"....And I still ain't got a passport. "

"Then you begin to give up the very idea of belonging. Suddenly this thing, this belonging,it seems like some long, dirty lie ... and I begin to believe that birthplaces are accidents, that everything is an accident. But if you believe that, where do you go? What do you do? What does anything matter?"



--Zadie Smith

To be or not to be

"In every generation, there are a few souls, call them lucky or cursed, who are simply born not belonging, who come into the world without strong affiliation to family or location or nation or race; those who value stability, who fear transience, uncertainty, change, have erected a powerful system of stigmas and taboos against rootlessness so that we mostly conform, we hide our secret identities beneath false skins of those identities which bear the belongers' seal of approval. But the truth leaks out in our dreams; alone in our beds—because we are all alone at night, even if we do not sleep by ourselves—we soar, we fly, we flee."


--Salman Rushdie