Passages about home and exile

Tell me, O Muse, of that ingenious hero who travelled far and wide after he had sacked the famous town of Troy.

I would rather be a paid servant in a poor man's house and be above ground than king of kings among the dead.

I sing of arms and of the man who first came, a fugitive by fate, from the coasts of Troy to Italy and the Lavinian shores.

Can there be such anger in the minds of the gods?

Midway upon the journey of our life I found myself within a forest dark, for the straightforward pathway had been lost.

All hope abandon, ye who enter in!

In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.

Am I my brother's keeper?

Of all creatures that have breath and understanding, we women are the most wretched.

I would rather stand three times in the line of battle than give birth once.

I suffered those deeds more than I performed them.

Not to be born is best of all; and next best, by far, is to go back quickly where you came from.

You don't know about me without you have read a book by the name of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer; but that ain't no matter.

Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot.

There was Chaos and Night and black Erebus at first, and wide Tartarus, and no earth or air or sky; and in the boundless bosom of Erebus black-winged Night brought forth a wind-egg.

What do you want to call the place? Something grand, out of the clouds, plenty of puff to it. Cloudcuckooland?

Midway upon the journey of our life I found myself within a forest dark, for the straightforward pathway had been lost.

All hope abandon, ye who enter in.

In this best of all possible worlds, everything is for the best.

It is demonstrable that things cannot be otherwise than they are; for as all things have been created for some end, they must necessarily be created for the best end. Noses were made to carry spectacles, so we have spectacles.

Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road and this moocow that was coming down along the road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo.

I will not serve that in which I no longer believe, whether it call itself my home, my fatherland or my church: and I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can and as wholly as I can, using for my defence the only arms I allow myself to use, silence, exile, and cunning.

And when the day of Pentecost was fully come, they were all with one accord in one place. And suddenly there came a sound from heaven as of a rushing mighty wind, and it filled all the house where they were sitting.

Saul, Saul, why persecutest thou me?

All the world's a stage, / And all the men and women merely players: / They have their exits and their entrances; / And one man in his time plays many parts, / His acts being seven ages.

Men have died from time to time, and worms have eaten them, but not for love.

If music be the food of love, play on; / Give me excess of it, that, surfeiting, / The appetite may sicken, and so die.

She never told her love, / But let concealment, like a worm i' the bud, / Feed on her damask cheek: she pined in thought, / And with a green and yellow melancholy / She sat like patience on a monument, / Smiling at grief.

And I have felt / A presence that disturbs me with the joy / Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime / Of something far more deeply interfused, / Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns.

There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream, / The earth, and every common sight, / To me did seem / Apparelled in celestial light, / The glory and the freshness of a dream. / It is not now as it hath been of yore.

There was no hope for him this time: it was the third stroke. Night after night I had passed the house and studied the lighted square of window.

She stood among the swaying crowd in the station at the North Wall. He held her hand and she knew that he was speaking to her, saying something about the passage over and over again. All the seas of the world tumbled about her heart.

April is the cruellest month, breeding / Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing / Memory and desire, stirring / Dull roots with spring rain.

Unreal City, / Under the brown fog of a winter dawn, / A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many, / I had not thought death had undone so many.

If you surrendered to the air, you could ride it.

O Sugarman done fly away, Sugarman done gone, Sugarman cut across the sky, Sugarman gone home.

The hymn opens by praising Inanna as mistress of all the divine powers, clothed in terror, the great lady who makes heaven tremble and earth quake, a goddess whose dominion extends over war and destruction as fully as over any other domain of divine power.

Enheduanna describes being driven from her temple by the rebel Lugal-Ane, who strips her of her office and her regalia, and states that she called out to her own god Nanna for help and received no answer, as if he did not care that his own priestess had been so thoroughly humiliated.

They shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.

Comfort, O comfort my people, says your God. Speak tenderly to Jerusalem, and cry to her that she has served her term, that her penalty is paid.

Hecuba learns that her daughter Cassandra, the prophetess whose warnings no one ever believed, has been allotted to Agamemnon as his concubine, a fate Cassandra herself receives not with despair but with a wild, prophetic joy the other characters find deeply unsettling.

