“What a wretched existence I lead in these absurd climates and insane conditions.”

Original: Quelle existence désolante, s’écrie-t-il, je mène sous ces climats absurdes et dans ces conditions insensées! — Rimbaud’s African correspondence often records the harshness and monotony of the life he had chosen. · Letter from Aden, 1884 (French)

• Environment
• Exile
• Suffering

“The Irishman, finding himself in another environment, outside Ireland, very often knows how to make his worth felt.”

Joyce links exile with the opportunity for individual development. · Lecture, Ireland, Island of Saints and Sages, 1907

• Exile
• Identity
• Opportunity

“I hate the East so profoundly that I should not return to it if there were no other land in which I could live.”

A blunt private verdict on the posting he had served with outward success · Letter from his years as minister at Constantinople, quoted by Elizabeth Robins Pennell

• Exile
• Place
• Travel

“No self-respecting person wants to stay in Ireland. Instead he will run from it, as if from a country that has been subjected to a visitation by an angry Jove.”

A provocative justification of emigration and intellectual exile. · Lecture, Ireland, Island of Saints and Sages, 1907

• Exile
• Independence
• Ireland

“I would like to know everything. Your country seems so beautiful to me when I have almost no hope of seeing it, when I cannot even think of returning.”

Original: Ja bym chciał wiedzieć o wszystkim. Wasz kraj tak mi się pięknym wydaje, kiedy nie mam prawie nadziei widzieć go, kiedy — o powrocie ani myśleć. — Exile transforms his homeland into something increasingly precious through distance. · Letter to his mother, 24 January 1832 (Polish)

• Exile
• Home
• Longing

“No self-respecting person wants to stay in Ireland. Instead he will run from it.”

The deliberately blunt formulation captures Joyce’s early philosophy of exile. · Lecture, Ireland, Island of Saints and Sages, 1907

• Choice
• Exile
• Independence

“Our own age has always repelled me, so that, but for the love of those dear to me, I should have preferred to have been born in any other time than our own.”

Original: Nostra aetas me semper offendit, adeo ut, nisi me carorum amor retinuisset, qualibet alia nasci maluerim quam hac. — The classic humanist preference for antiquity over the present. · Letter to Posterity (Posteritati) (Latin)

• Exile
• Past
• Time

“I have done with Europe.”

Original: Je n’ai plus rien à faire en Europe. — The remark captures Rimbaud’s decisive psychological and geographical break with his former European life. · Letter to his family from Aden, 1880s (French)

• Europe
• Exile
• Travel

“I am always in the same house, under the same conditions; only, I work much more and spend almost everything.”

Original: Je suis toujours dans la même maison, aux mêmes conditions; seulement, je travaille bien plus et je dépense presque tout. — The practical complaint reveals the exhausting economic reality behind Rimbaud’s life as a merchant. · Letter from Aden, 1880s (French)

• Exile
• Money
• Work

“The books have not reached me because, I am sure, someone appropriated them in my place.”

Original: Les livres ne me sont pas parvenus, parce que, j’en suis sûr, quelqu’un se les sera appropriés à ma place. — Books remained important practical possessions even after Rimbaud had abandoned his literary career. · Letter to his family from Aden, 22 September 1880 (French)

• Books
• Exile
• Reading

“I have forty degrees of heat here; at home we sweat litres of water every day.”

Original: J’ai 40 degrés de chaleur ici, à la maison: on sue des litres d’eau par jour ici. — The blunt description conveys the physical extremes of the climate in which Rimbaud was living. · Letter to his family from Aden, 22 September 1880 (French)

• Environment
• Exile
• Weather

“I am a stranger in this world, and there is a severe solitude and painful lonesomeness in my exile.”

Exile named as a weather of the soul · Collected personal remark

• Exile
• Loneliness
• Solitude

“I do not arrive at what I would like in these countries.”

Original: Je n’arriverai jamais à ce que je voudrais, dans ces pays. — The remark conveys a persistent sense of thwarted ambition despite years of effort abroad. · Letter from Aden, 15 January 1885 (French)

• Ambition
• Disappointment
• Exile

“I am not patriotic; I am too much of an Absolutist and Absolutism has no country—but my heart burns for Syria.”

Love of a wounded land without the flag of party · Letter to Mary Haskell, October 1912

• Exile
• Home
• Patriotism

“The years pass; I lead a stupid existence, I accumulate no income, and I shall never achieve what I want in these countries.”

Original: Les années se passent, je mène une existence stupide, je n’amasse pas de rentes, je n’arriverai jamais à ce que je voudrais, dans ces pays. — The remark conveys Rimbaud’s frustration with the gap between his ambitions and the life he was actually leading. · Letter from Aden, 15 January 1885 (French)

• Achievement
• Discontentment
• Exile

“I understand that I was always of an inferior race.”

Original: Je comprends que j’ai toujours été de race inférieure. — The statement deepens the work’s exploration of inherited identity, estrangement and refusal of conventional belonging. · A Season in Hell, Bad Blood, 1873 (French)

• Belonging
• Exile
• Identity