37 Quotes About Displacement

Everything suddenly seems displaced, subtle gradations erase borders, but it’s more forceful than that.

Distance is the journey. Displacement is the result.

He didn't know what he was anymore – not truly Chinese, for he had spent too long in the West, adopted too many Western ideas, but neither did he feel truly Westernised. There had been times when he had thought himself so, but a glimpse at his reflection quickly showed him the impossibility of such thoughts. No, rather, he felt suspended between two worlds, never to truly belong to either. The Yellow Papers

A few moments into the ride, I saw Reynaldo's figure down the road, walking erectly, holding something. Seeing him there, amid the banana trees and huts and roadside stands with petrol in Coke bottles, I felt a distinct envy: he belonged here, in this place. He strode with a correctness and security I knew I would never feel in this country. Which was fine. Displacement, it was a valid way to live.

The things I was good at had no real application: addressing envelopes in bubble letters with smiling creatures on the flap. Making sludgy coffee I drank with grave affect. Finding a certain desired song playing on the radio, like a medium scanning for news of the dead.

We have become a place of long weepingA house of scattered feathersThere is no home for us between earth and sky.—From Collected Lamentations from the Night of Knives

But home is 6617 miles away; a burning building. A sinking ship. A dying thing.

The Turks, themselves defeated in the Great War, treated the Russians surprisingly well and smiled acceptingly when their uninvited guests would rest on the stairs of mosques. They would even allow the Russians to enter the Hagia Sophia, which before the Ottoman conquest of 1453 had been the major cathedral of Eastern Christianity. Greeks and Armenians, old foes of the Turks, were still banned from this enormous mosque.

The fish,Even in the fisherman's net,Still carries,The smell of the sea.