Nomad Quotes

I'm a bit of a nomad anyway, so I find it quite easy to settle in places very quickly. ~ Sophie Kennedy Clark

You could say I'm a bit of a nomad. ~ Poppy Delevingne

Probably all of us, writers and readers alike, set out into exile, or at least into a certain kind of exile, when we leave childhood behind ... The immigrant, the nomad, the traveler, the sleepwalker all exist, but not the exile, since every writer becomes an exile simply by venturing into literature, and every reader becomes an exile simply by opening a book. ~ Roberto Bolano

And there are new kinds of nomads, not people who are at home everywhere, but who are at home nowhere. I was one of them ~ Robyn Davidson

Returning from his flocks, pleased with his ride.
Again in the aul appears the bai.
His horse goes on with an easy stride,
He sits and smiles upon it, hat awry. ~ Abai Kunanbayev

To journey without being changed is to be a nomad. To change without journeying is to be a chameleon. To journey and to be transformed by the journey is to be a pilgrim. ~ Mark Nepo

I'm an adaptable nomad. I love Paris, I've been living in Los Angeles and New York since 1990. I love London, too. My roots are inside of me. ~ Julie Delpy

I was nothing but a nomad to you.
Destined to leave,
inclined to stay.
I would have gladly rewritten
my entire journey for you,
but you already viewed me as a traveler.
"Wait for me," you murmured,
with no intention of ever returning.
I was your right now
after you became my infinity. ~ Noor Shirazie

No reason to feel depressed about being depressed. A depression can be a golden opportunity to collect the pieces and build ourselves anew. Global Souls are always on the move, nomads at heart, connected to various cities, commuters between cultures, both from here and everywhere. ~ Elif Shafak

I fear nomads. I am afraid of them and afraid for them too. ~ Jane Bowles

Modern man is a hard driven nomad without any stability, not (as the Bible has it) a wanderer or a pilgrim, but a refugee-an escapist. Instead of meditation and reflection there is only speed, fear and distraction. ~ Erik Von Kuehnelt-Leddihn

I'm adaptable. A nomad, my mom always says."
Zoe raised an eyebrow.
"Your mom?"
"Well I wasn't spawned. ~ Katie Reus

Freedom can choke you if you don't know how to handle it. ~ Charlotte Eriksson

The order of things established by the Romans in Libya rested in substance on a balance of power between the Nomad kingdom of Massinissa and the city of Carthage. ~ Theodor Mommsen

To be conscious of being unconscious and being a victim of self-delusionning , is really something that demands admiration and contemplation ! ~ The Night Gazer Nomad

Sometimes I think I live in a gap between two worlds, one world that I have to wake up to, be adherent of the rules and live in a place that is dictated by others. A place I sometimes feel the fear of aging and dying before I have figured out what it is I am here to do.
That other world is sweet, fresh and misty, inviting adventure into the unknown, melding ancient wisdom with new discovery; the sunlight turning into moonlight and the spell of eternal life is never broken.
Perhaps in that gap I should repair the forgotten bridge from one side to the other, but truth be told, I don't want to. I don't want to because I don't have the energy to fix what is broken within. I am a wild, wandering nomad, I belong everywhere and nowhere all at the same time, and in that gap between worlds, I am free. ~ Riitta Klint

The Lost Girls

Nomad girls are Lost Ones too,
With leaves at foot and crown;
They too seek shelter in the tress,
Drink Red and Gold and Brown.

Their circlets made of steam and rain,
Their lashes powdered ash,
They're firelight, they're fox's kill,
They're blood and sweat and scratch.

Lost Boys fly forever, and crow the rising sun.
They play all day in Neverland, their laughter mermaid-spun.
But Lost Girls live underground:
They steal from hole to hole.
They drink the shadows, wear the night,
And paint their cheeks with coal.

And when the wind turns colder,
They split a doe and climb inside.
Still-warm sinew wraps their hands,
Dead muscle soaks the light.

