Giovanni's Room quotes about exile & expatriation

You don’t have a home until you leave it and then, when you have left it, you never can go back.

He made me think of home—perhaps home is not a place but simply an irrevocable condition.

Perhaps, as we say in America, I wanted to find myself. This is an interesting phrase, not current as far as I know in the language of any other people, which certainly does not mean what it says but betrays a nagging suspicion that something has been misplaced.

And these nights were being acted out under a foreign sky, with no-one to watch, no penalties attached—it was this last fact which was our undoing, for nothing is more unbearable, once one has it, than freedom.

Americans should never come to Europe, it means they never can be happy again. What’s the good of an American who isn’t happy? Happiness was all we had.

And I resented this: resented being called an American (and resented resenting it) because it seemed to make me nothing more than that, whatever that was; and I resented being called not an American because it seemed to make me nothing.

What a long way, I thought, I’ve come—to be destroyed!

I looked at Giovanni’s face, which did not help me. He belonged to this strange city, which did not belong to me.

It’s funny, I’ve never felt anyplace was home before.

There is something fantastic in the spectacle I now present to myself of having run so far, so hard, across the ocean even, only to find myself brought up short once more before the bulldog in my own backyard—the yard, in the meantime, having grown smaller and the bulldog bigger.