Displaced Quotes

1. "For people who are displaced, you can reconstruct the story of your life from the objects you have access to, but if you don't have the objects then there are holes in your life. This is why people in Bosnia - if anyone was running back into a burning house, it was to salvage photos."
Author: Aleksandar Hemon

2. "I saw my mother in a different light. We all need to do that. You have to be displaced from what's comfortable and routine, and then you get to see things with fresh eyes, with new eyes."
Author: Amy Tan

3. "I'm teetering on the verge of tears and I feel like such a wuss. Who am I to be crying when all these people just got displaced from their homes? No one. That's who."
Author: Anna Banks

4. "How displaced is the sympathy lavished on adolescents. There is a yet more difficult age which comes later, when one has less to hope for and less ability to change, when one has cast the die and has to settle into a chosen life without the consolations of habit or the wisdom of maturity."
Author: Barbara Pym

5. "But artists aren't the only marginalized folks controlling real estate. Think about the colonizing role that wealthy white gay men have played in communities of color; they're often the first group to gentrify poor and working-class neighborhoods. Harlem is a good example. Gays have moved in and driven up rents, as have renegade young white students, who want to be cool and hip. This is colonization, post-colonial-style. After all, the people who are "sent back" to recover the territory are always those who don't mind associating with the colored people! And it's a double bind, because some of these people could be allies. Some gay white men are proactive about racism, even while being entrepreneurial. But in the end, they take spaces, redo them, sell them for a certain amount of money, while the people who have been there are displaced. And in some cases, the people of color who are there are perceived as enemies by white newcomers."
Author: Bell Hooks

6. "Accountants, machinists, medical technicians, even software writers that write the software for 'machines' are being displaced without upscaled replacement jobs. Retrain, rehire into higher paying and value-added jobs? That may be the political myth of the modern era. There aren't enough of those jobs."
Author: Bill Gross

7. "Everything suddenly seems displaced, subtle gradations erase borders, but it's more forceful than that."
Author: Bret Easton Ellis

8. "Beauty without grace is like a fish far displaced from the water and looking at this kind of beauty is like watching that fish die right there on the cement in front of you."
Author: C. JoyBell C.

9. "In time, most children stop being puzzled in this way. They settle in. The world around them, as it becomes familiar and daily, becomes ordinary. But for writers, like children who have never quite grown up, life retains a quality of strangeness; it remains a matter of questions for which there are no satisfactory answers, of hidden motives, displaced explanations, subtle concealments and mysteries. Eavesdropping of one kind or another, keeping an eye open and an ear cocked, even in public places, for the giveaway facial expression or gesture, the revealing word, becomes a settled habit for the writer, a necessary part of his professional equipment: the laying down of small scraps of information, of observation or experience, for future use."
Author: David Malouf

10. "By the time the sixties hit their home bases, we the kids, were already born, and our parents found themselves stuck between an entrenched belief that children needed to be raised in a traditional household, and a new sense that anything was possible, that the alternative lifestyle was out there for the asking. There they were in marriages they once thought were a necessity and with children they'd had almost by accident in a world that was suddenly saying, 'No necessities! No accidents! Drop Everything!' A little too old to take full advantage of the cultural revolution, our parents just got all the fallout. Freedom hit them obliquely, and invidiously, rather than head-on. Instead of waiting longer to get married, our parents got divorced; Instead of becoming feminists, our mothers were left to become displaced homemakers. A lot of unhappy situations were dissolved by people who were not quite young or free enough to start again."
Author: Elizabeth Wurtzel

11. "The Jews are a peculiar people: Things permitted to other nations are forbidden to the Jews.Other nations drive out thousands, even millions of people, and there is no refugee problem. Russia did it. Poland and Czechoslovakia did it. Turkey threw out a million Greeks and Algeria a million Frenchmen. Indonesia threw out heaven knows how many Chinese--and no one says a word about refugees.But in the case of Israel, the displaced Arabs have become eternal refugees. Everyone insists that Israel must take back every single Arab. Arnold Toynbee calls the displacement of the Arabs an atrocity greater than any committed by the Nazis. Other nations when victorious on the battlefield dictate peace terms. But when Israel is victorious it must sue for peace.Everyone expects the Jews to be the only real Christians in this world."
Author: Eric Hoffer

12. "The doctor from the mainland came and went. Silence settled over the island again, like a displaced curtain falling back in thickened, heavier folds. For there was a different quality in the silence now. It had tasted something, rich food on which it had long been thinly rationed. Shadowy things were trooping up, called by that scent of blood, like flies that smell carrion. They were not strangers to the old house; they had been ill-fed and at a distance, now they were hungry and avid and near."
Author: Evangeline Walton