You'll never tell what's girl, what's beast,
Once bloody fur's been trussed-
So think your happy thoughts, Lost Boy,
Wish on your Fairy Dust. ~ Lauren Bird Horowitz

Allowing myself to wander off into the vast jungles of religion and spirituality has often led to me stumbling upon life altering new ways of thinking, living, and being. ~ Brandan Roberston

All those summer drives, no matter where I was going, to a person, a project, an adventure, or home, alone in the car with my social life all before and behind me, I was suspended in the beautiful solitude of the open road, in a kind of introspection that only outdoor space generates, for inside and outside are more intertwined than the usual distinctions allow. The emotion stirred by the landscape is piercing, a joy close to pain when the blue is deepest on the horizon or the clouds are doing those spectacular fleeting things so much easier to recall than to describe. Sometimes I thought of my apartment in San Francisco as only a winter camp and home as the whole circuit around the West I travel a few times a year and myself as something of a nomad (nomads, contrary to current popular imagination, have fixed circuits and stable relationships to places; they are far from beign the drifters and dharma bums that the word nomad often connotes nowadays). This meant that it was all home, and certainly the intense emotion that, for example, the sequence of mesas alongside the highway for perhaps fifty miles west of Gallup, N.M., and a hundred miles east has the power even as I write to move me deeply, as do dozens of other places, and I have come to long not to see new places but to return and know the old ones more deeply, to see them again. But if this was home, then I was both possessor of an enchanted vastness and profoundly alienated. ~ Rebecca Solnit

But part of loving is sacrificing our ego's need to be right. Part of loving is realising that all of us are on the same journey, seeking the same things, but find ourselves at different places. When we are able to acknowledge and accept this reality; we are freed from the desire to force others into our systems, our beliefs and our points of view. ~ Brandan Roberston

I've been a nomad for centuries. I don't think I've ever settled down in one place for longer than a few months - until I met you. When this is over I want to be near you, wherever you are. And if you don't want me, then I'll wait in the shadows until I've conquered your heart and you find me worthy of your love. ~ Jayde Scott

Until we perceive the meaning of our past, we remain the mere carriers of ideas, like the Nomads. ~ Stephen Gardiner

The moment we begin to believe we have got something about God figured out with certainty is the moment we can be sure we are no longer speaking about God. ~ Brandan Roberston

I lean back against the velvet-cushioned seat and close my eyes to the sound of hooves pounding hard against the cobblestone streets. Their clip-clopping harmony keeping perfect tempo with the rumble of carriage wheels, affording a sound as sweet as any symphony I've ever heard.
It's the sound of escape
The sound of goodbye
A sound that's served to soothe me in the past, providing the much-needed assurance that the unwelcome inquiries and suspicions of newly alerted acquaintances would soon fade - allowing for a brief respite in a new location, before I'm on the move again.
I'm a gypsy.
A nomad.
A vagabond.
A drifter. ~ Alyson Noel

Mothers born on relief have their babies on relief. Nothingness, truly, seems to be the condition of these New York people. They are nomads going from one rooming house to another, looking for a toilet that functions. ~ Elizabeth Hardwick

It's something rebellious about picking up and leaving buying a one way ticket and not knowing when you want to return. ~ Turcois Ominek

If this were so; if the desert were 'home'; if our instincts were forged in the desert; to survive the rigours of the desert - then it is easier to understand why greener pastures pall on us; why possessions exhaust us, and why Pascal's imaginary man found his comfortable lodgings a prison. ~ Bruce Chatwin

I'm comfortable wherever I am, and I can be anywhere and feel comfortable after three weeks. I adapt, and I'm like a chameleon. If a country doesn't have Internet, then I get used to not having the Internet. I could basically live anywhere. I'm a nomad at heart. Nothing is more boring than monotony. ~ Julie Delpy

There is an erroneous tendency to view empire-building by rulers from urban-agrarian kingdoms (Alexander, for example) as strategic genius, while treating nomad imperial conquests like natural disasters. ~ James A. Millward

Freedom is a privilege that can suffocate you if you don't know how to handle it and on days like this
I don't know how to handle it. ~ Charlotte Eriksson

If they're not willing to explore beyond the realm of their safety, certainty, and comfort, they will never know if their fantasies are true. ~ Brandan Roberston

