A Book of Migrations Quotes

“I made my first home there and had been happy, because to be alienated in one's own country, in one's own hometown, among one's kin and peers, was problematic, but nothing could be more natural than to be alienated in a foreign country, and so there I had at last naturalized my estrangement. This may be one of the underappreciated pleasures of travel: of being at last legitimately lost and confused.”
― Rebecca Solnit, A Book of Migrations: Some Passages in Ireland

“Can one understand the presence of English literature without the absences of Irish literature? Are the presences in the former, at some level, bites taken out of the latter? Is England gardenlike because Ireland was prisonlike? Does the English pastoral, and the security and abundance it represents, depend on the impoverished land and people of other lands?”
― Rebecca Solnit, A Book of Migrations

“Imperialism [...] also meant that the conquerors themselves regarded and instructed their imperial subjects to regard the colonized countries as the outskirts rather than the center of the world.”
― Rebecca Solnit, A Book of Migrations: Some Passages in Ireland

“Travel offers the opportunity to find out who else one is, in that collapse of identity into geography I want to trace.”
― Rebecca Solnit, A Book of Migrations: Some Passages in Ireland