13. "His adolescents are displaced aristocrats who have lost their kingdom and wealth, which was childhood. [On J.D. Salinger]"
Author: Heather O'Neill

14. "It is because the children of the empire were not suckled by wolves that they were conquered & displaced by the children of the northern forests who were."
Author: Henry David Thoreau

15. "Today three-quarters of the Palestinian people are displaced: there are 5 million Palestinian refugees throughout the world."
Author: Ismail Haniyeh

16. "The thing is, a lot of our vets come home and they feel displaced, and they don't feel like their voice matters, so for me to be a spokesman and have that honor to educate America about who we are and what we are, it's like I'm doing my job."
Author: J. R. Martinez

17. "Do you ever want to go home?' I asked Paul.He brushed an ash from my face. 'It's the century of the displaced person,' he said. 'You can never go home."
Author: Janet Fitch

18. "They whisper: no little man from Customs and Immigration stands at the doors of memory or imagination demanding to see your passport. No arts bureaucrat or ComLit satrap can stamp OzLit, CanLit, FemLit, MigrantLit, or Displaced Person on your visa."
Author: Janette Turner Hospital

19. "In both jokes and dreams, Freud observed, meanings are condensed and displaced, things are represented indirectly or by their opposites, fallacious reasoning trumps logic. Jokes often arise involuntarily, like dreams, and tend to be swiftly forgotten. From these similarities Freud inferred that jokes and dreams share a common origin in the unconscious. Both are essentially means of outwitting our inner "censor."
Author: Jim Holt

20. "I am very aware that there are many of you who have friends and loved ones in the areas affected by this storm who have been displaced or who have not yet been accounted for."
Author: Jo Bonner

21. "Never in our country's history have we witnessed a natural disaster that has impacted so many people in such a wide area. In fact, as of the writing of this column, millions of people along the Gulf Coast have been displaced from their homes in a period of only five days."
Author: Jo Bonner

22. "Yes, I got my first Bolex camera a few weeks after being dropped in New York by the United Nations Refugee Organization. That was on October 29th, 1949. With my brother Adolfas, we wanted to make a film about displaced persons, how one feels being uprooted from one's home."
Author: Jonas Mekas

23. "When the old way of seeing was displaced, a hollowness came into architecture. Our buildings show a constant effort to fill that void, to recapture that sense of life which was once to be found in any house or shed. Yet the sense of place is not to be recovered through any attitude, device, or style, but through the principles of pattern, spirit, and context." - Jonathan Hale, The Old Way of Seeing, 1994"
Author: Jonathan Hale

24. "Words, displaced and mutilated words, words of others, were the poor pittance left him by the hours and the centuries."
Author: Jorge Luis Borges

25. "And just as agriculture has displaced species-dense communities with its monocrops, its diet has displaced the nutrient-dense foods that humans need, replacing them with mononutrients of sugar and starch. This displacement led immediately to a drop in human stature as agriculture spread - the evidence couldn't be clearer. The reasons are just as clear. Meat contains protein, minerals, and fats, fats that we need to metabolize those proteins and minerals. In contrast, grains are basically carbohydrates: what protein they do contain is low quality - lacking essential amino acids - and comes wrapped in indigestible fiber. Grains are essentially sugar with enough opioids to make them addictive."
Author: Lierre Keith

26. "We are, when we love, in an abnormal state, capable of giving at once to the most apparently simple accident, an accident which may at any moment occur, a seriousness which in itself it would not entail. What makes us so happy is the presence in our hearts of an unstable element which we contrive perpetually to maintain and of which we cease almost to be aware so long as it is not displaced. In reality, there is in love a permanent strain of suffering which happiness neutralises, make potential only, postpones, but which may at any moment become, what it would long since have been had we not obtained what we wanted, excruciating."
Author: Marcel Proust

27. "The new fashions sold in departmentstores had thrown skilled American seamstresses out of work, you see.They'd been displaced by immigrant girls doing piecework for a pittancein terrible sweatshops. I refused to patronize a garment industrythat exploited its desperately poor workers so heartlessly.And if that wasn't enough to keep me out of stores, there was this aswell: I was determined to resist that shameless sister of war propaganda—the advertising industry."
Author: Mary Doria Russell

28. "There was a rhythmic grinding sound, as if the engines of the universe itself were protesting, a rush of displaced air, and a large blue police box materialised in the back garden of Amy Pond's house."
Author: Neil Gaiman

29. "Death is a displaced name for a linguistic predicament."
Author: Paul De Man

30. "However, in fetishism the desired object is displaced; and in this context ("The Apparition" by Guy De Maupassant) it is the desiring object, so to speak. In other words, have we ever seen a boot in love with a fetishist?"
Author: Philippe Lejeune