The explanation of this perennial quality of Arabic is to be found simply in the conserving role of nomadism. It is in towns that languages decay, by becoming worn out, the things and institutions they designate. Nomads, who live to some extent outside time, conserve their language better; it is, moreover, the only treasure they can carry around with them in their pastoral existence; the nomad is a jealous guardian of his linguistic heritage, his poetry and his rhetorical art. On the other hand, his inheritance in the way of visual art cannot be rich; architecture presupposes stability, and the same is broadly true of sculpture and painting. ~ Titus Burckhardt

What if one's tendency to go wandering off is truly a gift? What if the driving force beneath the curiosity that leads a person to wander off the beaten path is not immaturity, but the wild, untamable Spirit of God, drawing them into the foliage to be refined, to discover fresh insights, and pioneer a new way forward for a new group of people? ~ Brandan Roberston

The spirit of man is nomad, his blood bedouin, and love is the aboriginal tracker on the faded desert spoor of his lost self; and so I came to live my life not by conscious plan or prearranged design but as someone following the flight of a bird. ~ Laurens Van Der Post

But the nomads were the terror of all those whom the soil or the advantages of the market had induced to build towns. Agriculture therefore was a religious injunction, because of the perils of the state from nomadism. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Perhaps one of the chief charms of woman lies precisely in the fact that they are dishonorable, i.e., that they are relatively uncivilized. In the midst of all the puerile repressions and inhibitions that hedge them round, they continue to show a gipsy spirit. No genuine woman ever gives a hoot for law if law happens to stand in the way of her private interest. She is essentially an outlaw, a rebel, what H. G. Wells calls a nomad. ~ H.L. Mencken

Walk me, foreign valley
Hear us wail, know our call,
Kill me, the troubled nomad, war torn and hungry
Quell the sun and all its tyranny.
Break the day, so to say and slay,
the snow and all we know,
Let come the horror we've been counting on.
Be it the fault together, of our catalyst and our progeny. ~ Rosca Marx

There are, I sometimes think, only two sorts of people in this world - the settled and the nomad - and there is a natural antipathy between them, whatever the land to which they may belong. ~ Freya Stark

It's just as hard to go back to a place you once left, as it is to leave it again. ~ Charlotte Eriksson

There are to-day two millions of nomad Mongols encamped about the south-eastern steppes of Russia, still living in tents, still raising and herding their flocks, little changed in dress, habits, and character since the days of Genghis Khan. While this is written a famine is said to be raging among them. ~ Mary Platt Parmele

God did not give Joseph any special information about how to get from being the son of a nomad in Palestine to being Pharaoh's right hand man in Egypt. What He did give Joseph were eleven jealous brothers, the attention of a very loose and vengeful woman, the ability to do the service of interpreting dreams and managing other people's affairs and the grace to do that faithfully wherever he was. ~ Rich Mullins

1. I'm lonely so I do lonely things
2. Loving you was like going to war; I never came back the same.
3. You hate women, just like your father and his father, so it runs in your blood.
4. I was wandering the derelict car park of your heart looking for a ride home.
5. You're a ghost town I'm too patriotic to leave.
6. I stay because you're the beginning of the dream I want to remember.
7. I didn't call him back because he likes his girls voiceless.
8. It's not that he wants to be a liar; it's just that he doesn't know the truth.
9. I couldn't love you, you were a small war.
10. We covered the smell of loss with jokes.
11. I didn't want to fail at love like our parents.
12. You made the nomad in me build a house and stay.
13. I'm not a dog.
14. We were trying to prove our blood wrong.
15. I was still lonely so I did even lonelier things.
16. Yes, I'm insecure, but so was my mother and her mother.
17. No, he loves me he just makes me cry a lot.
18. He knows all of my secrets and still wants to kiss me.
19. You were too cruel to love for a long time.
20. It just didn't work out.
21. My dad walked out one afternoon and never came back.
22. I can't sleep because I can still taste him in my mouth.
23. I cut him out at the root, he was my favorite tree, rotting, threatening the foundations of my home.
24. The women in my family die waiting.
25 ~ Warsan Shire

What are we to do when we seem to grow out of God? Or at least the understanding of God that we grew up with? ~ Brandan Roberston

