Expatriates Quotes

• The loneliness of the expatriate is of an odd and complicated kind, for it is inseparable from the feeling of being free, of having escaped.

  Adam Gopnik

  Loneliness, Feelings, Being Free

  Adam Gopnik (2000). “Paris to the Moon”, Random House Incorporated

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• I guess I wanted to leave America for awhile. It wasn't that I wanted to become an expatriate, or just never come back, I needed some breathing room. I'd already been translating French poetry, I'd been to Paris once before and liked it very much, and so I just went.

  Paul Auster

  Breathing, Paris, America

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• I know my own deficiencies, one of which is that I had lived away from America for such a long time. It's called expatriate

  James Hillman

  America, Long, Deficiency

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• It is a mistake to expect good work from expatriates for it is not what they do that matters but what they are not doing.

  Cyril Connolly

  Mistake, Literature, Matter

  Cyril Connolly (2008). “Enemies of Promise”, p.105, University of Chicago Press

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• You're an expatriate. You've lost touch with the soil. You get precious. Fake European standards have ruined you. You drink yourself to death. You become obsessed by sex. You spend all your time talking, not working. You are an expatriate, see? You hang around cafTs.

  Ernest Hemingway

  Sex, Talking, Fake

  Ernest Hemingway (2016). “The Sun Also Rises”, p.58, Hamilton Books

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• Such is the nature of an expatriate life. Stripped of romance, perhaps that's what being an expat is all about: a sense of not wholly belonging. [...] The insider-outsider dichotomy gives life a degree of tension. Not of a needling, negative variety but rather a keep-on-your-toes sort of tension that can plunge or peak with sudden rushes of love or anger. Learning to recognise and interpret cultural behaviour is a vital step forward for expats anywhere, but it doesn't mean that you grow to appreciate all the differences.

  Sarah Turnbull

  Mean, Differences, Appreciate

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• The realization that he is white in a black country, and respected for it, is the turning point in the expatriate's career. He can either forget it, or capitalize on it. Most choose the latter.

  Paul Theroux

  Country, Careers, White

  Paul Theroux (1986). “Sunrise with Seamonsters”, p.47, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• I've just finished a series of Olivia Manning novels. She's best known for two trilogies: Balkan Trilogy and Levant Trilogy. The six novels are continuous and contain the same set of characters. They are based on Manning's experiences in Eastern Europe and Egypt during the Second World War. Each novel is a wonderful picture of the peculiar British expatriate culture and what was happening during the war. She's one of those brilliant women who write very well about domestic relationships. All the books are slim, and it's easy to gallop through them.

  Sarah Waters

  War, Book, Character

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• I am pleased the Ministry of Culture is protecting the morals of expatriate bankers and their girlfriends.

  Mick Jagger

  Girlfriend, Bankers, Ministry

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• I am all for cultural diversity and would be willing to see each recognizable group value its cultural heritage. I am a New York patriot, for instance, and if I lived in Los Angeles, I would love to get together with other New York expatriates and sing "Give My Regards to Broadway".

  Isaac Asimov

  New York, Diversity, Giving

  Isaac Asimov (2009). “I, Asimov: A Memoir”, p.591, Bantam

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• The west has decided to channel money and effort into studying other customs and practices, but no one has really given other people the chance to study western customs and practices, except at schools maintained by white expatriates, or by allowing the rich from other cultures to study in Oxford or Paris. What happens then is that they return home to organise fundamentalist movements, because they feel solidarity with those of their compatriots who lack the opportunity for such education.

  Umberto Eco

  Home, School, Opportunity

  "The roots of conflict" by Umberto Eco, www.theguardian.com. October 13, 2001.

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• I have to put down roots where I decide to stay. It wasn't enough for me to be an expatriate Indian in Canada. If I can't feel that I can make social, political and emotional commitments to a place, I have to find another place.

  Bharati Mukherjee

  Commitment, Emotional, Roots

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• I travel backwards and forwards quite a lot. I live very near to the train station. I'm kind of playing at being an expatriate, I suppose.

  Jarvis Cocker

  Kind, Train Stations, Backwards

  Interview with Scott Plagenhoef, pitchfork.com. April 2, 2007.

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• World Christians are heaven's expatriates, camping where the Kingdom is best served.

  David Bryant

  Christian, Heaven, Camping

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• [The director's idea for the film was:] A young American or English girl goes to Tuscany to visit English expatriates. She is on a mission to lose her virginity. That's a mission easily accomplished, if that's the only mission. The story had to be more complicated than that. Because there is so little happening dramatically, there had to be something to keep you curious.

  Susan Minot

  Girl, Ideas, Directors

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• Pound was silly, bumptious, extravagantly generous, annoying, exhibitionistic; Eliot was sensible, cautious, retiring, soothing, shy. Though Pound wrote some brilliant passages, on the whole he was a failure as a poet (sometimes even in his own estimation); Eliot went from success to success and is still quoted--and misquoted--by thousands of people who have never read him. Both men were expatriates by choice, but Eliot renounced his American citizenship and did his best to become assimilated with his fellow British subjects, while Pound always remained an American in exile.

  T.S. Mathews

  Silly, Men, People

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• We didn't think the library was funny looking in it's faux- Greek splendor, nor did we find the cuisine limited or bland, or the movies at the Michigan theater relentlessly American and mindless. These were opinions I came to later, after I became a denizen of a City, an expatriate anxious to distance herself from the bumpkin ways of her youth. I am suddenly consumed by nostalgia for the little girl who was me, who loved the fields and believed in God, who spent winter days home sick from school reading Nancy Drew and sucking menthol cough drops, who could keep a secret.

  Audrey Niffenegger

  Girl, Distance, Reading

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• Haitians do not need development programs imposed on them by expatriates. Instead, they need help in developing as self-assured persons.

  Tony Campolo

  Self, Development, Needs

  "Making Matters Worse in Haiti" by Tony Campolo, www.huffingtonpost.com. May 2, 2010.

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• To read 'Happy Talk' is to crash a party as vivid and surreal as Felini's 8. It's the business of show business, the American dream, told by a chorus of Americans locked just outside of that dream, outside of the United States, relegated to expatriate status on the shores of Haiti. Melo paints a version of Haiti that's an interior landscape perhaps even more than an externalized place. This Haiti is a plan, a memory, a morphine-drip fueled dream out to bond its inhabitants forever.

  Monica Drake

  Dream, Memories, Party

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