Homeland Leaving Quotes

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God is not an employer looking for employees. He is an Eagle looking for people who will take refuge under his wings. He is looking for people who will leave father and mother and homeland or anything else that may hold them back from a life of love under the wings of Jesus.
John Piper (A Sweet and Bitter Providence: Sex, Race, and the Sovereignty of God)
The homeland does not leave the body until the last moment, the moment of death. The fish, Even in the fisherman's net, Still carries The smell of the sea.
Mourid Barghouti (رأيت رام الله)
ORESTES: Never shall I see you again. ELECTRA: Nor I see myself in your eyes. ORESTES: This, the last time I'll talk with you ever. ELECTRA: O my homeland, goodbye. Goodbye to you, women of home. ORESTES: Most loyal of sisters, do you leave now? ELECTRA: I leave with tears blurring all that I see.
Euripides (Electra)
It is the narrow, hidden tracks that lead back to our lost homeland, what contains the solution to the last mysteries is not the ugly scar that life's rasp leaves on us, but the fine, almost invisible writing that is engraved on our body.
Gustav Meyrink (The Golem)
...We leave our homeland, our property and our friends. We give up the familiar ground that supports our ego, admit the helplessness of ego to control its world and secure itself. We give up our clingings to superiority and self-preservation...It means giving up searching for a home, becoming a refugee, a lonely person who must depend on himself...Fundamentally, no one can help us. If we seek to relieve our loneliness, we will be distracted from the path. Instead, we must make a relationship with loneliness until it becomes aloneness.
Chögyam Trungpa (The Myth of Freedom and the Way of Meditation)
The Americans won't win. They're not fighting for their homeland. They just want to be good. In order to be good, they just have to fight awhile and then leave.
Denis Johnson (Tree of Smoke)
It is, therefore, a great source of virtue for the practiced mind to learn, bit by bit, first to change about in visible and transitory things, so that afterwards it may be possible to leave them behind altogether. The man who finds his homeland sweet is still a tender beginner; he to whom every soil is as his native one is already strong; but he is perfect to whom the entire world is as a foreign land. The tender soul has fixed his love on one spot in the world; the strong man has extended his love to all places; the perfect man has extinguished his. From boyhood I have dwelt on foreign soil and I know with what grief sometimes the mind takes leave of the narrow hearth of a peasant's hut, and I know too how frankly it afterwards disdains marble firesides and panelled halls.
Hugh of Saint-Victor (The Didascalicon of Hugh of Saint Victor: A Medieval Guide to the Arts)
Just as I can't see a clear brook without at least stopping to dangle my feet in it, I can't see a meadow in May and simply pass by. There is nothing more seductive then such fragrant earth, the blossoms of clover swaying above it like a light foam, and the petal-bedecked branches of the fruit trees reaching upward, as if they wanted to rescue themselves from this tranquil sea. No, I have to turn from my path and immerse myself in this richness . . . When I turn my head, my cheek grazes the rough trunk of the apple tree next to me. How protectively it spreads its good branches over me. Without ceasing the sap rises from its roots, nuturing even the smallest of leaves. Do I hear, perhaps, a secret heartbeat? I press my face against its dark, warm bark and think to myself: homeland, and am so indescribably happy in this instant.
Sophie Scholl
Our homeland in the language we spoke, thought, and wrote in, not the place where we were born. We live in the space of our language, and to expand it, it's not enough to just leave; we need to start thinking in other languages.
Dmitry Berkut (Clochard)
Maybe it is all rotten, but if the good ones leave, who's there to make it better after the war? I know why you have to leave, Ninochka. It's leave or nothing. But I can't give up my homeland and my oath for love. That's the kind of thing that makes men say little princesses have no place at the front.
Kate Quinn (The Huntress)
The Shah stayed on the throne until 1979, when he fled Iran to escape the Islamic revolution. Since then, this old and great civilization has been discussed mostly in connection with fundamentalism, fanaticism, and terrorism. As an Iranian who has lived more than half of my life in Iran, I know that this image is far from the truth. This is why writing "Persepolis" was so important to me. I believe that an entire nation should not be judged by the wrongdoings of a few extremists. I also don't want those Iranians who lost their lives in prisons defending freedom, who died in the war against Iraq, who suffered under various repressive regimes, or who were forced to leave their families and flee their homeland to be forgotten. One can forgive but one should never forget.
Marjane Satrapi (The Complete Persepolis)
What place is this,” Drizzt asked the cat quietly, “that I call home? These are my people, by skin and by heritage, but I am no kin to them. They are lost and ever will be. “How many others are like me, I wonder?” Drizzt whispered, taking one final look. “Doomed souls, as was Zaknafein, poor Zak. I do this for him, Guenhwyvar; I leave as he could not, His life has been my lesion, a dark scroll etched by the heavy price exacted by Matron Malice’s evil promises. “Goodbye, Zack!” he cried, his voice rising in final defiance. “My father. Take heart, as do I, that when we meet again, in a life after this, it will surely not be in the hellfire our kin are doomed to endure.
R.A. Salvatore (Homeland (Forgotten Realms: The Dark Elf Trilogy, #1; Legend of Drizzt, #1))
That´s right. Only a name. A name given to us by circumstances beyond our control. Now we have to reclaim it. [...] "We are still humans", I say. "We are not only refugees. We are like everyone in the world. We can do something, achieve something. We didn´t choose to leave our homelands. We didn´t choose the name refugee. [...]
Yusra Mardini (Butterfly: From Refugee to Olympian, My Story of Rescue, Hope and Triumph)
an old man with no destiny with our never knowing who he was, or what he was like, or even if he was only a figment of the imagination, a comic tyrant who never knew where the reverse side was and where the right of this life which we loved with an insatiable passion that you never dared even to imagine out of the fear of knowing what we knew only too well that it was arduous and ephemeral but there wasn't any other, general, because we knew who we were while he was left never knowing it forever with the soft whistle of his rupture of a dead old man cut off at the roots by the slash of death, flying through the dark sound of the last frozen leaves of his autumn toward the homeland of shadows of the truth of oblivion, clinging to his fear of the rotting cloth of death's hooded cassock and alien to the clamor of the frantic crowds who took to the streets singing hymns of joy at the jubilant news of his death and alien forevermore to the music of liberation and the rockets of jubilation and the bells of glory that announced to the world the good news that the uncountable time of eternity had come to an end.
Gabriel García Márquez (The Autumn of the Patriarch)
It would be the simplest thing to say, my homeland is where I was born. But when you returned, you found nothing. What does that mean? It would be the simplest thing to say, my homeland is where I will die. But you could die anywhere, or on the border between two places. What does that mean? After a while the question will become harder. Why did you leave? Why did you leave? For twenty years you have been asking, why did they leave? Leaving is not a negation of the homeland, but it does turn the problem into a question. Do not write a history now. When you do that, you leave the past behind, and what is required is to call the past to account. Do not write a history except that of your wounds. Do not write a history except that of your exile. You are here - here, where you were born. And where longing will lead you to death. So, what is homeland?
Mahmoud Darwish (يوميات الحزن العادي)
For what is life but a succession of change; of one thing after another; painful beginnings, fearful setting out into the unknown, leaving what we are for what we have not yet become. We sail forth boldly, keeping a steady keel and a keen eye on the horizon, to reach islands, land whose fragrance we sniff at at the edge of our dreams; and so we sail on, hoping that the next landfall will be our own bit of earth.
Suchen Christine Lim (A Bit of Earth)
Converts leave something of themselves behind when they leave their homeland. Yahweh is not the King of Moab. He’s the King of Israel. Some things still live inside converts that can come back to life, should they re-embrace their former culture. Michael Ben Zehabe, Ruth: a woman’s guide to husband material, pg 30
Michael Ben Zehabe (Ruth: A Woman's Guide to Husband Material)
I see coming back to my village as significant, thanks to my privilege of being able to leave. But also because I can simultaneously cherry-pick my favourite aspects of my culture for anecdotes back home and social media, and keep the private, painful reflective ones for myself. This is what so many second-and-third generation immigrants experience visiting their homeland. We fine-tune the ability to find the nuances funny, deflecting the crushing weight of displacement and diaspora drama that becomes part of our everyday.
Nikesh Shukla (The Good Immigrant)
I’m used to doing things my way, and Aidan is set in his medieval ways.” “What’s medieval?” Joshua wanted to know. “Ask Aidan. He’s good with answers,” she replied resentfully. “Medieval refers to the days of knight and ladies, Joshua. Alexandria thinks I would have made a great knight. They were men who served their homeland with honor and always recued and took care of their fair maidens.” Aidan drained the contents of a third glass of ruby liquid. “A fitting description, and quite a compliment. Thank you, Alexandria.” Stefan coughed behind his hand, and Marie hastily turned to look out the window. Alexandria found a reluctant smile curving her soft mouth. “That’s not all I could call you, but for now, we’ll leave it at medieval.
Christine Feehan (Dark Gold (Dark, #3))
I think," says Professor Carl Hermann, who never left his homeland, "that even now the outside world does not realize how surprised we non-Nazis were in 1933. When mass dictatorship occurred in Russia, then in Italy, we said to one another, 'That is what happens in backward countries. We are fortunate, for all our troubles, that it cannot happen here.' But it did, worse even than elsewhere, and I think that all the explanations leave some mystery. When I think of it at all, I still say, with unbelief, 'Germany—no, not Germany.
Milton Sanford Mayer (They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933–45)
People don’t leave their homeland simply because governments stage events. One’s native land is not like the soil we put in flowerpots, where we pour water and fertilizer and then change the soil after an interval.
Taslima Nasrin (Lajja)
For Russian Jews, Zionism was an immediate solution to age-old problems. “Anywhere is better than Russia,” Karl agreed, “but for Western Jews, Zionism is a trap, I think. Once Jews are permitted a territorial center, it will be too easy to drive the rest of us from every other nation on Earth. ‘Go back where you belong!’ ” he cried dismissively, jerking his thumb toward Palestine. “ ‘Oh, by the way, leave all your possessions behind.’ ” ... But I have no need of some artificial homeland invented by the British. I am not a German Jew, Agnes, but a Jewish German.