Many Englishmen have written about camels. When I open a book and see the familiar disparagement, the well-worn humour, I realize that the author's knowledge of them is slight, that he has never lived among the Bedu, who know the camel's worth: 'Ata Allah', or 'God's gift', they call her, and it is her patience that wins the Arab's heart. I have never seen a Bedu strike or ill-treat a camel. Always the camel's needs come first. It is not only that the Bedu's existence depends upon the welfare of his animals, but that he has a real affection for them. ~ Wilfred Thesiger

Sometimes I feel very alone. I am a bit of a nomad. Many people in sort of emerging countries, emerging economies, find themselves displaced. So there is that sense, and so I'm part of a whole, I think, group of displaced people. ~ Chris Abani

I have always been a nomad and I have mastered the art of packing! I always say: pack lightly, live lightly. ~ Diane Von Furstenberg

So he'd done more of the same. He'd drunk to forget. He'd brawled to let off steam. He'd taken the dangerous jobs to fund his lifestyle – and then began it all again. He wasn't some chivalrous nomad, skulking from planet to planet doing good deeds and leaving when things got too hot. No, left when the bar-owner's daughter suddenly wanted to marry him. Kanan didn't leave because the Empire moved in: He'd stared down Imperials like Vidian before and lived. They knew he was something to ignore. No, he left because where the Empire went, fun usually died. ~ John Jackson Miller

All my life I have been a nomad. ~ Ayaan Hirsi Ali

I knew that I had made my last journey in the Empty Quarter and that a phase in my life was ended. Here in the desert I found all that I asked; I knew that I should never find it again. But it was not only this personal sorrow that distressed me. I realized that the Bedu with whom I had lived and traveled, and in whose company I had found contentment, were doomed. Some people maintain that they will be better off when they have exchanged the hardship and poverty of the desert for the security of a materialistic world. This I do not believe. I shall always remember how often I was humbled by those illiterate herdsmen who possessed, in so much greater measure than I, generosity and courage, endurance, patience and lighthearted gallantry. Among no other people have I ever felt the same sense of personal inferiority. ~ Wilfred Thesiger

But it's only when we allow ourselves to get lost that we can have the opportunity to find and be found. ~ Brandan Roberston

A nomad I will remain for life,
in love with distant and uncharted places. ~ Isabelle Eberhardt

The lives of happy people are dense with their own doings
crowded, active, thick. But the sorrowing are nomads, on a plain with few landmarks and no boundaries; sorrow's horizons are vague and its demands are few. ~ Larry McMurtry

In place of a true-type people, born of and grown on the soil, there is a new sort of nomad, cohering unstably in fluid masses, the parasitical city dweller, traditionless, utterly matter-of-fact, religionless, clever, unfruitful, deeply contemptuous of the countryman and especially that highest form of countryman, the country gentleman ... ~ Oswald Spengler

Research on hunter-gatherer groups ranging from the nineteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries shows that the average nomad worked just two to four hours each day. ~ Leonard Mlodinow

We no longer find out identity or value in having the right theology or being a part of the right denomination. ~ Brandan Roberston

The ownership of land is not natural. The American savage, ranging through forests who game and timber are the common benefits of all his kind, fails to comprehend it. The nomad traversing the desert does not ask to whom belong the shifting sands that extend around him as far as the horizon. The Caledonian shepherd leads his flock to graze wherever a patch of nutritious greenness shows amidst the heather. All of these recognise authority. They are not anarchists. They have chieftains and overlords to whom they are as romantically devoted as any European subject might be to a monarch. Nor do they hold as the first Christians did, that all land should be held in common. Rather, they do not consider it as a thing that can be parceled out.

"We are not so innocent. When humanity first understood that a man's strength could create good to be marketed, that a woman's beauty was itself a commodity for trade, then slavery was born. So since Adam learnt to force the earth to feed him, fertile ground has become too profitable to be left in peace.

