“This is the most immediate fruit of exile, of uprooting: the prevalence of the unreal over the real.”

To give a name to a thing is as gratifying as giving a name to an island, but it is also dangerous: the danger consists in one’s becoming convinced that all is taken care of and that once named, the phenomenon has also been explained.

A scientist’s life, the author says, is indeed conflictual, formed by battles, defeats, and victories: but the adversary is always and only the unknown.

More dangerous are…the functionaries ready to believe and act without asking questions.

For he who loses all often easily loses himself.

If it is true that there is no greater sorrow than to remember a happy time in a state of misery, it is just as true that calling up a moment of anguish in a tranquil mood, seated quietly at one’s desk, is a source of profound satisfaction.

The new kings of the world will live tranquilly for a long time, confining themselves to devouring each other and being parasites among each other on a cottage industry scale.

A country is considered the more civilised the more the wisdom and efficiency of its laws hinder a weak man from becoming too weak and a powerful one too powerful.

If a writer is convinced that he is honest, then it is very difficult for him to be a bad writer.

We who survived the Camps are not true witnesses.

It happened, therefore it can happen again: this is the core of what we have to say. It can happen, and it can happen everywhere.

My number is 174517; we have been baptized, we will carry the tattoo on our left arm until we die.

Human memory is a marvelous but fallacious instrument.

To accuse another of having weak kidneys, lungs, or heart, is not a crime; on the contrary, saying he has a weak brain is a crime.

The butterfly’s attractiveness derives not only from colors and symmetry: deeper motives contribute to it.

Perfection belongs to narrated events, not to those we live.

An enemy who sees the error of his ways ceases to be an enemy.

I don’t know that I want to settle there. I prefer the creative spur of exile. () But wherever I am I shall be Jewish, and that sound will inform every syllable I write.

Exile as a mode of genius no longer exists; in place of Joyce we have the fragments of work appearing in Index on Censorship.

The perpetuation of slavery, the exile and extermination of American Indians, and the passage of Jim Crow laws weren’t carried out at the bidding of a few malefactors of great wealth.

There being no shared daily life what with migrations, exiles, diasporas, rendings, the search for work. Or there is a shared daily life riddled with holes of silence

Were you indeed not blinded by the Curse Of Self-exile, that still grows worse and worse, Yourselves would know that, though you see him not, He is with you this Moment, on this Spot.

When some one reminded him that the people of Sinope had sentenced him to exile, he said, “And I sentenced them to stay at home.