Mary Doria Russell (Dreamers of the Day)
how to live away from places and people I love. Joseph Brodsky was right. So were Nabokov and Conrad. They were artists who never returned. Each had tried, in his own way, to cure himself of his country. What you have left behind has dissolved. Return and you will face the absence or the defacement of what you treasured. But Dmitri Shostakovich and Boris Pasternak and Naguib Mahfouz were also right: never leave the homeland. Leave and your connections to the source will be severed. You will be like a dead trunk, hard and hollow. What do you do when you cannot leave and cannot return?
Hisham Matar (The Return: Fathers, Sons and the Land in Between)
We can't all leave this country, Bijan had told me-this is our home. The world is a large place, my magician had said when I went to him with my woes. You can write and teach wherever you are. You will be read more and heard better, in fact, once you are over there. To go or not to go? In the long run, it's all very personal, my magician reasoned. I always admired your former colleague's honesty, he said. Which former colleague? Dr. A, the one who said his only reason for leaving was because he liked to drink beer freely. I am getting sick of people who cloak their personal flaws and desires in the guise of patriotic fervor. They stay because they have no means of living anywhere else, because if they leave, they won't be the big shots they are over here; but they talk about sacrifice for the homeland. And then those who do leave claim they've gone in order to criticize and expose the regime. Why all these justifications?
Azar Nafisi (Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books)
Contemplating integrity as a way of life is like deciding to leave your homeland and become a citizen of a new country: it involves a major identity
Martha Beck (The Way of Integrity: Finding the Path to Your True Self)
Like the yaks that never leave their Himalayan homeland, wolves stay in the forest, the feral forest. People who became dogs only remember the forest they left when they are castrated and discarded. I should head for the forest, into the scent of wild grass. … There, I will rise when the sun rises, fall asleep when the sun sets, and gaze at the dewdrops forming and evaporating very slowly.
Alexandria Ryu (Ink Garden: Poems)
when a Native group is forced out of its homeland, the people sometimes forget their stories. History itself is lost. “What’s worse, they leave behind the places where their dead are buried – their mothers and fathers.
Felix Blackwell (Stolen Tongues)
Another one, popular with inhabitants of northern Europe, invokes the supposed stimulatory effects of their homeland’s cold climate and the inhibitory effects of hot, humid, tropical climates on human creativity and energy. Perhaps the seasonally variable climate at high latitudes poses more diverse challenges than does a seasonally constant tropical climate. Perhaps cold climates require one to be more technologically inventive to survive, because one must build a warm home and make warm clothing, whereas one can survive in the tropics with simpler housing and no clothing. Or the argument can be reversed to reach the same conclusion: the long winters at high latitudes leave people with much time in which to sit indoors and invent.
Jared Diamond (Guns, Germs, and Steel)
Jack sprung to his feet out of reach. "I'd prefer to finish this intact. " "My apologies,” Cabal said, grinning viciously. "l keep forgetting, you're only human." His smile softened to full amusement as Jack raised his sword in challenge. "Human or not," Jack said as he slowly approached him. "I carry the advantage of unworldly knowledge. " " Is that what you're doing?" Cabal laughed; "Something unworldly?" "I have a vast library of knowledge inside my head from my homeland." "What knowledge could your world offer that would be useful here?" "How about a toilet?" Jack winked at Nicole. “Perhaps you should build one and leave us all in awe.” Cabal declared. “People could call them ‘Jacks’ for short.” Nicole added to the conversation.
Alaina Stanford (When Magic Fails (Hypnotic Journey #2))
When I close my eyes to see, to hear, to smell, to touch a country I have known, I feel my body shake and fill with joy as if a beloved person had come near me. A rabbi was once asked the following question: ‘When you say that the Jews should return to Palestine, you mean, surely, the heavenly, the immaterial, the spiritual Palestine, our true homeland?’ The rabbi jabbed his staff into the ground in wrath and shouted, ‘No! I want the Palestine down here, the one you can touch with your hands, with its stones, its thorns and its mud!’ Neither am I nourished by fleshless, abstract memories. If I expected my mind to distill from a turbid host of bodily joys and bitternesses an immaterial, crystal-clear thought, I would die of hunger. When I close my eyes in order to enjoy a country again, my five senses, the five mouth-filled tentacles of my body, pounce upon it and bring it to me. Colors, fruits, women. The smells of orchards, of filthy narrow alleys, of armpits. Endless snows with blue, glittering reflections. Scorching, wavy deserts of sand shimmering under the hot sun. Tears, cries, songs, distant bells of mules, camels or troikas. The acrid, nauseating stench of some Mongolian cities will never leave my nostrils. And I will eternally hold in my hands – eternally, that is, until my hands rot – the melons of Bukhara, the watermelons of the Volga, the cool, dainty hand of a Japanese girl… For a time, in my early youth, I struggled to nourish my famished soul by feeding it with abstract concepts. I said that my body was a slave and that its duty was to gather raw material and bring it to the orchard of the mind to flower and bear fruit and become ideas. The more fleshless, odorless, soundless the world was that filtered into me, the more I felt I was ascending the highest peak of human endeavor. And I rejoiced. And Buddha came to be my greatest god, whom I loved and revered as an example. Deny your five senses. Empty your guts. Love nothing, hate nothing, desire nothing, hope for nothing. Breathe out and the world will be extinguished. But one night I had a dream. A hunger, a thirst, the influence of a barbarous race that had not yet become tired of the world had been secretly working within me. My mind pretended to be tired. You felt it had known everything, had become satiated, and was now smiling ironically at the cries of my peasant heart. But my guts – praised be God! – were full of blood and mud and craving. And one night I had a dream. I saw two lips without a face – large, scimitar-shaped woman’s lips. They moved. I heard a voice ask, ‘Who if your God?’ Unhesitatingly I answered, ‘Buddha!’ But the lips moved again and said: ‘No, Epaphus.’ I sprang up out of my sleep. Suddenly a great sense of joy and certainty flooded my heart. What I had been unable to find in the noisy, temptation-filled, confused world of wakefulness I had found now in the primeval, motherly embrace of the night. Since that night I have not strayed. I follow my own path and try to make up for the years of my youth that were lost in the worship of fleshless gods, alien to me and my race. Now I transubstantiate the abstract concepts into flesh and am nourished. I have learned that Epaphus, the god of touch, is my god. All the countries I have known since then I have known with my sense of touch. I feel my memories tingling, not in my head but in my fingertips and my whole skin. And as I bring back Japan to my mind, my hands tremble as if they were touching the breast of a beloved woman.
Nikos Kazantzakis (Travels in China & Japan)
I just want to be able to live my share of existence without being obliged to detract from the existence of others. I don't belive in prophecies that favor suffering over common sense. I came naked into the world, I'll leave it naked, what I possess doesn't belong to me, and neither do other people's lives. All human unhappiness comes from this misunderstanding. You have to be prepared to give back what God has loaned you. No earthly thing belongs to you, not really. Neither the homeland you talk about nor the grave where you'll be dust among the dust.
Yasmina Khadra
Book, when I close you life itself opens. I hear broken screams in the harbor. The copper slugs cross the sandy areas, descending to Tocopilla. It is night. Between the islands our ocean palpitates with fish. It touches the feet, the thighs, the chalky ribs of my homeland. Night touches the shoreline and rises while singing at daybreak like a guitar awakening. I feel the irresistible force of the ocean's call. I am called by the wind, and called by Rodriguez, José Antonio, I received a telegram from the "Mina" worker's union and the one I love (I won't tell you her name) waits for me in Bucalemu. Book, you haven't been able to enwrap me, you haven't covered me with typography, with celestial impressions, you haven't been able to trap my eyes between covers, I leave you so I can populate groves with the hoarse family of my song, to work burning metals or to eat grilled meat at the fireside in the mountains. I love books that are explorers, books with forest and snow, depth and sky, but I despise the book of spiders that employs thought to weave its venomous wires to trap the young and unsuspecting fly. Book, free me. I don't want to be entombed like a volume, I don't come from a tome, my poems don't eat poems, they devour passionate events, they're nurtured by the open air and fed by the earth and by men. Book, let me wander the road with dust in my low shoes and without mythology: go back to the library while I go into the streets. I've learned to take life from life, to love after a single kiss, and I didn't teach anything to anyone except what I myself lived, what I shared with other men, what I fought along with them: what I expressed from all of us in my song.
Pablo Neruda (All the Odes)
The country’s best minds increasingly were leaving, preferring a life in New York or London over the struggles in Malaysia. It was the kind of brain drain that had stunted the growth of nations from India to Indonesia, whose most ambitious citizens gave up on their troubled homeland and sought a better life elsewhere.
Tom Wright (Billion Dollar Whale: The Man Who Fooled Wall Street, Hollywood, and the World)
I cut an orange from the branch so that I could taste Palestine, but Umm Hassan yelled, “No! It’s not for eating, it’s Palestine.” I was ashamed of myself and hung the branch on the wall of the sitting room in my house, and when you came to visit me and saw the mouldy fruit, you yelled, “What’s that smell?” And I told you the story and watched you explode in anger. “You should have eaten the oranges,” you told me. “But Umm Hassan stopped me and said they were from the homeland.” “Umm Hassan’s senile,” you answered. “You should have eaten the oranges, because the homeland is something we have to eat, not let it eat us. We have to eat the oranges of Palestine, and we have to eat Palestine and Galilee.” It came to me then that you were right, but the oranges were going bad. You went to the wall and pulled off the branch, and I took it from your hand and stood there confused, not knowing what to do with that bunch of decay. “What are you going to do?” you asked. “Bury it,” I said. “Why bury it?” you asked. “I’m not going to throw it away, because it’s from the homeland.” You took the branch and threw it in the rubbish. “What a scandal!” you said. “What are these old women’s superstitions? Before hanging the homeland up on the wall, it’d be better to knock down the wall and leave. We have to eat every orange in the world and not be afraid, because the homeland isn’t oranges. The homeland is us.