Andromache, widow of Hector, learns she is being given to Neoptolemus, son of Achilles, the very man responsible for her husband's death, and must accept this fate while still grieving Hector and now facing the additional horror of her young son's impending execution.

In the first Eclogue Tityrus, reclining under his beech and playing his pipe, has kept his farm by the favour of a young god at Rome, while Meliboeus drives his goats into exile, dispossessed by a veteran.

The fourth Eclogue foretells a child whose birth will bring back the golden age, when the earth will give its fruits unasked and the serpent will die, a prophecy that Christians later read as foretelling Christ.

Ibn Arabi's poems mourn a departed beloved in the classical manner of the qasida, naming the abandoned desert campsites, the departing caravan, and the stations of the pilgrimage, working entirely within poetic conventions inherited from earlier Arabic love poetry.

He describes a heart that has become capable of every form, a pasture for gazelles and a convent for monks, a temple for idols and the pilgrim's Kaaba, and tables of the Torah and the scroll of the Quran, a single image absorbing multiple religious traditions' particular symbols into one unified capacity for love.

The account describes the passage through the Strait of Magellan and the execution of Thomas Doughty at Port St Julian, a fellow Englishman Drake condemned for alleged mutiny and witchcraft, exposing command's brutal underside during an otherwise celebrated voyage.

The plunder of Spanish ships and towns along the Pacific coast of the Americas, and the landing in what Drake named Nova Albion in California, together stage English privateering violence and territorial ambition against Spanish colonial power in the Pacific.

Two sets of identical twins, both pairs separated as infants in a shipwreck, end up in the same city of Ephesus on the same day without knowing it, doubling the confusion beyond Shakespeare's classical Roman source's single pair of twins.

Antipholus of Syracuse and his servant Dromio are mistaken at every turn for their local twins, who are also called Antipholus and Dromio, entangling wives, merchants, a courtesan and a goldsmith in escalating confusion throughout the city.

As I walked through the wilderness of this world, I lighted on a certain place where was a den, and I laid me down in that place to sleep, and as I slept I dreamed a dream.

The name of the slough was Despond. Here, therefore, they wallowed for a time, being grievously bedaubed with the dirt, and Christian, because of the burden that was on his back, began to sink in the mire.

Crusoe describes salvaging what he can from the wrecked ship before it breaks apart entirely, biscuit, gunpowder, tools, and begins the meticulous inventory that will structure his account of the following twenty-eight years.

Struck by a severe fever and convinced he is dying, Crusoe experiences a vision and turns for the first time to a Bible salvaged from the wreck, beginning a religious conversion he comes to read as the true meaning of his shipwreck and isolation.

Parson Yorick travels through France without ever reaching Italy, recording not sights but encounters, with a monk in Calais, a lady whose hand he holds, a grisette, a caged starling that cannot get out, and a peasant family at supper.

The book is a comedy of feeling that parodies the grand tour and Smollett's ill-tempered travels, positioning Sterne's approach as deliberate corrective, substituting cultivated sensibility for aristocratic cataloguing or irritable complaint.

Goldsmith opens by addressing Auburn directly as the loveliest village of the plain, recalling in loving, specific detail its parson, its schoolmaster, its alehouse and the evening games and gatherings that once filled its now-empty green.

He describes a single rich landowner enclosing the common land that had once supported the village's many small farming families, converting shared agricultural ground into a private pleasure park and driving the villagers from the land that had sustained them for generations.

Occom, a Mohegan who converted during the Great Awakening, was educated by Eleazar Wheelock, became a Presbyterian minister and preacher in England, and spent his later life founding the Christian Indian town of Brothertown in New York.

The 1772 sermon preached at the execution of the Mohegan Moses Paul was the first work published in English by a Native American and a bestseller in its day, establishing Occom's authority as writer within English print culture.

Hermann, the prosperous innkeeper's son, brings a cart loaded with clothing and provisions out to the refugees passing through the town, and among them notices Dorothea, a young woman managing and caring for the displaced families around her with a competence and dignity that immediately strikes him.

Hermann's father makes clear he wants a richer match for his son than a penniless refugee could provide, prompting Hermann's mother, more sympathetic to her son's actual feelings, to send the pastor and the apothecary out among the refugees to make careful, discreet inquiries into Dorothea's actual character and background.

