Expat Quotes

“I woke up early and took the first train to take me away from the city. The noise and all its people. I was alone on the train and had no idea where I was going, and that’s why I went there. Two hours later we arrived in a small town, one of those towns with one single coffee shop and where everyone knows each other’s name. I walked for a while until I found the water, the most peaceful place I know. There I sat and stayed the whole day, with nothing and everything on my mind, cleaning my head. Silence, I learned, is some times the most beautiful sound.”
― Charlotte Eriksson

“I am running and singing and when it’s raining I’m the only one left on the open street, smiling with my eyes fixed on the sky because it’s cleaning me. I’m the one on the other side of the party, hearing laughter and the emptying of bottles while I peacefully make my way to the river, a lonely road, following the smell of the ocean. I’m the one waking up at 4am to witness the sunrise, where the sky touches the sea, and I hold my elbows, grasping tight to whatever I’ve made of myself.”
― Charlotte Eriksson, Another Vagabond Lost To Love: Berlin Stories on Leaving & Arriving

“Am I making something worth while?
I’m not sure.
I write and I sing and I hear words from time to time about my life and choices making ways, into other lives, other hearts,
but am I making something worth while?
I’m not sure.

There was a boy last night who I never spoke to because I was too drunk and still shy, but mostly lonely, and I couldn’t find anything lightly to say,
so I simply walked away
but still wondered what he did with his life
because he didn’t even speak to me
or look at me
but still made me wonder who he was
and I walked away asking
Am I making something worth while?
I am not sure.

I am a complicated person with a simple life
and I am the reason for everything that ever happened to me.”
― Charlotte Eriksson, Another Vagabond Lost To Love: Berlin Stories on Leaving & Arriving

“Well, at least this is what I told myself every day as I fell asleep with the fire still burning and the moon shining high up in the sky and my head spinning comforting from two bottles of wine, and I smiled with tears in my eyes because it was beautiful and so god damn sad and I did not know how to be one of those without the other.”
― Charlotte Eriksson, Another Vagabond Lost To Love: Berlin Stories on Leaving & Arriving

“I had chosen to leave, and live alone in a foreign country. And in fleeing thousands of miles across the Pacific, I chose myself, and a chance at a different future.”
― Alison Singh Gee, Where the Peacocks Sing: A Palace, a Prince, and the Search for Home

“Do you know the difference between an expat and an immigrant? You're an immigrant in a country you look up to, an expat in one you consider beneath you.”
― Rabih Alameddine, The Angel of History

“Giving up on the drive to succeed is a good part of what being an expat is all about. If you travel all the way to the Caribbean Sea, you probably have already decided to trade the dog-eat-dog competition of modern living for a hammock on the sand.”
― Anthony Lee Head, Driftwood: Stories from the Margarita Road

“I think I feel not at home in America, but not necessarily at home outside of America.”
― Jim Jarmusch

“Minding his own business had been his motto living in a strange foreign country with a world-recognized social issue of failing morals.”
― Vann Chow, The White Man and the Pachinko Girl

“American men,” said Nancy gravely, “don’t know how to drink.”
“What?” Jim was startled.
“In fact,” she went on carelessly, “they don’t know how to do anything very well. The one thing I regret in my life is that I wasn’t born in England.”
“In England?”
“Yes. It’s the one regret of my life that I wasn’t.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald

“Cand cineva se hotaraste sa emigreze intr-o tara indepartata, isi impune in mod fatal obligatia de a se afirma in aceasta tara.”
― Jorge Luis Borges, Cartea de nisip: proză completă 2

“Se il mio passaporto austriaco era mio di diritto, questo documento consegnatomi dalle autorità inglesi era l'oggetto di una mia richiesta, un favore che ero andato a chiedere e che, per di più, poteva essermi negato in qualunque momento. Da un giorno all'altro ero sceso ancora di un gradino: da ospite straniero e in un certo senso gentlemanche lì spendeva i suoi guadagni internazionali e pagava le tasse da emigrante, a refugee. Inoltre, da quel momento avrei dovuto fare richiesta per ogni visto straniero da apporre su quel documento bianco perchè tutti i paesi si dimostravano sospettosi nei confronti di quel "genere" di persone al quale all'improvviso appartenevo anche io, quello delle persone senza diritti nè patria, che non si potevano scacciare e rispedire a casa loro come gli altri. Non facevo che pensare a quello che un esiliato russo mi aveva detto molti anni addietro: "Un tempo l'uomo non era che anima e corpo. Oggi, se vuole essere trattato da essere umano, gli serve anche un passaporto".
E forse non c'è nulla che renda più esplicito l'incredibile passo indietro compiuto dal mondo nel periodo postbellico delle restrizioni imposte alla libertà di spostamento degli individui e più in generale ai loro diritti. Prima del 1914 la terra era di tutti gli uomini, ognuno andava dove credeva e vi restava per tutto il tempo che desiderava. (...) Soltanto dopo la guerra il nazionalsocialismo cominciò a sconvolgere il mondo e il primo sintomo attraverso il quale si manifestò l'epidemia morale del nostro secolo fu la xenofobia - l'odio o perlomeno il timore dell'altro. Dovunque ci si proteggeva contro lo straniero, dovunque lo si evitava. (...) Tuttavia è solo registrando questi piccoli sintomi che l'epoca futura potrà stabilire con esattezza il quadro clinico delle condizioni spirituali e degli sconvolgimenti intellettuali che hanno colpito il nostro mondo tra le due guerre.”
― Stefan Zweig, Stefan Zweig. Das Gesamtwerk.: In chronologischer Auflage. Neu bearbeitet. (Gesamtwerke der Weltliteratur 4)