Elias Khoury (Gate of the Sun)
they leave behind the places where their dead are buried – their mothers and fathers. The dead are bound to that place, and have returned to the land there. Because of this, Natives who are forced out of their homelands no longer have connections to their ancestors, and thus, to the spirit world. Their medicines no longer work. Their prayers are no longer
Felix Blackwell (Stolen Tongues)
At the end of the vacation, I took a steamer alone from Wuhan back up through the Yangtze Gorges. The journey took three days. One morning, as I was leaning over the side, a gust of wind blew my hair loose and my hairpin fell into the river. A passenger with whom I had been chatting pointed to a tributary which joined the Yangtze just where we were passing, and told me a story.In 33 B.C., the emperor of China, in an attempt to appease the country's powerful northern neighbors, the Huns, decided to send a woman to marry the barbarian king. He made his selection from the portraits of the 3,000 concubines in his court, many of whom he had never seen. As she was for a barbarian, he selected the ugliest portrait, but on the day of her departure he discovered that the woman was in fact extremely beautiful. Her portrait was ugly because she had refused to bribe the court painter. The emperor ordered the artist to be executed, while the lady wept, sitting by a river, at having to leave her country to live among the barbarians. The wind carried away her hairpin and dropped it into the river as though it wanted to keep something of hers in her homeland. Later on, she killed herself. Legend had it that where her hairpin dropped, the river turned crystal clear, and became known as the Crystal River. My fellow passenger told me this was the tributary we were passing. With a grin, he declared: "Ah, bad omen! You might end up living in a foreign land and marrying a barbarian!" I smiled faintly at the traditional Chinese obsession about other races being 'barbarians," and wondered whether this lady of antiquity might not actually have been better off marrying the 'barbarian' king. She would at least be in daily contact with the grassland, the horses, and nature. With the Chinese emperor, she was living in a luxurious prison, without even a proper tree, which might enable the concubines to climb a wall and escape. I thought how we were like the frogs at the bottom of the well in the Chinese legend, who claimed that the sky was only as big as the round opening at the top of their well. I felt an intense and urgent desire to see the world. At the time I had never spoken with a foreigner, even though I was twenty-three, and had been an English language student for nearly two years. The only foreigners I had ever even set eyes on had been in Peking in 1972. A foreigner, one of the few 'friends of China," had come to my university once. It was a hot summer day and I was having a nap when a fellow student burst into our room and woke us all by shrieking: "A foreigner is here! Let's go and look at the foreigner!" Some of the others went, but I decided to stay and continue my snooze. I found the whole idea of gazing, zombie like rather ridiculous. Anyway, what was the point of staring if we were forbidden to open our mouths to him, even though he was a 'friend of China'? I had never even heard a foreigner speaking, except on one single Linguaphone record. When I started learning the language, I had borrowed the record and a phonograph, and listened to it at home in Meteorite Street. Some neighbors gathered in the courtyard, and said with their eyes wide open and their heads shaking, "What funny sounds!" They asked me to play the record over and over again.
Jung Chang (Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China)
Albert turned to Haydée. ‘At what age did the signora leave Greece?’ he asked. ‘At the age of five,’ Haydée replied. ‘And do you recollect your homeland?’ Albert asked. ‘When I close my eyes, I can again see everything that I used to see. There are two ways of seeing: with the body and with the soul. The body’s sight can sometimes forget, but the soul remembers for ever.
Alexandre Dumas (The Count of Monte Cristo)
[The Edfu Building Texts in Egypt] take us back to a very remote period called the 'Early Primeval Age of the Gods'--and these gods, it transpires, were not originally Egyptian, but lived on a sacred island, the 'Homeland of the Primeval Ones,' and in the midst of a great ocean. Then, at some unspecified time in the past, an immense cataclysm shook the earth and a flood poured over this island, where 'the earliest mansions of the gods' had been founded, destroying it utterly, submerging all its holy places, and killing most of its divine inhabitants. Some survived, however, and we are told that this remnant set sail in their ships (for the texts leave us in no doubt that these 'gods' of the early primeval age were navigators) to 'wander' the world. Their purpose in doing so was nothing less than to re-create and revive the essence of their lost homeland, to bring about, in short: 'The resurrection of the former world of the gods ... The re-creation of a destroyed world.' [...] The takeaway is that the texts invite us to consider the possibility that the survivors of a lost civilization, thought of as 'gods' but manifestly human, set about 'wandering' the world in the aftermath of an extinction-level global cataclysm. By happenstance it was primarily hunter-gatherer populations, the peoples of the mountains, jungles, and deserts--'the unlettered and the uncultured,' as Plato so eloquently put it in his account of the end of Atlantis--who had been 'spared the scourge of the deluge.' Settling among them, the wanderers entertained the desperate hope that their high civilization could be restarted, or that at least something of its knowledge, wisdom, and spiritual ideas could be passed on so that mankind in the post-cataclysmic world would not be compelled to 'begin again like children, in complete ignorance of what happened in early times.
Graham Hancock (America Before: The Key to Earth's Lost Civilization)
They were weeping not because a young man was marrying and leaving his mother but because of the incalculable loss and suffering that Armenians have endured, because they couldn’t not weep for relatives of theirs who had perished during the massacres of 1915, because no joy in the world could make them forget their nation’s grief and their homeland on the other side of Mount Ararat.
Vasily Grossman (An Armenian Sketchbook)
The modern world lacks not only hiding places, but certainties. There is no consensus about reality between, for example, the nations of the North and of the South. What President Reagan says is happening in Central America differs so radically from, say, the Sandinista version, that there is almost no common ground. It becomes necessary to take sides, to say whether or not one thinks of Nicaragua as the United States’s ‘front yard’. (Vietnam, you will recall, was the ‘back yard’.) It seems to me imperative that literature enter such arguments, because what is being disputed is nothing less than what is the case, what is truth and what untruth. If writers leave the business of making pictures of the world to politicians, it will be one of history’s great and most abject abdications.
Salman Rushdie (Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981-1991)
Alongside the viciousness of much of German politics in the Weimar years was an incongruous innocence: few people could imagine the worst possibilities. A civilized nation could not possibly vote for Hitler, some had thought. When he became chancellor nonetheless, millions expected his time in office to be short and ineffectual. Germany was a notoriously law-abiding as well as cultured land. How could a German government systematically brutalize its own people? German Jews were highly assimilated and patriotic. Many refused to leave their homeland, even as things got worse and worse. "I am German and am waiting for the Germans to come back; they have gone to ground somewhere," Victor Klemperer wrote in his diary--he was the son of a rabbi and a veteran of the First World War who chose to stay, and miraculously survived. Few Germans in 1933 could imagine Treblinka or Auschwitz, the mass shootings of Babi Yar or the death marches of the last months of the Second World War. It is hard to blame them for not foreseeing the unthinkable. Yet their innocence failed them, and they were catastrophically wrong about their future. We who come later have one advantage over them: we have their example before us.
Benjamin Carter Hett (The Death of Democracy: Hitler's Rise To Power)
On May 28, 1830, President Andrew Jackson unlawfully signed the Indian Removal Act to force move southeastern peoples from our homelands to the West. We were rounded up with what we could carry. We were forced to leave behind houses, printing presses, stores, cattle, schools, pianos, ceremonial grounds, tribal towns, churches. We witnessed immigrants walking into our homes with their guns, Bibles, household goods and families, taking what had been ours, as we were surrounded by soldiers and driven away like livestock at gunpoint. There were many trails of tears of tribal nations all over North America of indigenous peoples who were forcibly removed from their homelands by government forces. The indigenous peoples who are making their way up from the southern hemisphere are a continuation of the Trail of Tears. May we all find the way home.
Joy Harjo (An American Sunrise)
If you came back, you wanted to leave again; if you went away, you longed to come back. Wherever you were, you could hear the call of the homeland, like the note of the herdsman's horn far away in the hills. You had one home out there and one over here, and yet you were an alien in both places. Your true abiding place was the vision of something very far off, and your soul was like the waves, always restless, forever in motion.
Johan Bojer (The Emigrants)
There's something that happens to the newly displaced. Whatever power or choice that was stripped away in the process of reluctantly leaving one's homeland is fervently reclaimed in other situations, and honing in on the best spot to sit and enjoy a meal, be it at a restaurant or a lakeside, takes on the utmost importance. . . . If nothing else, we were always prepared for any and all circumstances and with plenty of provisions to see us through.
Naz Deravian (Bottom of the Pot: Persian Recipes and Stories)
One of the most notorious slogans of ultra-nationalism in Turkey has been ‘Either love it or leave it!’ It is meant to block all kinds of fault-finding from within. The implication is that if you criticize your country or your state, you are showing disrespect, not to mention a lack of patriotism, in which case you had better take your leave. If you do stay, however, the implication is that you love your homeland, in which case you had better not voice any critical opinions. This black-and-white mentality is an obstacle to social progress. But it is not only Turkish ultra- nationalism that is fuelled by a dualistic mentality. All kinds of extremist, exclusivist discourses are similarly reductionist and sheathed in tautology. Either/or approaches ask us to make a choice, all the while spreading the fallacy that it is not possible to have multiple belongings, multiple roots, multiple loves.
Elif Shafak (The Happiness of Blond People: A Personal Meditation on the Dangers of Identity)
If A Tree Could Wander Oh, if a tree could wander and move with foot and wings! It would not suffer the axe blows and not the pain of saws! For would the sun not wander away in every night ? How could at ev'ry morning the world be lighted up? And if the ocean's water would not rise to the sky, How would the plants be quickened by streams and gentle rain? The drop that left its homeland, the sea, and then returned ? It found an oyster waiting and grew into a pearl. Did Yusaf not leave his father, in grief and tears and despair? Did he not, by such a journey, gain kingdom and fortune wide? Did not the Prophet travel to far Medina, friend? And there he found a new kingdom and ruled a hundred lands. You lack a foot to travel? Then journey into yourself! And like a mine of rubies receive the sunbeams? print! Out of yourself ? such a journey will lead you to your self, It leads to transformation of dust into pure gold!
