Refugee Literary Quotes

The kingdom of God dawns in trailer parks and refugee camps. That shouldn’t surprise us. The kingdom came to us not from a boardroom or a literary guild, but from a feeding trough and an execution stake.

What immediately strikes me is just how tattered the books are. Some of the spines have split. The binding has loosened and the threads stick out. Some of the books are in such bad condition that they seem to be held together only by their place on the shelf. They are neither old nor valuable, but they have had hard lives - emigres, some having arrived with refugees from Russia before the war, only to go back east at a later stage. More than sixty years later they have come home to Paris.

The church is not built on the rock foundation of geniuses and influencers but of apostles and prophets. This should hardly be surprising, since the kingdom is not greater than its king, and the body is not greater than its head. When confronted by the gospel, the natural response from any culture is, “Can any good thing come out of Nazareth?” That’s true, come to think of it, even in Nazareth (Luke 4:24). And the natural counter-argument from the church is, “Come and see” (John 1:46). The kingdom of God dawns in trailer parks and refugee camps. That shouldn’t surprise us. The kingdom came to us not from a boardroom or a literary guild, but from a feeding trough and an execution stake.

It's a great paradox: we come from a lost world we can only glimpse when it disappears. Our image of orality comes from books. We gain our familiarity with winged words through their opposite, words fixed in writing and therefore made motionless. Once transcribed, these stories lost their fluidity, their flexibility, the freedom of improvisation, and , in many cases, their characteristic language forever. For this legacy to be saved, it had to be mortally wounded. It is wounded yet remains fascinating. The wealth of imagination at the dawn of our culture has survived without fully fading into the mists of time. We hear its distant echoes in the transcription of mythologies, fables, sagas, folk songs, and traditional tales. Transformed, recast, and reinterpreted, we find it in The Iliad and The Odyssey, the Greek tragedies, the Torah (and the Old Testament), The Ramayana, The Edda, And The Thousand and One Nights, And it's precisely these exiled stories - literary refugees in the foreign land of written texts - that5 make up the backbone of our culture.

Anyone else would have known it was utterly useless asking Carl such a question. He never watched the news, never listened to the radio, never read a newspaper. He would have been the first to admit that he had lost touch with the world. It had been a deliberate decision, once all the reports of incompetent state leaders, ice cap melt, and suffering refugees had begun to sadden him more than the most tragic literary family saga ever could. It had been a form of self-preservation, even though his world had shrunk as a result. The world he now inhabited measured no more than two-by-two kilometers, and he patrolled its borders every day.