I always wanted to leave home. I never knew they were going to stop me from coming back. Maybe, if I knew, I never would have left. It is kind of painful to be away from everything that you've ever know. Nobody will know the pain of exile until you are in exile. No matter where you go, there are times when people show you kindness and love, and there are times when they make you know that you are with them but not of them. That's when it hurts.<ref name="Bordowitz">

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.

It was as though she was an exile from a world that saw things her way

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)

In exile one is nothing but a ghost ... I ceased to exist when I went into exile.

A departure can feel like a desertion, a judgement on the place and people left behind.

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.

All my life, I have lived with the feeling that I have been kept from my true place. If the expression "metaphysical exile" had no meaning, my existence alone would afford it one.

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.

It was the kind of town that made you feel like Humphrey Bogart: you came in on a bumpy little plane, and, for some mysterious reason, got a private room with a balcony overlooking the town and the harbor; then you sat there and drank until something happened. I felt a tremendous distance between me and everything real.

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.

Living in exile has its difficulties enough.

Living in exile has its difficulties enough.

I seem to be a ship that is sailing out of my own life.