He holds him with his glittering eye, the wedding guest stood still, and listens like a three years' child, the mariner hath his will.

Instead of the cross, the albatross about my neck was hung.

Darwin describes the extraordinary diversity of finches he collects on the Galápagos Islands, noting differences in beak size and shape between islands, an observation he records with real interest but without yet drawing from it the theoretical conclusions it would eventually help support decades later.

Witnessing a major earthquake in Chile, Darwin describes the ground itself as behaving like a thin crust over a fluid, and connects the sudden uplift of the coastline he observes afterward directly to the slow geological processes he had been tracking across the whole voyage.

Dana describes the captain ordering a sailor tied to the rigging and flogged for a minor, disputed offense, and records his own helpless fury at witnessing the punishment, unable to intervene given his own position aboard the ship.

He describes the work of curing and stacking hides at San Diego, sailors laboring for weeks on the beach in a trade that supplied the leather manufacturing of the eastern United States from a coast most Americans of his time had never seen or thought about.

That's my last Duchess painted on the wall, / Looking as if she were alive. I call / That piece a wonder, now: Fra Pandolf's hands / Worked busily a day, and there she stands.

She had / A heart, how shall I say? too soon made glad, / Too easily impressed; she liked whate'er / She looked on, and her looks went everywhere.

The British expel the French settlers of Acadia in Nova Scotia in 1755, separating Evangeline from her betrothed Gabriel on their own wedding day, the poem's founding catastrophe that launches her years-long search across the American landscape.

Evangeline searches for Gabriel across Louisiana, the western prairies and the Ozarks, arriving again and again just after he has already moved on, a repeated pattern of near-miss that becomes the poem's central emotional structure across her years of devoted searching.

Renan, himself a Breton, describes the character of the Celtic peoples as timid, melancholy, imaginative, devoted to a lost cause and to the ideal woman, constructing a specifically national character type from within rather than through detached outside observation.

Renan surveys the Mabinogion, the Arthurian romances, the legends of the saints and the Breton folk poetry collected by La Villemarqué, treating this literary and legendary material as reliable evidence for the Celtic people's genuine collective psychology.

Newman, a self-made American millionaire of thirty-six with no interest in apologizing for his commercial background, is introduced to Claire de Cintré, a young widow of the ancient Bellegarde family, and after her mother and elder brother grudgingly consent, she accepts his proposal of marriage.

The Bellegarde family withdraws their consent to the marriage, ultimately unwilling to admit a commercial man into their ancient lineage regardless of his considerable fortune, and Claire, devastated, enters a Carmelite convent rather than continue any further pursuit of the marriage.

Strether arrives in Paris as Mrs Newsome's ambassador, sent specifically to rescue her son Chad from what she believes is a corrupting affair with a bad woman and bring him home to Woollett, the family business, and an advantageous marriage his mother has already arranged.

Under Paris's spell, Strether tells a young man he meets in a garden to live all he can, since it's a mistake not to, a piece of advice that crystallizes his own growing conviction that Woollett's provincial caution has cost him chances he can no longer recover at fifty-five.

The narrator, walking home through a ploughed field, finds a thistle crushed by the plough but still standing, and remembers a story from the Caucasus long ago, of a man who would not surrender.

Hadji Murat, a famous Avar commander, quarrels with the imam Shamil and defects to the Russians, hoping they will help him rescue his family, whom Shamil holds hostage; the Russians treat him as a curiosity and a bargaining chip.

Gregor Samsa wakes one morning to find himself transformed into a monstrous insect, an impossible event the story reports without explanation or metaphor, in flat, matter-of-fact prose that treats the transformation as an ordinary domestic problem rather than a horrifying impossibility.

Unable to go to work, Gregor watches his family's response evolve across the story, from initial horror at his transformed state, through a gradually settled sense of burden as they adjust to his presence, and finally toward open relief once he eventually dies.

I was something that lay under the sun and felt it, like the pumpkins, and I did not want to be anything more. I was entirely happy.

She lent herself to immemorial human attitudes which we recognize by instinct as universal and true. I had not been mistaken. She was a rich mine of life, like the founders of early races.