Jalal ad-Din Muhammad ar-Rumi
Clever and civilized men will not stay home Leave your homeland and explore foreign fields Go out! You shall find replacement for those you have left Give your all, the sweetness of life will be tasted after the struggle I have seen that standing water stagnates If it flows, it is pure, if it does not, it will become murky If the lion doesn’t leave his den, he will not eat If the arrow does not leave the bow, it will not strike If the sun stands still in its orbit Man will tire of it Gold dust merely soil before excavated Aloewood is just ordinary wood if in the forest Travel by Imam Syafii
Ahmad Fuadi (Negeri 5 Menara)
Motherland. Madre Patria. We are born of a nation, and we are shaped by its features. Whatever that nation offers — whether it’s hardship or opportunity — is our inheritance. When we see ourselves belonging wholly to our nation, it can be difficult to decipher its flaws and shortcomings. We make excuses for its failures and contradictions, just as family members sometimes cover for one another. It’s a form of denial. Conversely, when your own nation lets you down, when it leaves you vulnerable, when it fails to make good on the promises of citizenship, the sense of betrayal you’re left with is nothing short of traumatic.
Tracy K. Smith
There is far more to the Islamic way of life than fasting and segregating women, of course. Praying five times a day, avoiding alcohol, the custom of eating with the right hand, leaving the left for ablutions and many health measures associated with Islam, such as ritual washing. Then there is the Qur’an itself and the sonorous power of the Arabic language, with an attractive system of ethics including a focus on alms-giving and the equality of believers. Putting all this together created a powerful religious technology which made its followers more aggressive, confident, united and with a higher birth rate than any competing civilization. [...] People in the West see the traditional culture of the Muslim Middle East as primitive and “backward,” and there are constant calls for modernization. In fact, as had been seen, Islamic culture is anything but backward. Civilization first arose in Egypt, Mesopotamia and the Indus Valley in what is now Pakistan. It is no coincidence that these lands, with the longest experience of civilization, are now strongly and fervently Muslim. Long experience of civilization has bred a high-S genotype and culture which perfectly adapt people to survive and expand their numbers in dense agricultural and urban populations. Such countries tend to be poor (if we leave out the anomalous effects of oil wealth), since their peoples lack the temperament for industrialization. But wealth at that level is of no benefit in the long-term struggle for survival and success. To paraphrase Christian scripture, what does it benefit a civilization if it gains wealth but loses its strength and vigor? The advantages of Islam can be clearly seen in countries with mixed populations. Lebanon once had a Christian majority but is now 54% Muslim. In Communist Yugoslavia the provinces with Muslim populations grew much faster and received tax revenue from the wealthier Christian states. The population of Kosovo, the spiritual homeland of Christian Serbia, grew from 733,000 in 1948 to over two million in 1994, with the Muslim component surging from 68% to 90%, and lately going even higher. Meanwhile, Muslims are migrating into Europe where Christianity is in decline, the birth rate is far below replacement level, and people no longer have much faith in their own culture. Over the next few decades, as the next chapter will indicate, the native peoples of the West will become feebler and fewer. This means that on current trends Europe will become an Islamic continent in a century or so. The 1,400-year struggle between Islam and the West is coming to end. pp. 227 & 229-230
Jim Penman (Biohistory: Decline and Fall of the West)
Palestinians make up 20 percent of Israel’s population, and despite the fact that they live in their own homeland, Israel relegates them to second- or even third-class status. One of my classmates had discovered that more than fifty laws discriminated against the Palestinian citizens of Israel based solely on their ethnicity. Another discussed how government resources were disproportionately directed to Jews, leaving the Palestinians to suffer the worst living standards in Israeli society, with Palestinian children’s schools receiving only a fraction of the government spending given to Jewish schools. They also talked about how difficult it was for Palestinians to obtain land for a home, business, or agriculture because over 90 percent of the land in Israel was owned either by the state or by quasigovernmental agencies (like the Jewish National Fund) that discriminated against Palestinians. And they lamented the fact that if they or any of their relatives chose to marry a Palestinian from the West Bank or Gaza, they couldn’t pass on their Israeli citizenship to their spouse, thanks to the Citizenship and Entry into Israel Law. Their spouse wouldn’t even be able to gain residency status to live with them inside Israel. This meant they’d be forced to leave Israel and separate from their family in order to live with their spouse.
Ahed Tamimi (They Called Me a Lioness: A Palestinian Girl's Fight for Freedom)
Many of my friends around the world express surprise at the Palestinian attachment to place of origin and concerns for family ties. Some even scoff at it and contrast it with their own open-armed acceptance of adventure, discovery, a nomadic lifestyle and residence in places that they choose and change according to their fancy, without the slightest regret at leaving family or even homeland behind. They remind me that the world is wider and more beautiful than 'our villages' and 'our families'. I understand this beautiful sense of the vastness of the world. Like them, I love movement, journeys, and living in new places. What these friends forget is that it is they who choose to distance themselves. They are the ones who take the decision and make the plans and then present their passports (recognized everywhere) and get on planes and trains and cars and motorcycles and go to places where three conditions that the Palestinian cannot meet are fulfilled: first, that it is their preference and choice to go to specifically these places; second, that these places always welcome them; and third and most important, that it is in their power to return to their home country whenever they desire and decide. The Palestinian forced to become a refugee, to migrate, and to go into exile from his homeland in the sixty years since the Nakba of 1948, or the forty since the June 1967 War, suffers miseries trying to obtain a document by which he will be recognized at borders. He suffers miseries trying to obtain a passport from another state because he is stateless and has to go through Kafkaesque interrogations before being granted entry visa to any place in the world, even the Arab states. The Palestinian is forbidden to enter his own country by land, sea, or air, even in a coffin. It is not a matter of romantic attachment to a place but of eternal exclusion from it. The Palestinian stripped of an original identity is a palm tree broken in the middle. My foreign friends have control over the details of their lives but a single Israeli solder can control the details of the life of any Palestinian. This is the difference. This is the story.
Mourid Barghouti (ولدت هناك .. ولدت هنا)
was brought up in a blend of two cultures: Middle Eastern and Western. My homeland was westernized because of the influence of modern industrial cultures. Orthodox Christians and Jews lived in our neighborhood, but the vast majority of our people were born Muslim, which meant they were expected to remain faithful to the Islamic beliefs and the Qur’an for their lifetimes. It is written in the Qur’an that if a Muslim leaves Islam and converts to any other religion, the penalty is death. I understood from an early age that, because I was born a Muslim, I would die a Muslim.
Samaa Habib (Face to Face with Jesus: A Former Muslim's Extraordinary Journey to Heaven and Encounter with the God of Love)
Rava approached Steldor and removed a dagger from a sheath at her hip. With her left hand, she smoothed the collar of his white shirt, then yanked the fabric away from his chest, slicing through it in a single motion. Spying the silver wolf’s head talisman that he always wore, she seized it, ripping it free of his neck. “Whether for good luck or good fortune, you’ll have no need of this,” she sneered, dropping the pendant into a pouch that hung from her belt. “I’m sorry it’s not strong enough to cover your stench,” he icily replied, for the mixture inside the talisman was the source of his rich, masculine scent. Rava stared at Steldor, then stalked around him to tear the remnants of his shirt from his back, trying without success to strip him of his pride. She perused his muscular torso, and when she faced him once more, her eyes came to rest on the scar beneath his rib cage--the one that marked the life-threatening wound given to him by a Cokyrian blade--and placed the tip of the dagger she still held against it. “Only slightly marred.” She traced the knife’s point along the jagged white line, leaving a trail of red. “I’ll see what I can do to change that.” She tucked the weapon back into its sheath and gave a nod to the soldiers who had brought Steldor out of the Bastion. As they tied his wrists with rope, she went to the woman who had brought the box and lifted its lid. With a satisfied chuckle, she removed a whip more fearsome than any I had ever seen, cradling it like a mother would an infant, and the gathered throng fell silent. It was indeed rawhide, but uncoiled it reached four feet in length before meeting a silver ring, on the other end of which another two feet of metal-studded leather waited to strike. I looked to Narian and Cannan, and knew by both of their expressions that this was not what they had expected. Indeed, Rava purposefully made eye contact with Narian, her demeanor haughty, before returning her attention to her prey. “On your knees,” Rava growled, dangling the whip in front of Steldor. He obeyed, his eyes never leaving her face, continuing to radiate strength and insolence. “How can a flag be of consequence in a dead kingdom?” she taunted. “It is cloth. It is meaningless. And it can be burned.” She ticked a finger for one of the many soldiers around us to come forward, and I recognized Saadi. He extended our rolled Hytanican flag, and Rava took it, letting it unfurl until the end touched the ground. She held out her other hand and Saadi passed her a lit torch, which she touched to the banner of my homeland, letting flames consume it. The courtyard’s white stone walkway would now and forever be scorched. Steldor’s upper lip lifted away from his teeth, but aside from this snarl, he showed no reaction. “Tell me, does it seem worth it to you to suffer this punishment for a rag?” “Without question,” Steldor forcefully answered, and cheers rolled like thunder through the Hytanicans who had gathered to watch, sending chills down my spine.
Cayla Kluver (Sacrifice (Legacy, #3))
That has nothing to do with it. Abraham had no desire to leave his homeland, but God commanded him, and he had no choice but to go. Others of our family have also been chosen when they did not expect it. God has reached out and touched them and put them in directions they never dreamed. You, I think, will be one of these men, Moses of the tribe of Levi!