"This vital stuff that lives beneath our feet is a treasury of all times. The past: it is packed with metals and sparkling stones, riches made by the work of aeons. The future: it contains seeds and eggs: tight-packed promises which will unfurl into wonders more fantastical than ever jeweller dreamed of -- the scuttling centipede, the many-branched tree whose roots, fumbling down into darkness, are as large and cunningly ~ Lucy Hughes-Hallett

Everyone is looking to find someplace to call home but having one can mess you up leaving you perpetually stuck. ~ Karishma Magvani

Nobility and freedom were inseparable, and the nomad was free. In the desert a man was conscious of being the lord of space, and in virtue of that lordship he escaped in a sense from the domination of time. By striking camp he sloughed off his yesterdays; and tomorrow seemed less of a fatality if its where as well as its when had yet to
come. But the townsman was a prisoner; and to be fixed in one place, ­ yesterday, today, tomorrow - was to be a target for time, the ruiner of all things. ~ Martin Lings

A nomad with many more wildernesses to explore – and it is so much easier to travel away from things than towards them. But it's the words that are a curse – because he cannot utter a simple goodbye. ~ Alden Bell

When we are able to systematise and theologise God down to a set of absolute theological principles, I believe that we lose something essential. When our faith becomes nothing more than a stagnant creed or unchanging statement of belief, we lose sight of the majesty and glory of God, the mystery and diversity that gives vibrancy to our faith. ~ Brandan Roberston

I have come to see that exploration is not a practice of the unfaithful, but rather is exactly what being a follower of Christ is actually all about. ~ Brandan Roberston

I'm becoming a professional nomad and enjoying that whole part of my life. ~ Dar Williams

Whilst stay-at-home persons are searching for truth, the apple will stay on the tree. ~ Lev Shestov

I pondered on this desert hospitality and, compared it with our own. I remembered other encampments where I had slept, small tents on which I had happened in the Syrian desert and where I had spent the night. Gaunt men in rags and hungry-looking children had greeted me, and bade me welcome with the sonorous phrases of the desert. Later they had set a great dish before me, rice heaped round a sheep which they had slaughtered, over which my host poured liquid golden butter until it flowed down on to the sand; and when I protested, saying 'Enough! Enough!', had answered that I was a hundred times welcome. Their lavish hospitality had always made me uncomfortable, for I had known that as a result of it they would go hungry for days. Yet when I left them they had almost convinced me that I had done them a kindness by staying with them ~ Wilfred Thesiger

Sleep is light in nomad camps. The body, exhausted by space, grows warm, stretches out straight, recalls the length of the trip. The paths of the mountain ridges run like shivers along the spine. The velvet meadows burden and tickle the eyelids. Bedsores of the ravines hollow out the sides. Sleep immures you, bricks you up. Last thought: have to ride around some ridge... ~ Osip Mandelstam

I was born for the ocean, for the road, and I longed to build my reputation as a fearless nomad, forever roaming the country with a suitcase and my guitar. Light as the wind itself, a romantic mystery passing through people's lives, leaving them with moments of magic, wondering where I might be now. ~ Charlotte Eriksson

As I listened I thought once again how precarious was the existence of the Bedu. Their way of life naturally made them fatalists; so much was beyond their control. It was impossible for them to provide for a morrow when everything depended on a chance fall of rain or when raiders, sickness, or any one of a hundred chance happenings might at any time leave them destitute, or end their lives. They did what they could, and no people were more self-reliant, but if things went wrong they accepted their fate without bitterness, and with dignity as the will of God. ~ Wilfred Thesiger

I have always thought that people are, by nature, nomadic, but they've built up anti-human constructs to keep them in place and then they pop pills to mask their misery and look for ways to distract from their emptiness. ~ Jackie Haze

During the civil war, the Sudanese government armed the Misseriya nomads as proxy. Even though both groups had coexisted quite well prior to the conflict, it all become much more difficult as a consequence. ~ Rebecca Hamilton

Some call them "homeless." The new nomads reject that label. Equipped with both shelter and transportation, they've adopted a new word. They refer to themselves, quite simply, as "houseless ~ Jessica Bruder

The polyglot is a linguistic nomad. ~ Rosi Braidotti

No man can live this life and emerge unchanged. He will carry, however faint, the imprint of the desert, the brand which marks the nomad; and he will have within him the yearning to return, weak or insistent according to his nature. For this cruel land can cast a spell which no temperate clime can match. ~ Wilfred Thesiger

