks. It is built so no one has to.”
― Neil Banerjee, What the Gate First Knew

“Is my husband
really waiting for me? This distance

has grown dangerous.”
― Zilka Joseph, In Our Beautiful Bones

“You think, how shocked
you once were that food could be made
into craft as people in your old
country and war zones starved. But

now you can shrug, take the chuck
roast out of the oven, watch
survivors crossing borders
caught on video, under constant fire,
scaling razor fences, ladders
to freedom.”
― Zilka Joseph, In Our Beautiful Bones

“According to Historian John Hope Franklin, Negro colonization seemed as important to Lincoln as emancipation. In 1862, Franklin notes, Lincoln called a group of prominent free Negroes to the White House and urged them to support colonization, telling them: “Your race suffers greatly, many of them by living among us, while ours suffers from your presence. If this is admitted, it affords a reason why we should be separated.”

In spite of his unquestioned greatness, Abraham Lincoln was a man of his times and limited by some of the less worthy thinking of his times. This is demonstrated both by his reliance upon the concept of race in his analysis of the American dilemma and by his involvement in a plan of purging the nation of blacks as a means of healing the badly shattered ideals of democratic federalism. Although benign, his motive was no less a product of fantasy. It envisaged an attempt to relieve an inevitable suffering that marked the growing pains of the youthful body politic by an operation which would have amounted to the severing of a healthy and indispensable member.”
― Ralph Ellison

“Rearrangement followed by rearrangement is the norm. That is how species survive climate change. They move around. This is true even of species that are today confined to shrinking distributions in isolated mountains. They have survived because they have been able to move, even if that has only been up and down the same mountain. The greatest risk they face in the future is the possibility that they may not be able to move again.”
― Chris D. Thomas, Inheritors of the Earth: How Nature Is Thriving in an Age of Extinction

“Life had not paused while you were gone. It had rearranged itself around your absence. By the time you stay long enough to see it all together, you begin to understand that you are standing between two versions of home. The one that continued without you, and the one that grew within you.”
― Ensieh Khosroshahi, Cultural Quiet Signals: The Unspoken Language of Human Behavior