31. "Now if this electron is displaced from its equilibrium position, a force that is directly proportional to the displacement restores it like a pendulum to its position of rest."
Author: Pieter Zeeman

32. "In a brief moment of lucidity, I was sure that we'd all gone crazy. But then that moment of lucidity was displaced by a supersecond of superlucidity (if I can put it that way), in which I realized that this scene was the logical outcome of our ridiculous lives. It wasn't a punishment but a new wrinkle. It gave us a glimpse of ourselves in our common humanity. It wasn't proof of our idle guilt but a sign of our miraculous and pointless innocence. But that's not it. That's not it. We were still and they were in motion and the sand on the beach was moving, not because of the wind but because of what they were doing and what we were doing, which was nothing, which was watching, and all of that together was the wrinkle, the moment of superlucidity. Then, nothing."
Author: Roberto Bolaño

33. "Let's take this figure of the feminist killjoy seriously. Does the feminist kill other people's joy by pointing out moments of sexism? Or does she expose the bad feelings that get hidden, displaced, or negated under public signs of joy? Does bad feeling enter the room when somebody expresses anger about things, or could anger be the moment when the bad feelings that circulate through objects get brought to the surface in a certain way?"
Author: Sara Ahmed

34. "Accordingly, identification, or the formation of composite figures, serves different purposes: first, to represent a feature both persons have in common; secondly, to represent a displaced common feature; but thirdly, to find expression for a common feature that is merely wished for. Since wishing it to be the case that two people have something in common is often the same as exchanging them, this relation too is expressed in the dream by identification. In the dream of Irma's injection, I wish to exchange this patient for another, that is, I wish that the other were my patient, as Irma is; the dream takes account of the wish in showing me a figure who is called Irma, but who is examined in a posture in which I have only had occasion to see the other."
Author: Sigmund Freud

35. "The whole world seems tilted, my inner ear displaced by a hole where my spouse used to be."
Author: Suzanne Finnamore

36. "If we live with possibilities we are exiles from the present which is given us by God to be our own, homeless and displaced in a future or a past which are not ours because they are always beyond our reach. The present is our right place, and we can lay hands on whatever it offers us."
Author: Thomas Merton

37. "Displaced Person's SongIf you see a train this evening,Far away, against the sky,Lie down in your woolen blanket,Sleep and let the train go by.Trains have called us, every midnight,From a thousand miles away,Trains that pass through empty cities,Trains that have no place to stay.No one drives the locomotive,No one tends the staring light,Trains have never needed riders,Trains belong to bitter night.Railway stations stand deserted,Rights-of-way lie clear and cold,What we left them, trains inherit,Trains go on, and we grow old.Let them cry like cheated lovers,Let their cries find only wind,Trains are meant for night and ruin,And we are meant for song and sin."
Author: Thomas Pynchon

38. "In short, the Enlightenment privatized marriage, taking it out of the public sphere, and redefined its purpose as individual gratification, not any "broader good" such as reflecting God's nature, producing character, or raising children. Slowly but surely, this newer understanding of the meaning of marriage has displaced the older ones in Western culture."
Author: Timothy Keller

39. "The Arabs understandably did everything they could to protect their monopoly. Coffee beans were treated before being shipped to ensure they were sterile and could not be used to seed new coffee plants; foreigners were excluded from coffee-producing areas. First to break the Arab monopoly were the Dutch, who displaced the Portuguese as the dominant European nation in the East Indies during the seventeenth century, gaining control of the spice trade in the process and briefly becoming the world's leading commercial power."
Author: Tom Standage

40. "I do think we have the capacity to love more than one person at a time, and that the love we feel for someone can be displaced, transferred, shifted. Even shared with another. But not lost. At least not forever."
Author: Tracey Garvis Graves

41. "How strange was the relation between parents and children! When they were small the parents doted on them, passed through agonies of apprehension at each childish ailment, and the children clung to their parents with love and adoration; a few years passed, the children grew up, and persons not of their kin were more important to their happiness than father or mother. Indifference displaced the blind and instinctive love of the past. Their meetings were a source of boredom and irritation. Distracted once at the thought of a month's separation they were able now to look forward with equanimity to being parted for years."
Author: W. Somerset Maugham

42. "Life itself has lost its plane reality: it is projected, not along the old fixed points, but along the dynamic coordinates of Einstein, of revolution. In this new projection, the best-known formulas and objects become displaced, fantastic, familiar-unfamiliar. This is why it is so logical for literature today to be drawn to the fantastic plot, or to the amalgam of reality and fantasy. ("The New Russian Prose")"
Author: Yevgeny Zamyatin

Displaced Quotes Pictures