Gilbert Morris (By Way of the Wilderness (Lions of Judah Book #5))
Some Tips to Preserve Flowers Fresh Longer Receiving new and lovely blossoms is among the most wonderful emotions in the world. It creates you feel loved, and unique, critical. Nothing really beats fresh flowers to mention particular feelings of love and devotion. This is actually the reason why you can tell how a celebration that is unique is from the quantity and type of flowers current, sold or whether available one to the other. Without a doubt the rose sector actually flowers online stores can not slow-down anytime soon and are booming. Weddings, Valentines Day, birthday, school, anniversaries, brand all without and the most significant instances a doubt flowers are part of it. The plants could have been picked up professionally or ordered through plants online, regardless of the means, new blossoms can present in a celebration. The challenge with receiving plants, however, is how to maintain their freshness longer. Really, merely placing them on vases filled up with water wouldn’t do the trick, here are a few established ways you'll be able to keep plants clean and sustained for times:  the easiest way to keep plants is by keeping them inside the refrigerator. Here is the reason why most flower shops have huge appliances where they keep their stock. If you have added place in the fridge (and endurance) you're able to just put the flowers before bed-time and put it within the fridge. In the morning you could arrange them again and do the same within the days.  If you are partial to drinking pop, specially the obvious ones like Sprite and 7 Up, you need to use this like a chemical to preserve the flowers fresh. Just serve a couple of fraction of mug of pop to mix within the water in the vase. Sugar is just a natural chemical and soda has high-sugar content, as you know.  To keep the petals and sepals fresh-looking attempt to apply somewhat of hairspray on the couple of plants or aroma. Stay from a length (about one feet) then provide the blossoms a fast spritz, notably to the leaves and petals.  the trick to maintaining cut flowers new is always to minimize the expansion of bacteria while in the same period give you the plants with all the diet it needs. Since it has properties for this function vodka may be used. Just blend of vodka and sugar for the water that you're going to use within the vase but make sure to modify the water daily using the vodka and sugar solution.  Aspirin is also recognized to preserve flowers fresh. Only break a pill of aspirin before you place the plants, and blend it with the water. Remember which you need to add aspirin everytime the water changes.  Another effective approach to avoid the growth of bacteria is to add about a quarter teaspoon of bleach inside the water within the vase. Mix in a few teaspoon of sugar for the blossoms and also diet will definitely last considerably longer. The number are only several of the more doable ways that you can do to make sure that it is possible to enjoy those arrangement of flowers you obtained from the person you worry about for a very long time. They could nearly last but atleast the message it offered will soon be valued inside your heart for the a long time.
Homeland Florists
strangely, on the verge of storming Rome itself, Attila withdrew. Why? For many centuries the official answer was that God had intervened in some mysterious way to protect his chosen city, Rome, seat of the papacy. In more recent times, such supernatural explanations have fallen out of favor and the question has arisen anew. Some have suggested that Attila was overawed by the sanctity of Rome. But why would a pagan warlord like Attila stand in awe of a Christian center? Attila was by no means an ignorant barbarian: For example, he invited Roman and Greek engineers into Hun territory to install bathing facilities. However, his respect for Roman civilization was clearly of a pragmatic rather than a religious nature. Another theory is that Attila was worried about leaving unattended his newly acquired homeland, in what is now Hungary. But then why did he venture out almost as far as Rome and hang around indecisively for so long before returning? All these explanations founder on the same point. It seems clear that Attila did indeed set out with every intention of taking Rome, but his expedition came to a premature halt. Mounting modern evidence suggests that Attila was stopped by a virulent epidemic of dysentery, or some similar disease. Most of his men were too ill to stay on their horses, and a significant number died. In short, bacteria saved Rome.
David P. Clark (Germs, Genes, & Civilization: How Epidemics Shaped Who We Are Today (Ft Press Science Series))
I’m red poppy from the mountains of the homeland The winds are my tunes The thunder is my voice When I object what is going on… Rains are my tears When I’m speechless The gushing sounds of water Are my hearty songs… *** I’m red poppy from the mountains of the homeland When I welt, I shall leave smiling And assured that my seeds Shall create vast meadows of wildflowers For future generations Wiser than you and I…
Louis Yako (أنا زهرة برية [I am a Wildflower])
need the other great powers. Russian trade would keep Germany from launching an attack on his homeland and aid in the rebuilding of the Soviet state. When the two nations signed the secret pact, Stalin gained an even greater boost to his ego when Hitler effectively gave away much of eastern Europe to Russia in the form of “spheres of influence” along with the ten-year nonaggression pact. Moreover, Germany would now move against the British and the French, leaving Russia considerable time before becoming Hitler’s next target. Besides, no mere paperhanger could outwit Stalin! Well, it did sound good at the time … and those who might have objected would have wisely saved their nation the trouble of the interrogation, trial, and firing squad by blowing out their own brains. If anything, years of pogroms and purges had proved that Soviet premier Stalin did not tolerate pessimism. With the new buffer states, security, and the promised trade bonus, as far as the Russian leader could see, Hitler had effectively bought off Joseph Stalin at just the right price. Time was now on Stalin’s side … or so he thought. While feelings of suspicion and paranoia had served him well over the years, Stalin demonstrated confidence in the deal and his ability to handle prospective German aggression, failing miserably to
Bill Fawcett (How to Lose WWII: Bad Mistakes of the Good War (How to Lose Series))
At a point in history when two thirds of Europe’s Jewry had been exterminated, with their murderers uncharged, it seems reasonable to me that the world needed a Jewish state. None of this is to condone the tragedy of Palestinian displacement nor the illegality and, to my mind, immorality of the settlements, nor to minimise or excuse any of the subsequent tragedies visited upon the Palestinian people who have suffered worst from a cycle of violence that does as much to advance the careers of right-wing ideologues as it does to legitimise Hamas, but it’s important to remember that Israel exists, primarily, because it needed to. Know that every Jew you meet has a member of their family who was forced to leave their homeland because it was hostile to Jews. Anti-Semitism created Israel, and not, as some would have it, the other way around.
Matt Greene (Jew[ish])
On that momentous day of my first return to my grandfather’s place in Ojoto after many years of my sojourn in America, I was lost in my thought until a light wind blew across the pedestrian path in a wooded area where I stood, caressing the trees’ leaves and small branches. The stubborn leaves swerved in all directions like untrained dancers learning to strut after consuming palm-wine from large calabash jugs. Looking up, I watched weakened leaves snapped off and gained their freedom from primordial trees. A liberation dance followed in the dense air above me before the leaves set down. Listening to beautiful sounds made by birds converging around me, as if they were singing for the newly liberated leaves, I found myself lost in the wonderment of nature. What I experienced had drawn me back to that exhilarating place for mental respite each time I returned home.
Fidelis O. Mkparu, 2021
And what does this apologist of the bourgeoisie have in mind when he talks of the extension of the «dimensions of true freedom» for the workers? Is it the «freedom» to be unemployed, the «freedom» to leave their families and homeland in order to sell the power of their muscles and minds to the capitalists of the Western world, or is it the «freedom» to pay taxes, to be discriminated against and savagely exploited by the old and the new Yugoslav bourgeoisie, as well as by the foreign bourgeoisie?
Enver Hoxha (Yugoslav "Self-Administration" - Capitalist Theory and Practice)
they leave behind the places where their dead are buried – their mothers and fathers. The dead are bound to that place, and have returned to the land there. Because of this, Natives who are forced out of their homelands no longer have connections to their ancestors, and thus, to the spirit world. Their medicines no longer work. Their prayers are no longer heard. “Eventually, the younger generations forget the names of sacred places. And as the names and history and wisdom are forgotten, the peoples’ spiritual power diminishes. The culture collapses. How they perceive this change affects their whole way of life.
Felix Blackwell (Stolen Tongues)
think,” says Professor Carl Hermann, who never left his homeland, “that even now the outside world does not realize how surprised we non-Nazis were in 1933. When mass dictatorship occurred in Russia, and then in Italy, we said to one another, ‘That is what happens in backward countries. We are fortunate, for all our troubles, that it cannot happen here.’ But it did, worse even than elsewhere, and I think that all the explanations leave some mystery. When I think of it all, I still say, with unbelief, ‘Germany—no, not Germany.
Milton Sanford Mayer (They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933–45)
Hand Watches" I opened the drawer where I keep old things and tokens… I looked over some hand watches with dead batteries and frozen times… Watches gifted to me over the years by teachers or friends commending my accomplishments and respect for time… It never occurred to them nor to me then that Time would die in a heart attack and cease to matter the day my homeland was occupied and destroyed… The day plunderers, in collaboration with thieves at home, would burn and destroy everything beautiful… And ever since, I refuse to wear hand watches… I vowed not to wear a hand watch until my people retrieve their Time and dignity… And when that happens, Time will not matter for I will then turn into a butterfly a sparrow a daffodil an orange Or perhaps an apricot blossom on a branch… I will turn into a spring of water flowing beyond time and timing … In that same drawer I found pens that have run out of ink looking now like mummified corpses… At a moment of despair, A strong feeling struck me like a lightning leaving me with a frightening question: What if this is a wound no time can heal, a cause that no ink can revive? [Published on April 7, 2023 on CounterPunch.org]
Louis Yako
[Hand Watches] I opened the drawer Where I keep old things and tokens I glanced over some hand watches With dead batteries and frozen times… Watches that were gifted to me over time By teachers or friends To commend my accomplishments and respect for time… It never occurred to them or to me then That Time would die in a heart attack And will cease to be important The day my homeland was occupied and destroyed… The day the occupying thieves In collaboration with the thieves within Would burn and destroy everything beautiful in it… And since then, I refuse to wear hand watches And will never wear one Until my people get back their Time and dignity… And when that happens, Time will remain unimportant For then, I will turn into a butterfly A sparrow A daffodil or an orange blossom, Or perhaps an apricot blossom on a branch An unstoppable sprig of water That flows beyond time and timing … In that same drawer I found Pens that have run out of ink Looking like mummified corpses.. At a moment of despair, A strong feeling struck me like a lightning Leaving me with a frightening question: What if this is a wound that all time can’t cure A cause that all the ink of the world can’t solve? [Original poem published in Arabic on February 5, 2023 at ahewar.org]
Louis Yako
I think of an Afghan driver I once had, a medical student who spoke whimsically of the homeland he loved so dearly but so badly wanted to leave. 'We Afghans are unlucky people,' the driver had whispered. "But we would be the luckiest people if the wars ever left—look outside at this magical place.