Stephen Dedalus, recently returned from Paris and mourning his mother's death, leaves the Martello tower where he has been staying and proceeds to teach a history class, carrying his grief and his strained relationship with his own living father throughout the day's subsequent events.

Leopold Bloom moves through an ordinary day's activities, cooking breakfast, attending a funeral, visiting a newspaper office, eating lunch, and wandering Dublin's streets, while his wife Molly waits at home for a scheduled visit from her lover, a domestic situation Bloom is aware of but does not directly confront.

She had always the power of suggesting things much lovelier than herself, as the perfume of a single flower may call up the whole sweetness of spring.

I know, I know! But when I look back, it's what I remember.

K. arrives one winter night in a village governed by a castle on the hill and claims to have been summoned as a land surveyor, a claim the castle authorities neither confirm nor explicitly deny, establishing the novel's central and permanent administrative ambiguity.

K. takes up with Frieda, a barmaid who had briefly worked in proximity to the elusive official Klamm, and the novel leaves genuinely unresolved whether K.'s feelings for her are authentic or primarily strategic, pursued as a form of proximity to castle authority rather than for their own sake.

The story opens by stating that when Miss Emily Grierson died, the whole town went to her funeral, the men through a sort of respectful affection for a fallen monument, the women mostly out of curiosity to see the inside of her house, which no one save an old manservant had entered in at least ten years.

After her father's death, Emily refuses for three days to acknowledge that he has actually died, and the town, rather than intervening more forcefully, allows this refusal to pass without serious challenge, an early instance of the same pattern of denial that will recur, far more devastatingly, later in her life.

The Tales of Jacob recounts Jacob's theft of the blessing intended for his brother Esau, his subsequent years serving Laban to earn his wives, and the rape of Dinah, establishing the family history and accumulated tension that will shape Joseph's own eventual story.

Young Joseph develops the favorite son's genuine psychological vanity in considerable detail before his brothers, driven by real accumulated resentment, sell him into slavery, an act of betrayal Mann renders with the full emotional texture of an actual family's breakdown.

Santayana's autobiography recounts his Spanish childhood, his boyhood in Boston, his years as a student and professor at Harvard, with portraits of William James and Josiah Royce, giving readers direct firsthand access to two major American philosophers.

Santayana resigns from teaching in 1912 to live in Europe as a writer, a considerable personal and professional gamble abandoning Harvard's institutional security for independent literary and philosophical work outside conventional academic career structure.

The Rights of Man, supposedly inalienable, proved to be unenforceable, even in countries whose constitutions were based upon them, whenever people appeared who were no longer citizens of any sovereign state.

We became aware of the existence of a right to have rights and a right to belong to some kind of organized community, only when millions of people emerged who had lost and could not regain these rights because of the new global political situation.

The Younger family awaits a ten thousand dollar life insurance payment following the death of the father, and each family member has already imagined a different use for money none of them yet actually possesses, exposing competing visions of a better life within a single cramped household.

Lena Younger puts a deposit on a house in Clybourne Park, a white neighborhood, and a representative of the neighborhood's residents' association visits the family to offer them money in exchange for not moving in, a proposal that forces the family to weigh cash against the right simply to live where they choose.

Broken spears lie in the roads; we have torn our hair in our grief. The houses are roofless now, and their walls are red with blood.

They ate everything, including hens, eggs, maize cakes, and they even mounted the horses and treated them like men, or like gods, and gave the animals food to eat, as if the animals understood their speech.

Two fishermen, Achille and Hector, quarrel over Helen, a proud housemaid, while Philoctete shows tourists for a coin the wound on his shin that will not heal, and the poet walks through the poem among them.

Achille, in a sunstroke vision, travels back along the sea to Africa and meets his ancestor Afolabe, who asks what his name means and cannot understand a name that means nothing.

For Indigenous peoples, Whyte argues, climate change is not a new crisis but a repetition of colonialism, which already worked by disrupting the relationships between peoples and their ecosystems and forcing rapid adaptation to imposed environmental change.

Anishinaabe examples, of the sturgeon, the wild rice and the waters that removal and dams destroyed, show that the environmental change settler societies imposed on Indigenous peoples is the model for what anthropogenic climate change now threatens everyone with.