“I know how men in exile feed on dreams.”
― Aeschylus

“How strange it is to be a continent away from ¨home¨ and you don't know where ¨home¨ is anyhow and all the ¨home¨ you've got is in your head.

[letter to Neal Cassady, Jan. 8, 1951]”
― Jack Kerouac, Jack Kerouac Selected Letters 1940-1956

“She turned to the second half of her question: ‘Why did you come back?’ ‘I wanted to be part of the new South Africa.’ Glib but true. In all the years I was away, I felt interrupted. Despite my resolve to look in the other direction, the life I might have been leading flickered in the corner of my eye. In another place, unfazed, a potential me was going about his business as if I’d never cut him short. Once apartheid fell – or sat down, as Leora likes to say – I could finally look squarely at this phantom who was living under my name. And then I got used to the idea that we could change places. A clean swap: your elsewhere for mine." (from "Double Negative" by Ivan Vladislavic, Teju Cole)”
― Ivan Vladislavić, Teju Cole

“Be an Action Dreamer!”
― Christie Dao, Actualize Your Dreams: From Wishful Thinking to Reality

“Sure, people stare… I think it’s curiosity. Most of the time if I give a big smile, the person looks totally shocked to have been caught and will smile back. They go from a sort of blankness to this welling gladness. Women especially blossom into joy and will give really lovely, open smiles in return, with a ilhamdallah or masha’allah and a pat on the head or a pinched cheek for Mather, maybe a few words for me, Welcome to Jordan! They’re so surprised and grateful I’m smiling at them! Even women who are fully covered, just a tiny window for their eyes peeking from a veil. You can see the uplift in the corners of their eyelids, feel their genuine warmth”
― Siobhan Fallon, The Confusion of Languages

“German Kindergarten teachers would not intervene unless someone's eye was actually being poked out with a stick, and even then, only to clean up the eye, put it back in the child's head, and tell them to soldier on.”
-Kari Martindale, in “Expat Education: an Expat’s Guide to Choosing a School Overseas” by author Carole Hallett Mobbs”
― Kari Martindale

“Ola La Palma, goodbye United Kingdom.”
― Steven Magee

“I am an international kind of guy.”
― Steven Magee

“I am a British guy living in the USA.”
― Steven Magee

“I am a British guy with a USA family.”
― Steven Magee

“I am a British guy with a USA passport.”
― Steven Magee

“Rumors in Thailand don’t have fathers or mothers. They’re orphans of loan sharks, con men, streetwalkers, and fortune tellers. No one claims them until they become legitimate.”
― Christopher G. Moore

“Though I am a born American, though I became what is called an expatriate, I look upon the world not as a partisan of this country or that but as an inhabitant of the globe.”
― Henry Miller, The Air-Conditioned Nightmare

“Llego a Londres con mi vida metida en una maleta.”
― Estefanía Pérez, La Chica de la Manzana

“Ask any child from Chile to sketch something, anything at all. Before any human figure, a cloud, a tree, they'll fill the upper space with an array of jagged peaks.”
― Ariel Dorfman, Feeding on Dreams: Confessions of an Unrepentant Exile

“RENAULT
I have often speculated on why you do not return to America. Did you abscond with the church funds? Did you run off with the President's wife? I should like to think you killed a man. It is the romantic in me.

RICK
It was a combination of all three.

RENAULT
And what in Heaven's name brought you to Casablanca?

RICK
My health. I came to Casablanca for the waters.

RENAULT
Waters? What waters? We are in the desert.

RICK
I was misinformed.”
― Aljean Harmetz, Round Up the Usual Suspects: The Making of Casablanca--Bogart, Bergman, and World War II