Hollie McKay (Afghanistan: The End of the U.S. Footprint and the Rise of the Taliban Rule)
Had I been provided with a choice, I would have chosen to stay. I didn’t know we were poor, and I didn’t feel any of the desperation that dictated our lives. I just remember being loved, safe, and happy. In retrospect, I realize this is a credit to the efforts of my mother and my surrogate family rather than a credit to the island. Nevertheless, leaving Jamaica still felt like a betrayal. I didn’t know then that when you leave someone or something behind not by choice, you never trade your allegiance to them. I assimilated well enough to call America home many years ago, but my longing for Jamaica never fully went away. Assimilation, though necessary, comes with a price. It created an unwelcome wedge between me and my homeland.
Jayma Anne Montgomery (AlieNation: The Imitated Life)
I see coming back to my village as significant, thanks to my privilege of being able to leave. But also because I can simultaneously cherry-pick my favourite aspects of my culture for anecdotes back home and social media, and keep the private, painful reflective ones for myself. This is what so many second-and-third generation immigrants experience visiting their homeland. We fine-tune the ability to find the nuances funny, deflecting the crushing weight of displacement and dispora drama that becomes part of our everyday.
Kieran Yates (The Good Immigrant)
Where did you grow up? What’s your native language? What’s your religious affiliation? How many people are in your family? What did the apartment or house you grew up in look like? How did your parents meet? Was there a TV? Where did you sleep? What did you eat? What was your favorite hiding place when you were a child? Did you go to school? What sort of clothing did you wear? Did you have pets? Did you learn a trade? Do you have a family of your own? When did you leave the country of your birth? Why? Are you still in contact with your family? What was your goal when you left home? How did you say your goodbyes? What did you take with you when you left? What did you think Europe would be like? What’s different? How do you spend your days? What do you miss most? What do you wish for? If you had children who were growing up here, what would you tell them about your homeland? Can you imagine growing old here? Where do you want to be buried?
Jenny Erpenbeck (Go, Went, Gone)
From Alan Thein Duening: Picture North America from space. Look at the upper left and start an imaginary line on the rugged coast of southern Alaska. Climb the ridges that encircle Prince William Sound. Cross the snowy teeth of the Chugach Mountains and descend through kettle-pond country to the feet of the towering Alaska Range. Rise again to the bitter heights and turning southeast along the crest, clip the corner of the Yukon Territory. Enter British Columbia and veer east through its folding north. Turn your line south when you reach the Continental Divide in the Rocky Mountains. Follow the divide down the thousand-mile spine of British Columbia, across Montana, along the buttressed ridges of the Idaho border and into Wyoming as far as Jackson Hole. There, leave the divide and turn westward toward the coast. Following the swells and benches that limit the Columbia Basin, dip southward into Utah and Nevada, then northward again around the high desert of central Oregon. When you approach the Cascade Mountains, veer southwest through the tangled topography of northern California to the crest of the Coast Range. Just north of San Francisco Bay, descend to the shores of the Pacific. The line you have drawn is an unfamiliar one. You won’t find it on maps. But it shows a geographical unit more real, in ecological sense, than any of the lines governments draw. You have drawn a biological region, a bioregion. Specifically, you have outlines the watersheds of rivers flowing into the Pacific Ocean through North America’s temperate rain forest zone with a fifteen-hundred-mile belt of rain forests along the coast. The unity of this diverse bioregion is the movement of its water; every ounce of moisture that the ocean throws into the sky and the sky hurls down on the land inside this region’s borders tumbles toward the rain forest coast. If it does not evaporate or get trapped in underground aquifers along the way, water will reach that dripping shoreline through one of several hundred swift, cold rivers. Most likely, it will travel through the Columbia or the Fraser rivers, home to the Earth’s greatest population of migrating salmon. This place, defined by water running to woodlands, has no perfect name. You can call it Rain Forest Province, the North Pacific Slope, or Cascadia… Natural units of place such as this have always mattered more to people than has humanity in general or the planet in its entirety. Indeed, history is unequivocal; people will sacrifice for villages, homelands, or nations, even giving their lives. But humans seem unwilling to sacrifice for their planet, despite the fact that it is now suffering proportionately greater losses from social decay and environmental destruction than most countries at war.
David Landis Barnhill (At Home on the Earth: Becoming Native to Our Place: A Multicultural Anthology)
Diggory saved my second son after taking the life of my first. He has fulfilled his debt. My kin will no longer hunt him, and you will leave our homeland in peace. I do not owe him an alliance. I do not owe him anything.
Shelby Mahurin (Blood & Honey (Serpent & Dove, #2))
And though god-resembling Vidvoyos believes that his name will also last, who knows what will happen after we are dead? With the passage of time, many a city will add the names of its heroes to our achievement and leave out ours. And this will go on and on until, at last, everything is changed so that even we, the seafarers who took part in this journey, would fail to recognize our actions or adventures or indeed ourselves. But why worry about such things when we are mortal and, in the end, we must return to dust? How sleepy I am! All night I peered into the darkness like a fool, fearing to see those hostile Phoenicians while they no doubt slept upon their comfortable beds in their safe harbors, utterly unaware of us, the immortal heroes whose homeland awaits us with certain death! Enough! Farewell to you, my hero, who has seen the fleece of gold!
Joe Alex (The Ships of Minos 5: A Bronze Age Saga Classic)
dating question -What do you want from this world? -To have a wardrobe. In his first meeting with Katrina, she asked him a dating question, and his answer was unconventional, he wished he could buy a wardrobe, in which he put his belongings, a metaphor for the instability in his life, so how does he do this, while he is without a homeland, without a home, moving from place to another, carrying a bag containing a few of his personal belongings. About to cheat on Khadija, the curiosity in the intelligence man’s mind overpowered him, the desire for knowledge, exploration, information, and a thirst for more details, the smallest details. Plan the process with the mentality of a computer programmer, “I will leave them a loophole in the system, they will hack me through it, and to do this they have to open their doors to send their code, and at this very moment, I am sending my code in the opposite direction. The most vulnerable account devices to hack are the hackers themselves. They enter the systems through special ports, which are opened to them by the so-called Trojan horse, a type of virus, with which they target the victim, open loopholes for them, infiltrate through them, and in both cases, they, in turn, have to open ports on their devices to complete the connection, from which they can be hacked backward. Katrina is a Trojan horse, he will not close the ports in front of her, she must succeed in penetrating him, and she will be his bridge connecting them, he will sneak through her, to the most secret and terrifying place in the world, a journey that leads him to the island of Malta, to enter the inevitable den. This is how the minds of investigators and intelligence men work, they must open the outlets of their minds to the fullest, to collect information, receive it, and deal with it, and that is why their minds are the most vulnerable to penetration, manipulation, and passing misleading information to them. It is almost impossible to convince a simple man, that there is life outside the planet, the outlets of his mind are closed, he is not interested in knowledge, nor is he collecting information, and the task of entering him is difficult, they call him the mind of the crocodile, a mind that is solid, closed, does not affect anything and is not affected by anything, He has his own convictions, he never changes them. While scientists, curious, intellectuals, investigators, and intelligence men, the ports of their minds are always open. And just as hackers can penetrate websites by injecting their URL addresses with programming phrases, they can implant their code into the website’s database, and pull information from it. The minds of such people can also be injected, with special codes, some of them have their minds ready for injection, and one or two injections are sufficient to prepare for the next stage, and for some, dozens of injections are not enough, and some of them injected their minds themselves, by meditation, thinking, and focusing on details, as Ruslan did. Khadija did not need more than three injections, but he trusted the love that brought them together, there is no need, she knew a lot about him in advance, and she will trust him and believe him. Her mind would not be able to get her away, or so he wished, the woman’s madness had not been given its due. What he is about to do now, and the revenge videos that she is going to receive will remain in her head forever, and will be her brain’s weapon to escape, when he tries to get her out of the box. From an early age, he did not enjoy safety and stability, he lived in the midst of hurricanes of chaos, and the heart of randomness. He became the son of shadows and their master. He deserved the nickname he called himself “Son of Chaos.
Ahmad I. AlKhalel (Zero Moment: Do not be afraid, this is only a passing novel and will end (Son of Chaos Book 1))
Mostly Pakistani electronic and print media are talking, spreading, and participating in the foreign policy agenda against Islam, the Armed Forces, Pakistan, and the Pakistani nation by receiving funds for that purpose. It is common sense to understand that no one will do anything against their people and land without getting any reward or money. They have organized the so-called "Amn Ki Aasha"; they are not on the "Mission of Peace" but on the "Mission of Destruction" of the moral, Islamic, and cultural values of our society. They are open traitors and agents of foreign secret agencies, especially Indians. The agencies never leave proof or signs of their involvement behind them. We should, as a Muslim nation and as a great Armed Forces of the world, first trace and clean up the traitors and agents at home and within us, and then turn to others, out of the homeland. The enemies who are active in destroying our beloved Pakistani security and peace, our media is the ugly enemy of our defense system; it should and must be brought to justice and addressed for peace and security.
Ehsan Sehgal
But rather than deal with labels, I want to deal with substance. There are two prerequisites for peace. First, the Palestinians must recognize the Jewish state. They have to stop calling and educating their people for Israel’s destruction. Second, in any peace agreement Israel must retain the overriding security control over the entire area west of the Jordan River. If we don’t we’ll get another radical Islamic terrorist state in the Palestinian areas which will explode the peace and explode the Middle East. Unfortunately, the Palestinians vehemently reject both prerequisites for peace. They even deny, Mr. President, our historical connection to our homeland. Why are Jews called Jews? The Chinese are called Chinese because they come from China. The Japanese are called Japanese because they come from Japan. Well, Jews are called Jews because they come from Judea. This is our ancestral homeland. Jews are not foreign colonialists in Judea. LEAVING WASHINGTON, I realized I had a problem. The president of the United States opposed the Iran nuclear deal, as I did, but he had also become convinced that I was the obstacle to a Palestinian-Israeli peace that Mahmoud Abbas was ready for. I had to hand it to the Palestinians. They outflanked me by embracing a friend from whom I had grown apart, promising him that he would be the great peacemaker. Trump had known this person for many years and considered him a reliable source on the Middle East. How could I not see that coming? Admittedly, I wasn’t so much worried that Trump would cozy up to the Palestinians with the same vindictive zeal as Obama. Most of the senior officials in his administration did not buy the Palestinian line. Besides, I knew that Trump would come to appreciate the great support Israel and I had in the evangelical community, the most important element of his political base.
