Nowhere Like Home Quotes

“Choice has turned our society into the kind of place where people get so lost they need to find themselves in countries like this.”
― Jamie Alexander, Nowhere Like Home: Misadventures in a Changing World

“my paradigm of the modern era: greed leads to exploitation, which leads to inequality, and inequality to resentment, hatred, and ultimately war.”
― Jamie Alexander, Nowhere Like Home: Misadventures in a Changing World

“I remember looking at Papua and seeing how colonialism, oppression and what was left of tribalism and the Hindu caste system in Indonesia had made corruption rife throughout the province.”
― Jamie Alexander, Nowhere Like Home: Misadventures in a Changing World

“this choice was often snatched away by desperate governments and greedy multinationals and the reward was not a sanitary life free from hardship and disease, but poverty and cultural erosion.”
― Jamie Alexander, Nowhere Like Home: Misadventures in a Changing World

“I’d long since abandoned any nourishing contentment in favour of the more immediate satisfaction of ever-expanding wealth, only to realise that it was the basic things—sociability, companionship, family—that would make me feel ultimately satisfied.”
― Jamie Alexander, Nowhere Like Home: Misadventures in a Changing World

“veneer of human morality”
― Jamie Alexander, Nowhere Like Home: Misadventures in a Changing World

“As concerned and angered as I was though, after Hebron, I was starting to glimpse the reality of the Israeli-Palestinian issue. As much as anything, it was a conflict fought over emotions and ideas. Not land, not resources. Not even greed or wealth. Just abstract thoughts and immediate passions; tales of injustice and bitter vengeance that separated one man from another, one tribe from another—that turned two groups of fundamentally similar people into an “us” and a “them”.”
― Jamie Alexander, Nowhere Like Home: Misadventures in a Changing World

“I could go through life without even smelling a whiff of this kind of hatred and probably die a happy man, wrapped in a fluffy blanket of social cotton wool.”
― Jamie Alexander, Nowhere Like Home: Misadventures in a Changing World

“Everywhere, the same story: sheltered communities having their livelihoods destroyed by outsiders keen to profit from their lands. People being abused and tossed aside, forced away from the structures, traditions, even religions that once made up their natural lives, into an existence no one could ever want.”
― Jamie Alexander, Nowhere Like Home: Misadventures in a Changing World

“Nobody really knew what it was. That tiny void in their otherwise pristine lives, and nobody knew how best to fill it.”
― Jamie Alexander, Nowhere Like Home: Misadventures in a Changing World

“It puts the jump back in the flatline,”
― Jamie Alexander, Nowhere Like Home: Misadventures in a Changing World

“West Bank can look like a set from Grease, the Musical: young men with slick black hair, wearing skinny jeans and tight sweaters, looking as cool as they do dangerous.”
― Jamie Alexander, Nowhere Like Home: Misadventures in a Changing World

“Her father, in fact, had described the curfews quite openly: “The Israelis lock us up in our homes to kill one or two Palestinians, meanwhile what else is there for us to do but produce many more?” Safa and her mother had found this statement hilarious; being British, I’d felt really awkward.”
― Jamie Alexander, Nowhere Like Home: Misadventures in a Changing World

“that bloody war. How that must have seemed—one of the wealthiest nations in the world, prancing about in a far-off country on the pretext of “liberating the people”, only to plunge them further into poverty and mindless destruction, and then the coincidence that this country had one of the most sought-after commodities in the motorised age.”
― Jamie Alexander, Nowhere Like Home: Misadventures in a Changing World

“few people actually supported the war in Iraq and that not all Westerners were slutty drunkards.”
― Jamie Alexander, Nowhere Like Home: Misadventures in a Changing World

“I remember thinking how the same stereotypes worked in reverse, how the simplistic media in the UK and USA had convinced so many Westerners that all Arabs were either peace-loving hippies who secretly wanted to live in Western-style democracies, or Evil Terrorists who wanted to feast on the blood of the innocent when the moon was full.”
― Jamie Alexander, Nowhere Like Home: Misadventures in a Changing World

“parents, part of the older, more conservative generation, talked for a while, about the immorality of alcohol, the way the British had sold Palestine to the Jews and how Israel controlled America “like a boy on the back of an elephant”, in their words.”
― Jamie Alexander, Nowhere Like Home: Misadventures in a Changing World

“In a predictable Catch-22 situation, the more Jews moved into Palestine from Europe, the more the tide started turning against the Arab Jews who had been living across the Middle East too, despite the fact that these people were traditionally something of a protected minority in Muslim states. Arab nationalism, fuelled by a new anti-Western outlook, spurred the xenophobic violence that caused many Arab Jews to flee their ancient homes and head for the hills of Palestine. For those Jews, gone were the days of barbecued fish on the banks of the Tigris, of watching belly dancers with other Arab friends, as fascist propaganda loaded with anti-imperialist sentiments hit the receptive ears of Muslim and Christian leaders across the Arab world. In 1941, the Farhoud massacre in Bagdad killed around 170 Jewish Arabs, and it wasn’t an isolated event.”
― Jamie Alexander, Nowhere Like Home: Misadventures in a Changing World

“To understand the Arab-Israeli conflict, we need to look into the past in more detail. For Israelis, this past starts many thousands of years ago, back in the days of Moses and Noah and David and Solomon. But more importantly, it branches out to include the history of Europe in the mid-20th century and the rise of global anti-Semitism. For Palestinians, the relevant history is more recent, contained in the years and generations since the British Mandate of Palestine. And yet nowadays, both sides seem to overlook one significant detail: Jews and Muslims once coexisted. It was not always peaceful coexistence, or even coexistence free from discrimination, but coexistence it was.”
― Jamie Alexander, Nowhere Like Home: Misadventures in a Changing World

“I was grumpy because I was bored. And I was bored because I wasn’t travelling.”
― Jamie Alexander, Nowhere Like Home: Misadventures in a Changing World

“To get to El Nido, I had flown from Sorong in Papua to Jakarta, via Sulawesi, then on to Bangkok, taken a train down to Kuala Lumpur, caught another flight to Manila, then one more to Puerto Princesa, where we caught a bus to somewhere near Taytay, from which we had walked to a place where we found a rickshaw to take us all the way to Taytay, and finally hopped on one more bus from Taytay to El Nido. A total journey time of about five days. Now that we had arrived in El Nido, our mission was simple: get out.”
― Jamie Alexander, Nowhere Like Home: Misadventures in a Changing World

“I managed to pick a fish whose coniferous skeleton exacted a reasonable measure of revenge for catching it in the first place, and I didn’t enjoy the meal so much as respect it.”
― Jamie Alexander, Nowhere Like Home: Misadventures in a Changing World

“In short, what Europeans did to the Indonesians, the Indonesians have done, and were still doing, to the Papuans. To paraphrase the words of Paulo Freire, the oppressed are the greatest oppressors.”
― Jamie Alexander, Nowhere Like Home: Misadventures in a Changing World