The song is gone; the dance
is secret with the dancers in the earth,
the ritual useless, and the tribal story
lost in an alien tale.
Only the grass stands up
to mark the dancing-ring; the apple-gums
posture and mime a past corroboree,
murmur a broken chant.
The hunter is gone; the spear
is splintered underground; the painted bodies
a dream the world breathed sleeping and forgot.
The nomad feet are still.
Only the rider's heart
halts at a sightless shadow, an unsaid word
that fastens in the blood of the ancient curse,
the fear as old as Cain. ~ Judith A. Wright

We shall not lie on our backs at the Red Castle and watch the vultures wheeling over the valley where they killed the grandson of Genghiz. We will not read Babur's memoirs in his garden at Istalif and see the blind man smelling his way around the rose bushes. Or sit in the Peace of Islam with the beggars of Gazar Gagh. We will not stand on the Buddha's head at Bamiyan, upright in his niche like a whale in a dry-dock. We will not sleep in the nomad tent, or scale the Minaret of Jam. And we shall lose the tastes - the hot, coarse, bitter bread; the green tea flavoured with cardamoms; the grapes we cooled in the snow-melt; and the nuts and dried mulberries we munched for altitude sickness. Nor shall we get back the smell of the beanfields, the sweet, resinous smell of deodar wood burning, or the whiff of a snow leopard at 14,000 feet. ~ Bruce Chatwin

In a sense, my grandmother was living in the Iron Age. There was no system of writing among the nomads. Metal artifacts were rare and precious ... The first time she saw a white person my grandmother was in her thirties: she thought this person's skin had burned off. ~ Ayaan Hirsi Ali

OK, so this is the story of a Chinese father and son and their best horse. The horse runs away, for no reason, and lives with some nomads across the border. The son is very upset that the horse has gone, and the father says to him, "What makes you so sure this isn't a blessing?" Then the horse comes back, a few months later, with a beautiful nomad stallion. The son is thrilled, but the father says to him, "What makes you so sure this isn't a disaster?" The son loves riding the new horse, but one day falls and breaks his leg. Everyone is sad for him, and his father says, wait for it, "What makes you so sure this isn't a blessing?" At some point the nomads invade, and every able-bodied young man has to go off to battle. The nomads basically wipe out all the men, but the son is safe because he is lame, and so he and his father live on and look after one another. ~ Scarlett Thomas

Genius in the poet, like the nomad of Arabia, ever a wanderer, still ever makes a home where the well or the palm-tree invites it to pitch the tent. Perpetually passing out of himself and his own positive circumstantial condition of being into other hearts and into other conditions, the poet obtains his knowledge of human life by transporting his own life into the lives of others. ~ Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton

The way of the nomad is to accept everything as it comes: there is no anticipation of better days, no longing for the unrequited, no despair for loss. ~ D.J. Niko

I had some terrific experiences in the wilderness since I wrote you last - overpowering, overwhelming," he gushed to his friend Cornel Tengel. "But since then I am always being overwhelmed. I require it to sustain life.
Everett Ruess ~ Jon Krakauer

For an artist, a good place to be is you have some kind of influence and power to get things done, but in your essence you remain a nomad or a soldier facing a difficulty to be overcome. ~ Cai Guo-Qiang

I float too much to wander, like you, in the real world. I envy it but that's the dealio - you're a train and I'm a train station and when I try to guess your trajectory I end up telling my own story. But you are my nomad and I love you sideways daily. Sideways because I have to beam my love in all directions, hoping it bounces off something and eventually finds you. ~ Richard Silken

The lyricism of marginality may find inspiration in the image of the outlaw, the great social nomad, who prowls on the confines of a docile, frightened order. ~ Michel Foucault

The contemporary sedentary is someone who feels at home everywhere, thanks to cellphones, and the nomad is someone who does not feel at home anywhere, someone who is excluded, ostracized. ~ Paul Virilio

Transformation Ideas are many a penny,executioners are few & lonely;They use their arsenal sharply .to bring out rewards unworldly. ~ LAD NOMAD

How easy it is for us to demonise from a distance. But when we stand face to face with our supposed enemy, it is hard to hate. ~ Brandan Roberston