Benjamin Netanyahu (Bibi: My Story)
The young state of Israel also became the destination of postimperial migrations from Arab countries such as Iraq, Yemen, Libya, Morocco, Tunisia, Algeria, and Egypt, which during the postwar period shed the dominance of British, Italian, French, and Spanish colonialisms. Some 600,000 Jews from Arab countries moved to Israel during the first 25 years of statehood. They were part of a larger emigration movement from the newly independent former colonies, which mostly involved European settlers and officials leaving for the metropole or other colonies.90 These postcolonial migrations from outside Europe are usually considered separately from the postimperial migrations and expulsions on the European continent.91 But even where these two contexts are considered together, Jews only appear insofar as they (r)emigrated to the colonial metropole—for instance, from Algeria to France.92 Jews who emigrated from the former colonies to their newly designated homeland of Israel usually fell off the radar. Yet their migrations are particularly interesting because they represent a liminal case between the ideal types of postcolonial migration and ethnic unmixing or even ethnic cleansing. Jewish migrants from Arab states were clearly postcolonial migrants as they left newly independent former colonies. But given the coetaneous flight and expulsion of Palestinian Arabs from Israel, they were also part of an extended process of population exchange between Israel and the Arab world, which, after centuries of European and Ottoman dominance, emerged from decolonization reorganized into independent nation-states.
Jannis Panagiotidis (The Unchosen Ones: Diaspora, Nation, and Migration in Israel and Germany)
The United States could afford to leave Afghanistan, albeit with tragic consequences for the Afghan people, who would again be subjugated by the Taliban, because that country was thousands of miles away from America. But an Israeli withdrawal from large areas in Judea and Samaria would place the Islamists a few thousand meters from all of our major cities. We would hand the hills around Jerusalem and Tel Aviv to Hamas. A terrorist organization supported by Iran and committed to our destruction would take over the heart of our homeland and threaten our survival. US officials repeatedly underestimated the power of the Islamists and overestimated the power of their non-Islamist allies. Unless you have forces with an equal commitment to fight and die to defend their country, the Islamists eventually win. As long as Israeli forces held on to territories adjoining Israel, the Islamists would be kept at bay. The minute we vacated those territories, the Islamists would take over, as did Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza.
Benjamin Netanyahu (Bibi: My Story)
We all deserve a better ending to the story of the Holocaust. This could involve a strong multicultural Germany showing the way to the rest of Europe; an American society dealing bravely with the racial crimes of its past that still resonate today; an Arab world that expunges its barbarism and inhumanity … Nothing like that could happen if we continue to fall into the trap of treating mythologies as truths. Palestine was not empty and the Jewish people had homelands; Palestine was colonized, not “redeemed”; and its people were dispossessed in 1948, rather than leaving voluntarily.
Ilan Pappé (Ten Myths About Israel)
I am with you, rafēgh (comrade) By Siavash Kasrai Translation: Darya Saudade --- I am with you, rafēgh (comrade), in wherever you are and struggle. I am your neighbor when, beside the window in the evening's gaze, you hum the people’s anthem to yourself. I walk in step with you when, devoted to anxiety and eagerness, you hand out a nightly leaflet to every passerby in the alley, with the ring of every word, you awaken a heart, a city, a whole homeland. I am with you when among the people, like a restless fish in water, you slide and come and seek, and warn the sleeping of the flood coming. I work alongside you when the body is worn out from work, but, in the fields, the factories, you keep working, you keep working. I am your fellow-sufferer when with the caress of your hands you beckon the child to patience, as if awakening a bud from its slumber I am your fellow inmate when you fill the dragging moments with forgotten memories in the corner of your confinement or in the fever of torture and the throes of anguish. No, my soulmate, my comrade, no, I won’t leave you alone, when at an unknown dawn you sacrifice your life for ideals and love. I am with you, rafēgh, I am with you, rafēgh, In wherever I am and struggle. In wherever you are and struggle.
Siavash Kasrai
It was considered insanely hard to poison a computer's BIOS remotely, but if I was going to rebuild a computer that had been fatally pwned, ignoring the BIOS would be like changing all your house locks after losing your keys but leaving all the windows unlocked.
Cory Doctorow (Homeland (Little Brother, #2))
Ivo Andric, Bosnian chronicle (Quote about nostalgia, free translation from Bosnian lenguage) More than three hundred years ago, brought us from our homeland, a unique Andalusia, a terrible, foolish, fratricidal whirlwind, which we can not understand even today, and who has not understood it to this day, scattered us all over the world and made us beggars to which gold does not help. Now, threw us on the East, and life on the East is not easy for us or blessed, and the as much man goes further and gets closer to the sun's birth, it is worse, because the land is younger and more raw and people are from the land. And our trouble is that we could not fully love this country, to which we owe becouse it has received us, accept us and provided us with shelter, nor could we hate the one who has unjustly took us away and expelled us as an unworthly sons. We do not know is it more difficult that we are here or that we are not there. Wherever we were outside of Spain, we would suffer because we would have two homelands, I know, but here life is too much pressed us and humiliated us. I know that we have been changed for a long time,we do not remember anymore how we were, but surely we remember that we were different. We left and road up long time ago and we traveled hard and we unluckily fell down and stopped at this place, and that is why we are no longer even a shadow of what we were. As a powder on a fruit that goes hand-to-hand, from man first fall of what is finest on him. That's why we are like this. But you know us, us and our life, if we can call this life. We live between "occupiers" and commonalty, miserable commonalty and terrible Turkish. Cutted away completely from our loved ones, we are careful to look after and keep everything Spanish, songs and meals and customs, but we feel that everything changes in us, spoils and forgets. We remember the language of our land, the lenguage we did take and carried three centuries ago, the lenguage which even do not speak there anymore, and we ridiculously speak with stumbling the language of the comonalty with which we suffer and the Turkish who rules over us. So it may not be a long day when we will be purely and humanly able to express ourselves only in prayer, and which actually does not need any words. This so lonely and few, we marry between us and see that our blood is paling and fainting. We bend and shred in front of everyone, we mourn, suffer and contrive, as people said: on the ice we make campfire, we work, we gain, we save, not only for ourselves and for our children, but for all those who are stronger and more insolent, impudent than us and strike on our life , on the dignity, and on the wealth. So we preserved the faith for which we had to leave our beautiful country, but lost almost everything else. Luckily, and to our sorrow, we did not lose from our memory reminiscence of our dear country, as it was, before she drive away us like stepmother; just as it will never extinguish in us the desire for a better world, the world of order and humanity in which you goes stright, watches calmly and speaks openly. We can not free ourselves from that feeling, nor feeling that, in addition to everything, we belong to such a world, though, we are expelled and unhappy, otherwise we live. That's what we would like to know there. That our name does not die in that brighter and higher world that is constantly darkening and destroying, iconstantly moves and changes, but never collapses, and always for somebody exists, that that world knows that we are carrying him in our soul, that even here we serve him on our way, and we feel one with him, even though we are forever and hopelessly separated from him.
Ivo Andrić (Bosnian Chronicle (Bosnian Trilogy, #2))
To be fair to President Bush, however, his approach to revenue was not a new one. In 1980, the year when Planet Ponzi started to turn, the average effective federal tax rate on the median American household was 11.4%. By 2010, that rate had plummeted to just 4.7%.10 That is not a reasonable amount for the average family to pay in exchange for defense, social security, Medicare, Medicaid, homeland security, the Department of Education, environmental protection, and various other services besides. The results are all too predictable. If you want to understand why we have a deficit in the US, look at figure 3.2. The graph is unusual in that it aggregates all sources of government revenues: not just taxation but other fees, charges, utility revenues, rents‌—‌any money that leaves your pocket and ends up in the government’s.11
Mitch Feierstein (Planet Ponzi)
On the other hand, the claim ignores the fact that 300,000 Lebanese men and women emigrated to the West between 1890 and 1914.16 Had the Mutasarrifiyah been as successful as some purport, there might have been fewer immigrants willing to leave their homeland in search of economic opportunity abroad.
Louis Farshee (Safer Barlik: Famine in Mount Lebanon During World War I)
The high point of the days at the speedway involved ramming through a car that blocked the road, using the heavy Crown Vic as a battering ram. Tips from our burly and brainy instructor included, “Slow down before hitting the blocking vehicle,” “leave enough room to accelerate hard through it,” and even more to the point, “hit the wheels, which are attached to axles; this the most solid part of the opposing car.
Douglas Grindle (How We Won and Lost the War in Afghanistan: Two Years in the Pashtun Homeland)
It is a curious mystery [...] that the exact same notions of the Seven Sages as the bringers of civilization in the remotest antiquity, and of the preservation and repromulgation of “writings on stones from before the flood,” turn up in the supposedly completely distinct and unrelated culture of Ancient Egypt. Of the greatest interest, at any rate, is the [Temple of Horus]’s idea of itself expressed in the acres of enigmatic inscriptions that cover its walls. These inscriptions, the so-called Edfu Building Texts, take us back to a very remote period called the “Early Primeval Age of the Gods”--and these gods, it transpired, were not originally Egyptian, but lived on a sacred island, the “Homeland of the Primeval Ones,” in the midst of a great ocean. Then, at some unspecified time in the past, a terrible disaster--a true cataclysm of flood and fire [...]-- overtook this island, where “the earliest mansions of the gods” had been founded, destroying it utterly, inundating all its holy places and killing most of its divine inhabitants. Some survived, however, and we are told that this remnant set sail in their ships (for the texts leave us in no doubt that these gods of the early primeval age were navigators) to “wander” the world. [...] Of particular interest is a passage at Edfu in which we read of a circular, water-filled “channel” surrounding the original sacred domain that lay at the heart of the island of the Primeval Ones--a ring of water that was intended to fortify and protect that domain. In this there is, of course, a direct parallel to Atlantis, where the sacred domain on which stood the temple and palace of the god, whom Plato names as “Poseidon,” was likewise surrounded by a ring of water, itself placed in the midst of further such concentric rings separated by rings of land, again with the purpose of fortification and protection. Intriguingly, Plato also hints at the immediate cause of the earthquakes and floods that destroyed Atlantis. In the Timaeus, as a prelude to his account of the lost civilization and its demise, he reports that the Egyptian priests from whom Solon received the story began by speaking of a celestial cataclysm: “There have been and will be many different calamities to destroy mankind, the greatest of them being by fire and water, lesser ones by countless other means. Your own [i.e. the Greeks’] story of how Phaeton, child of the sun, harnessed his father’s chariot, but was unable to guide it along his father’s course and so burned up things on earth and was himself destroyed by a thunderbolt, is a mythical version of the truth that there is at long intervals a variation in the course of the heavenly bodies and a consequent widespread destruction by fire of things on earth.
