Exile is a dream of glorious return. Exile is a vision of revolution: Elba, not St Helena. It is an endless paradox: looking forward by always looking back. The exile is a ball hurled high into the air. He hangs there, frozen in time, translated into a photograph; denied motion, suspended impossibly above his native earth, he awaits the inevitable moment at which the photograph must begin to move, and the earth reclaim its own.

While exile is not a thing to desire for the fun of it, there is an unexpected gain from it;the gifts of exile are many. It takes out weakness by the pounding. It removes whininess, enables acute insight , heightens intuition, grants the power of keen observation and perspective that the 'insider' can never achieve.

Exile is a dream of a glorious return. Exile is a vision of revolution: Elba, not St Helena. It is an endless paradox: looking forward by always looking back. The exile is a ball hurled high into the air.

I think South Africa is a great country.

I spent a lot of time with them. They had been forced into exile as students and had left their parents behind. With my experience, it was a mind-boggling experience, that so young a people could run away from their homes because of their political beliefs fearing arrest or being killed by government security agents. It led me to an appreciation of life; that people react differently under pressure. But even then, it wasn't that 'alien' to me because of the way I came to Botswana.

He left his vast country inAfrica. Now he lives in the big city of stone. And it isbetter for him, this exile. An exile where the inhabi-tants have respect for a white stick, where the stateensures his wellbeing and where facilities enable himto read and write

Those who don't belong to any specific place can't, in fact, return anywhere. The concepts of exile and return imply a point of origin, a homeland. Without a homeland and without a true mother tongue, I wander the world, even at my desk. In the end I realise that it wasn't a true exile: far from it. I am exiled even from the definition of exile.

To build a South Africa that many of us truly believe we deserve.

Living away from my native place I became more consciously Kentuckian than I was when I lived at home. This is what the experience of exile can do, change your mind, utterly transform one's perception of the world of home.

[Henry] Life is a kind of exile and we all long to go home. Who said that?

But, you can’t ever think of yourself as belonging in Europe. In terms then of an interior life, I remained South African, through teaching and writing about South Africa – both fiction and literary criticism. I returned for a few years and taught at UWC but then I couldn’t manage the family separation, and returned to Scotland.

Maybe once you are an exile, you always are an exile. Always missing somewhere else, always carrying a bit from here and a bit from there and always with a bit of a broken heart. (p280)

Can it really be that for us existence means exile, and nothingness, home?

..Africa: it's a magic word that lends itselfs to suppositions and sets amateur explorers to dreaming. I want to try to be 'at home' on this bit of foreign [Arab] soil.