Refugee Experience Quotes

“I want to go home, but home is the mouth of a shark. Home is the barrel of a gun. No one would leave home unless home chased you to the shore. No one would leave home until home is a voice in your ear saying--leave, run, now. I don't know what I've become.”
― Warsan Shire, Bless the Daughter Raised by a Voice in Her Head

“I have found myself leaning heavily on this pain. At first I tried to silence it, thinking it would go and leave me to my agitated content. That it would linger for a season, a firm reminder of the disquiet that lurks and coils below the surface of the stubbornly self-gratifying vision of our lives. Far from going, it became more clear, more precisely located, concrete, an object that occupied space within me, cockroachy, dark and intimate, emitting thick, stinking fumes that reeked of loneliness and terror. When I woke up in the morning, I groped for it, then sighed with plunging recognition as I felt it stirring inside me, alive and well.”
― Abdulrazak Gurnah, Admiring Silence

“I knew I could never again be complete in one place. This was what it meant to be exiled and disinherited - to straddle closed borders, never whole anywhere. To remain in one place meant tearing one's limbs from another.”
― Susan Abulhawa, Against the Loveless World

“I want you to be very successful. Remember, people like us cannot afford to fail "People like us"… immigrants, exiles, refugees, newcomers, outsiders… Too many words for a shared, recognizable sentiment that, no matter how often described, remains largely undefined. Children of uprooted parents are born into the memory tribe. Both their present and their future are forever shaped by their ancestral past, regardless of whether they have any knowledge of it. If they flourish and prosper, their achievements will be attributed to a whole community; and, in the same way, their failures will be charged up to something bigger and older than themselves, be it family, religion, or ethnicity. While the journey of life may be full of reversals of fortune, children from displaced families can never allow themselves to fall below the level at which their parents started it out.”
― Elif Shafak, There Are Rivers in the Sky

“Around the world, refugees are effectively offered a false choice between three dismal options: encampment, urban destitution, or perilous journeys.”
― Alexander Betts, Refuge: Transforming a Broken Refugee System

“One way of grounding how we should identify refugees in a changing world is through the concept of force majeure - the absence of a reasonable choice but to leave. More specifically, the threshold for refuge would be: fear of serious physical harm. And the test would be: when would a reasonable person not see her- or himself as having a choice but to flee? In other words, if you were in the same situation, what would you do?”
― Alexander Betts, Refuge: Transforming a Broken Refugee System

“Each day was a struggle, life's meaning veiled in sorrow's plight,
Drowning in my own tears, embracing the darkest nights
Hunger was my constant companion, I lived on dry bread and tea,
Yearning for relief, wondering if tomorrow's hope I will see.”
― Hagir Elsheikh

“I didn’t say anything to my dad. It’s not like he could do anything but talk on the phone anyway. We don’t live in the heroic age. Our separation isn’t any great poetic struggle. It’s just pain. It’s just ripping bodies apart.”
― Daniel Nayeri , Everything Sad Is Untrue

“That’s what forgetting your grandpa’s face feels like. There’s no good in it. Nothing to gain but nothing. A piece of your heart makes a sound like a groan and disappears. Then you poke at it sometimes, trying to remember what was there by the shape of the hole. That’s it. You are less.”
― Daniel Nayeri, Everything Sad Is Untrue