Rootlessness Quotes

“Rootlessness," I opine, "is the twenty-first century norm."

"You're not wrong and that's why we're in the shit we're in, mate. If you belong nowhere, why give a tinker's toss about anywhere?”
― David Mitchell, The Bone Clocks

“The Open Road goes to the used-car lot.”
― Louis Simpson, People Live Here: Selected Poems 1949-1983

“Modern life is a centrifuge; it throws people in every direction.”
― Paul Murray, The Mark and the Void

“This rootless shifting east and west
I can't suppress a smile myself
but how else can I make
the whole world my home.
If any of my old friends
come around asking
say I'm down at the river
by the Second Fushimi Bridge.”
― Baisao, The Old Tea Seller: Life and Zen Poetry in 18th Century Kyoto

“What did Kiyoaki mean by his question? If one were forced to hazard a guess, it would be that he was trying to say that he had no interest in anything at all. He thought of himself as a thorn, a small, poisonous thorn jabbed into the workmanlike hand of his family. And this was his fate simply because he had acquired little elegance. A mere fifty years before, the Matsugaes had been a sturdy, upright samurai family, no more, eking out a frugal existence in the provinces. But in a brief span of time, their fortunes had soared. By Kiyoake’s time, the first traces of refinement were threatening to take hold on a family that, unlike the court of nobility, had enjoyed centuries of immunity to the virus of elegance. And Kiyoake, like an ant that senses the approaching flood, was experiencing the first intimations of his family’s rapid collapse.

His elegance was the thorn. And he was well aware that his aversion to coarseness, his delight in refinement, were futile; he was a plant without roots. Without meaning to undermine his family, without wanting to violate its traditions, he was condemned to do so by his very nature. And this poison would stunt his own life as it destroyed his family. The handsome young man felt that this futility typified his existence.

(p13.)”
― Yukio Mishima, Spring Snow

“How, I wondered, might a person, a people, take root, roots and rootlessness, the preservation of what little remains of the past, such were thoughts that blew through me on any given morning, standing very still in the porch, or in the garden, in my bare feet, feeling suddenly: that sound, that rushing, it is the wind, it is the trees!”
― Sarah Bernstein, Study for Obedience

“Every experience lately felt like an experiment of the body, of its power and limitations. Such experiments created a desire for something more fulfilling. It was a hunger born of rootlessness but he couldn't see that. He couldn't see that true liberation was a strictly DIY process.”
― Diriye Osman, Fairytales for Lost Children

“Modern man is an island, in a historical sense. Every society born of revolution is an island, and it is an island that floats, like a thin film on the surface of history. He is always moving, disconnected from all that came before him, and never holding still long enough to strike the roots necessary to pass something on to those who will come after.”
― Daniel Schwindt, The Case Against the Modern World: A Crash Course in Traditionalist Thought

“In a barren culture, one or two fragmentary story-themes play, like a broken record, broadcasting the same notes over and over again.”
― Clarissa Pinkola Estés

“So where are you reall from?" I'm asked now and then, and I can only apologetically offer a list of places I've passed through. In that litany, I cross my fingers and hope that people will understand that I'm a messy agglutinate of all the places I've ever lived in. Like a hologram created by splitting up light beams, a permanent record of all the places I've lived, reflected off me.

And as with all things that are required to fit into the tiniest dimensions for efficient and optimal portability, I require assembly,”
― Shruti Buddhavarapu

“I had no brothers or sisters, so life was not difficult for my mother and me. When I think back, I see her clearly with her thin lips resolutely closed, with something on her face like a mask, I don't know – a thick mask, as though her face were the surface of the sea. Do you understand? It possessed not a single colour but a multitude, appearing and disappearing and intermingling. We had no relatives. She and I acted as relatives to each other. It was as if she were some stranger on the road with whom circumstances had chanced to bring me... I used to have – you may be surprised – a warm feeling of being free, that there was not a human being, by father or mother, to tie me down as a tent peg to particular spot, a particular domain... I was not like other children of my age: I wasn't wasn't affected by anything, I didn't cry when hit, wasn't glad if the teacher praised me in class, didn't suffer from the things the rest did. I was like something rounded, made of rubber: you throw it in the water and it doesn't get wet, you throw it on the ground and it bounces back.”
― Tayeb Salih, Season of Migration to the North