Quotes About Foreignness

The main thing about aliens is that they are alien. They feel no responsibility for fulfilling any of your expectations. (Dark City Lights)

He did not put his feelings down to simple xenophobia. Basically, he hadn't expected the alien to be so completely alien.

No matter where and when you meet him you feel that he has come from some place-no matter from what place he has come-some country that he has devoured rather than resided in, some secret land that he has been nourished on but cannot inherit, for the Jew seems to be everythere from nowhere.

Life on the open road is liberty... to be alone, to have few needs, to be unknown, everywhere a foreigner and at home, and to walk grandly and solitarily in conquest of the world.

What everybody forgets is that when I was a journalist in Britain and in the United States, I was always a Canadian. And the price of expatriation does not go down, it goes up. I never felt part of the political common sense of Britain. I never felt it in the United States. I had no natural home in Britain and the U.S.

How I'd like to start a new life in a distant land. Not because of racism or politics. But to be in a place that I knew hardly anything about, in a place where I wouldn't even care to know the prime minister's name. A place where names and faces would have no meaning for me.

In all of my work, I think I'm exploring the idea that we are aliens to each other, how there is a huge distance that separates us all.

I would have to confess that in the land of the toubabu, I had managed to save only myself.

Sa femme est à côté de moi. Je ne « sens » rien, sinon une espèce de curiosité, mais les quelques paroles qu'ils échangent tous les deux me relèguent à ma condition d'étrangère Ã¢â'¬â€œ doublement. Elle semble ne plus soupçonner quoi que ce soit.

Suddenly I'm all alone in the world. I see all this from the summit of a mental rooftop. I'm alone in the world. To see is to be distant. To see clearly is to halt. To analyze is to be foreign. No one who passes by touches me. Around me there is only air. I'm so isolated I can feel the distance between me and my suit. I'm a child in a nightshirt carrying a dimly lit candle and traversing a huge empty house.

I'll disappear in the fog as a foreigner to all life, as a human island detached from the dream of the sea

I feel most at home in the United States, not because it is intrinsically a more interesting country, but because no one really belongs there any more than I do. We are all there together in its wholly excellent vacuum.

For the second time since she left Japan, she shivered with excitement. She'd felt it at the dinner table at Thanksgiving, and now, again, even stronger—as if somehow she'd been absorbed into a massive body that had taken over the functions of her own, and now it was infusing her small heart with the superabundance of its feeling, teaching her taut belly to swell, stretching her rib cage, and pumping spurts of happy life into her fetus.

I spoke no Spanish, so I was unable to haggle with the taxi-drivers. 'Benengeli,' I said, and the first cabbie shook his head and walked away, spitting copiously. The second named a number that had no meaning for me. I had come to a place where I did not know the names of things or the motives for men's deeds. The universe was absurd. I could not say 'dog', or 'where?', or 'I am a man'. Besides, my head was thick, like a soup.

If you're serious about shaking off your foreignness, Salad baba, then don't fall into some kind of rootless limbo instead. Okay? We're all here. We're right in front of you. You should really try and make an adult acquaintance with this place, this time. Try and embrace this city, as it is, not some childhood memory that makes you both nostalgic and sick. Draw it close. The actually existing place.

Children are all foreigners.

I was going to be living there and I didn't want to sound like a foreigner all my life.

Italy and London are the only places where I don't feel to exist on sufferance.

I'm completely Americanized - I have an American accent, an American wife - but a residue of me is foreign.

His theatre was the clouds, where no spectacle repeated itself. On land he was a foreigner. Land for him was stasis, and it pulled him into immobility, which was his image of death." —

Paul, Paul, this is the claim you never made, the fervor you never showed. You were so cool and light, so elusive, and I never felt you encircling me and claiming possession. Rango is saying all the words I wanted to hear you say. You never came close to me, even while taking me. You took me as men take foreign women in distant countries whose language they cannot speak. You took me in silence and strangeness.

I understood that going where I would actually be foreign might distract people from the more intimate nature of my defining otherness.

Admit I find everything strange and foreign. She finds a metaphor for her condition without defining it. It is my concern for happiness that cause me the most anguish. She now used him to perform her own tragedy for herself.

I leafed through the phrase book. If a Martian read it, the Martian would probably decide to avoid Hungary.