Refugee Quotes

“How foolish to believe we are more powerful than the sea or the sky.”
― Ruta Sepetys, Salt to the Sea

“But in our camp, his story was everyone’s story, a single tale of dispossession, of being stripped to the bones of one’s humanity, of being dumped like rubbish into refugee camps unfit for rats. Of being left without rights, home, or nation while the world turned its back to watch or cheer the jubilation of the usurpers proclaiming a new state they called Israel.”
― Susan Abulhawa, Mornings in Jenin

“we are the boat
returning to dock
we are the footprints
on the northern trail
we are the iron
coloring the soil
we cannot
be erased”
― Remi Kanazi, Before the Next Bomb Drops: Rising Up from Brooklyn to Palestine

“I was born walking, born in the nowhere between galaxies.”
― Hannah Lillith Assadi, Sonora

“You had to try to hang on to your name, though nobody cared about your name. You had to try and stay a person. You had to try not to become invisible. If you let go and fell back into the chaos you were gone, just a number in a unit, which was also a number. If you died, no one knew. If you gave up and disintegrated inside, no one knew.”
― Clemantine Wamariya, The Girl Who Smiled Beads: A Story of War and What Comes After

“I don't know how my mom was so unstoppable despite all that stuff happening. I dunno. Maybe it's anticipation. Hope. The anticipation that the God who listens in love will one day speak justice. The hope that some final fantasy will come to pass that will make everything sad untrue.”
― Daniel Nayeri, Everything Sad Is Untrue

“Lose your freedom, and become a slave by borrowing.”
― Oscar Auliq-Ice

“And whenever you look back and realize something was the last of something - like the last moment you ever saw your grandfather's house or the smell of the street you lived on or Orich bars or whatever - it can be an ordinary thing, but it also becomes the only thing you have, the clearest memory, and it gains all this extra meaning.”
― Daniel Nayeri, Everything Sad Is Untrue

“When you must flee and can carry only one thing, what will it be? What single seed from your old life will be the most useful in helping you sow a new one?”
― Chantha Nguon, Slow Noodles: A Cambodian Memoir of Love, Loss, and Family Recipes

“Sometimes you just want somebody to look at a thing with you and say, "Yes. That is a thing you're looking at. You haven't lied to yourself.”
― Daniel Nayeri, Everything Sad Is Untrue

“Weeping is reserved for those who stay. They weep and the earth weeps with them, the anguish drowned in a sea of shared grief. The exile cries alone, his voice sailing across eons unheeded, until, hitting the ghost of some dead galaxy, it is thrown back to haunt him.”
― Charlson Ong, Men of the East and Other Stories

“A refugee must learn to be anything people want her to be at any given moment. But behind the masks, I am only myself - a mosaic of flavors from near and far.”
― Chantha Nguon, Slow Noodles: A Cambodian Memoir of Love, Loss, and Family Recipes

“There can be no easy reconciliations, only complicated truths, told without shame. The murderers among us would have us believe that history is slippery and unknowable. Insisting otherwise is an act of defense... But the past never goes away. The fear and pain are still there, buried in our brains like mines. It is better to defuse them than to leave them entombed, quietly, waiting for a single misstep. That is why I am telling my story.”
― Chantha Nguon, Slow Noodles: A Cambodian Memoir of Love, Loss, and Family Recipes

“I put down Mr. Sheep Sheep. He props up on the dirt on a flat-panel bottom. His stubby round legs poke out in front of him. His arms reach out for a hug. I look in his black button eyes. They beg.”
― Daniel Nayeri, Everything Sad Is Untrue

“Here in Oklahoma, I understand why - why humans would sit behind a glass window and look in the faces of families running away from danger and dead sheep, and not feel anything. They think we're bad people who will come and take their stuff.”
― Daniel Nayeri, Everything Sad Is Untrue

“All of us inpatient for the sunrise, all of us in dread of it. All of us in search of home.”
― Khaled Hosseini, Sea Prayer

“Better a refugee than prisoner
(Sonnet 1555)

Eon upon eon I seek for a refuge,
Land upon land I receive but coldness.
Last I stand at your door exhausted,
Spare some warmth, for my heart freezes!

Stateless, cultless, I walk the planet.
Restless, sleepless, I live a dream.
Friendless, loveless, I brave the mission.
The being is dissolved for the beacon to beam.

Wield, I do, my conscience as compass.
Wear, I do, my backbone as battery.
Bouts of tragedy only amplifies my thunder,
Nature's bare mockery makes miracle of me.

Borders are for hoarders, my home is the world.
Better a refugee to the sea than prisoner of the pond.”
― Abhijit Naskar, World War Human: 100 New Earthling Sonnets

“Better a refugee to the sea than prisoner of the pond.”
― Abhijit Naskar, World War Human: 100 New Earthling Sonnets

“Better a refugee than prisoner.”
― Abhijit Naskar, World War Human: 100 New Earthling Sonnets

“Terrorists who manifested their destiny on stolen land, are banning immigrants!”
― Abhijit Naskar, Azad Earth Army: When The World Cries Blood

“The Refugee of Truth always runs into Self-Deception.”
― Sino Melo

“God is a Gypsy.”
― Abhijit Naskar, The God Sonnets: Naskar Art of Theology

“When a country disowns its own people, it doesn't render them stateless—it reveals its own shamelessness.”
― Qudama Rafiq

“The Rohingya legacy is not one of tragedy, but of triumph over silence, fear, and injustice.”
― Qudama Rafiq

“Rohingya Photographers, don't trade dignity for attention. Be the storytellers who inspire change, not cheap sympathy.”
― Qudama Rafiq

“Do not fear refugees.
Fear the silence that lets injustice grow.”
― Hagir Elsheikh, Dreamer In Chains: Poems of Exile and Resilience

“To be a refugee is to be split in two. One half buried in memories. The other is begging the world to let it bloom.”
― Hagir Elsheikh, Dreamer In Chains: Poems of Exile and Resilience

“away to the moon, away to another place, another time, another world, anywhere but here.”
― Christy Lefteri, The Beekeeper of Aleppo

“Call me misafir, call me göçmen,
This heart of mine is always migrant.
Şan ve şöhrete ben muhtaç değilim,
Benim derdim dünya, dünya dermanım.

Call me gypsy, or call me refugee,
This heart of mine is always migrant.
I've got no use for silicon or gold,
World is my bane, world, my ointment.

So many tongues, as many names -
Some call agua, some call pani.
Conquer the tongue, spirit is the same -
Some dub it divine, I live as humanity.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Yaralardan Yangın Doğar: Explorers of Night are Emperors of Dawn

“The wound remained. The feeling of being less - because we had no home - hung in the air. The weight of loss settled into our lives like dust in the corners of our fragile houses. We were a word written before we were born - refugee - an identity imposed, printed on the UNWRA ration card, carried like a birthmark.”
― Malak Hijazi, The Hajar Book of Rage