Emigres Quotes

#1. (Segura) "...surely you realise there are people who expect to be tortured and others who would be outraged by the idea. One never tortures except by a kind of mutual agreement. ... Dr Hasselbacher does not belong to the torturable class."
(Wormold) "Who does?"
(Segura) "The poor in my own country, in any Latin American country. The poor of Central Europe and the Orient. Of course in your welfare states you have no poor, so you are untorturable. In Cuba the police can deal as harshly as they like with emigres from Latin America and the Baltic States, but not with visitors from your country or Scandinavia. It is an instinctive matter on both sides.... #Quote by Graham Greene

#2. Whether by this he meant the clergy I know not; though I observed he spoke favourably of that body in France, pointing out that, long before the recent agitations, they had defended the civil rights of the Third Estate, and citing many cases in which the country curates had shown themselves the truest friends of the people: a fact my own observation hath confirmed. I remarked to him that I was surprised to find how little talk there was in Italy of the distracted conditions in France; and this though the country is overrun with French refugees, or emigres, as they call themselves, who bring with them reports that might well excite the alarm of neighbouring governments. He said he had remarked the same indifference, but that this was consonant with the Italian character, which never looked to the morrow; and he added that the mild disposition of the people, and their profound respect for religion, were sufficient assurance against any political excess. To this I could not forbear #Quote by Edith Wharton

#3. What immediately strikes me is just how tattered the books are. Some of the spines have split. The binding has loosened and the threads stick out. Some of the books are in such bad condition that they seem to be held together only by their place on the shelf. They are neither old nor valuable, but they have had hard lives - emigres, some having arrived with refugees from Russia before the war, only to go back east at a later stage. More than sixty years later they have come home to Paris. #Quote by Anders Rydell

#4. Emigres: Earned their livelihood by giving guitar lessons and mixing salads. #Quote by Gustave Flaubert

#5. An emigres artistic problem: the numerically equal blocks of a lifetime are unequal in weight, depending on whether they comprise young or adult years. The adult years may be richer and more important for life and for creative activity both, but the subconscious, memory, language, all the understructure of creativity, are formed very early; for a doctor, that won't make problems, but for a novelist or a composer, leaving the place to which his imagination, his obsessions, and thus his fundamental themes are bound could make for a kind of ripping apart. He must mobilize all his powers, all his artists wiles, to turn the disadvantages of that situation to benefits.
[ ... ] Only returning to the native land after a long absence can reveal the substantial strangeness of the world and of existence. #Quote by Milan Kundera

#6. Even so - think of the declaration of war in 1939! They had no armaments at all - and yet they declared war ! In those days they had, I believe, six divisions. It's quite possible that they will again let themselves be hoodwinked by fairy tales from the emigres. The soldiers, I know, were against war. But there are people over there who don't give a damn if Britain does collapse - yes, I mean the Jews ! There are others who say : "If the Russians are beaten, then we shall be the war criminals - there will be trials, and we shall end up in the Tower." The soldiers will defend themselves by saying that they had given full warning of the danger Britain ran in accepting the risks of undertaking an invasion. But for the politicians who declared war and the Jews who drove them to it there is no defence ! And these latter are quite capable of risking a second attempt. On the other hand, they may say to themselves : we are taking on an opponent who has so far knocked the teeth out of everybody who has opposed him. #Quote by Adolf Hitler