"The Emigrants" Quotes

Men and women are not only themselves; they are also the region in which they are born, the city apartment or the farm in which they learned to walk, the games they played as children, the old wives’ tales they overheard, the food they ate, the schools they attended, the sports they followed, the poets they read, and the God they believed in.

Only the song of the partridges and the wind in the trees can be heard in the silence of the countryside.

The years of longing, the years of wandering, the years of fear, the years of bitter toil, the years of grave illness – these years have been given back to me altogether in this autumn of my life, and I am filled with a new sense of peace.

The past is never fully closed, and understanding the past is the key to the present.

It is a good thing, I think, for a man to have a place where he can go and be quiet.

Our lives are so brief; they seem to be over before they have begun, and yet we waste so much time.

We are never truly at home in the world, for we are always other.

We are on this earth for a little while, and while we are here, we should try to do good.

We carry the dead with us, and even the dead are not safe from harm.

The world is full of stories, and the stories are all we have to make sense of our lives.