Graham Hancock (Magicians of the Gods: The Forgotten Wisdom of Earth's Lost Civilization)
Home! he'd cried out like a child that would give anything not to be seeing what it was seeing, but precisely in this one brief moment in which he hid his face in his hands, as it were, even the dutiful German official had known that home would never again be called Bavaria, the Baltic coast or Berlin, home had been transformed into a time that now lay behind him, Germany had been irrevocably transformed into something disembodied, a lost spirit that neither knew nor was forced to imagine all these horrific things. H-o-m-e. Which thou must leave ere long. After he had swum his way through a brief bout of despair, the German official had applied to retain his post. those others, though, the ones who had fled their homeland before they themselves could be transformed into monsters, were thrust into homelessness by the news that reached them from back home, not just for the years of their emigration but also, as seems clear to her now, for all eternity, regardless of whether or not they returned.
Jenny Erpenbeck (Visitation)
This knowledge, however, served the purposes of peace rather than war. The German general staff grasped that the tide of Americans, now just shy of 2 million men in France, could push into Lorraine and overrun Metz, then the Saar, thus scattering Germany’s armies. The Germans pressed for peace at this time, before their military was completely shattered, to avoid leaving their homeland unprotected against rioters and revolutionists.
Joseph E. Persico (Eleventh Month, Eleventh Day, Eleventh Hour: Armistice Day, 1918)
But Dmitri Shostakovich and Boris Pasternak and Naguib Mahfouz were also right; never leave the homeland. Leave and your connections to the source will be severed. You will be like a dead trunk, hard and hollow.
Hisham Mitam
You do not realize the value of homeland until you are oppressed and forced to leave.
Amany Al-Hallaq
Our nation was settled and populated by Christians who could not abide persecution. Shipload after shipload of our Christian ancestors, for decade after decade, chose to move from their homeland in Europe immigrating to a land known for its religious freedom. Their decision to leave their own nation, leaving most of their family members and lifelong friends, in almost all cases to never see them in this world again, had to be gut-wrenching and tearful. They left their nation because the level of religious persecution they were experiencing was not tolerable.
John Price (The End of America: The Role of Islam in the End Times and Biblical Warnings to Flee America)
The plane was going to cross that gulf. Surely such journeys were reckless. This one could rob me of a skill that I have worked hard to cultivate: how to live away from places and people I love. Joseph Brodsky was right. So were Nabokov and Conrad. They were artists who never returned. Each had tried, in his own way, to cure himself of his country. What you have left behind has dissolved. Return and you will face the absence or the defacement of what you treasured. But Dmitri Shostakovich and Boris Pasternak and Naguib Mahfouz were also right: never leave the homeland. Leave and your connections to the source will be severed. You will be like a dead trunk, hard and hollow.
Hisham Matar (The Return: Fathers, Sons and the Land in Between)
Pretty much,” Sophie agreed. “Well, do not expect an answer every time. But Wildwood was where a small colony of gnomes lived. Most of their race fled to the Lost Cities after the ogres overthrew Serenvale, their ancient homeland. But a few gnomes refused to leave and took up residence in one of the Neutral Territories, in a grove not far from the borders of what has now become the ogres’ capital city.” “Why are you speaking past tense?” Della asked. “Calla said something about refugees.” “A better term would be ‘evacuees,’ ” Mr. Forkle corrected. “Some sort of plague struck the colony a few weeks back, and forced them to flee. They
Shannon Messenger (Neverseen (Keeper of the Lost Cities, #4))
Joseph was a lonely man carried down into Egypt away from his home and homeland, away from his family. The Bible says in the hour of his loneliness, the Lord was with him. Just as the Lord was with Joseph, He has promised those who know Him, “I will never leave thee, nor forsake thee” (Hebrews 13:5).
Clarence Sexton (The Life of Joseph: God Meant It Unto Good)
Spilling blood to protect the homeland was one thing. But spilling blood, only to then vacate hard-won gains on a whim and leave a vacuum that ended up making the problem far worse, was another.
Douglas E. Richards (Split Second (Split Second, #1))
Mostly Pakistani electronic and print media are talking, spreading, and participating in the foreign policy agenda against Islam, Armed Forces, Pakistan, and the Pakistani nation by receiving funds for that purpose. It is common sense to understand that there is no one; who will do against their people and land without getting any reward and money. They have organized the so-called "Amn Ki Aasha"; they are not on the "Mission of Peace," but on the "Mission of Destruction" of the moral, Islamic, and cultural values of our society. They are openly traitors and agents of foreign secret agencies, especially Indians. The agencies do not leave the proof and sign of their involvement. We should, as a Muslim nation and as a great Armed Forces of the world, first, trace and clean up the traitors and agents at home and within us and then turn to others, out of the homeland. The enemies, who are active to destroy our beloved Pakistani security, and peace, our media is the ugly enemy of our defense system, it should and must be brought to justice to give the lesson forever.
Ehsan Sehgal
Nobody wants to leave their homeland illegally out of their heart's desire, they are compelled to do so as the last resort due to utter degradation of life there.
Abhijit Naskar (Sleepless for Society)
Yaroslav died on February 28, 1054, and was buried in the Cathedral of St. Sophia, which he had built. His earthly remains were placed in a white marble sarcophagus decorated with carvings of the Christian cross and Mediterranean plants, including palms, which were by no means native to Kyivan Rus’. According to one theory, the sarcophagus—a stone embodiment of Byzantine cultural imperialism—had once been the final resting place of a Byzantine notable but was brought to Kyiv either by marauding Vikings or by enterprising Greeks. The sarcophagus is still preserved in the cathedral, but the remains of Yaroslav the Wise disappeared from Kyiv in 1943, during the German occupation of the city. By some accounts, they ended up in the hands of Ukrainian Orthodox hierarchs in the United States and were spotted in Manhattan after the war. Some suspect that they may now be in the Church of the Holy Trinity in Brooklyn. What could account for the transfer of Prince Yaroslav’s remains all the way to the Western Hemisphere? The answer has nothing to do with American cultural imperialism but is closely associated with the Ukrainian claim to the legacy of Kyivan Rus’. Ukrainian clergymen leaving their homeland removed the relics so as to prevent them from falling into the hands of the advancing Soviet army. Concern that if returned to Kyiv, they might end up in Russia explains enough the continuing refusal of the custodians of the Brooklyn church to discuss the issue of Yaroslav’s remains with representatives of the Ukrainian government. Both Ukrainians and Russians claim Yaroslav the Wise as one of their eminent medieval rulers, and his image appears on the banknotes of both countries. The Ukrainian bill depicts Yaroslav with a Ukrainian-style moustache in the tradition of Prince Sviatoslav and the Ukrainian Cossacks. On the Russian note, we see a monument to him as the legendary founder of the Russian city of Yaroslavl, first mentioned in a chronicle seventeen years after his death. The Russian bill shows Yaroslav with a beard in the tradition of Ivan the Terrible and the Muscovite tsars of his era.
Serhii Plokhy (The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine)
My father met Morarji. It was a stormy meeting. Morarji said angrily, ‘You Sindhi Hindus have no reason to leave your homeland and come as refugees [to] India. We have full assurances [from] Jinnah that the minorities will be well treated in Sindh. There may have been provocations but you should have had the courage to resist these attacks. You must all go back. There is no place for you here.
Nandita Bhavnani (THE MAKING OF EXILE: SINDHI HINDUS AND THE PARTITION OF INDIA)
Life has deceived none but the ignorant, left no one in need but the compelled, and forced none but the beggar to leave his homeland.
د.أحمد الدوسري (Ibn Zuraiq Al-Baghdadi: A Passenger of Time)
I met Ali in the refugee camp while covering the famine and cholera epidemic that erupted in Yemen in 2017. Two years before, Ali decided to leave his homeland “forever.” He managed to get onboard a small boat which took him to a tanker ship that would carry him and three hundred other refugees to Djibouti. The night of his escape, Ali’s skiff pulled next to the towering tanker. The tanker crew lowered a basket to raise him more than forty feet onto the deck. During that hoist, rising vertically above the sea, the basket lifted Ali to an epiphany. “The crazy people do not have the height dimension!” he explained. “They have only two dimensions!” Ali presented his right palm, flat as a drafting table. “The crazy people have only length and width,” he said. He drew the two dimensions in imaginary lines on his outstretched palm. Then, with his left hand, the one holding a phantom pencil, he drew a vertical line up from his palm, stopping at the level of his eyes. “You must have the vertical dimension to be truly human,” he said. The imaginary vertical line stood balanced on his palm. Ali’s eyes crossed slightly as he focused on the point of his invisible pencil. The line rose, like a cable lifting a basket, into a third dimension beyond humanity’s binary divisions: beyond the choice of Sunni or Shiite, Muslim or Christian, political left or right. Ali was mad. Maybe the war pushed him into insanity. Maybe it was the torturing heat. But within insanity, there can be a kind of clarity unavailable to those who consider themselves sane. In his escape from Yemen, swaying in a basket in the night, Ali saw something—something that looked to the rising draftsman like compassion, forgiveness and empathy—a third dimension, the dimension of peace.
Scott Pelley (Truth Worth Telling: A Reporter's Search for Meaning in the Stories of Our Times)