Quotes About Foreignness

What was the relationship between leaving the country and an aesthetic life? What was it about America in particular that seemed to make one's life unaesthetic?

He was a man caught between two places, one where he would always be a stranger, one where he was no longer a native. Time and change had made him a perpetual traveler, never comfortable again, like many who had lost their homes or those who had traveled across the world, always searching for them.

After the reunification, there was a certain sense of foreignness because daily life in the former East German states was completely turned inside out - everything from the shops to the bureaucracy to the working world.

J'avais, j'avais ce goût de vivre chez les hommes, et voici que la terre exhale son âme d'étrangère...

Non è colpa della Francia se continuiamo a essere un paio di stranieri, caro. E' colpa nostra. Una vocazione, un destino. Come la nostra professione d'interpreti, un'altra maniera di essere sempre uno straniero, di stare senza stare, di essere ma non essere.

Je ne peux pas m'approprier le champ de neige sur lequel je glisse: il demeure étranger, interdit; mais je me complais dans cet effort meme vers un possession impossible: je l'éprouve comme un triomphe, non comme une défait

foreignness that gave him the ability to see the distinctiveness of America.

level than observing democratic institutions, it is Jesus' foreignness to sin that permits him to have a perfect conviction of the unique tragedy of our sinfulness. Since Jesus has perfectly clear eyes to see the tragedy of sin, his confession is utterly true.

Half of the time I don't know what they're talking about; their jokes seem to relate to a past that everyone but me has shared. I'm a foreigner in the world and I don't understand the language.

I'm very attracted to exile literature - particularly Nabokov - exactly because the idea of being away from home for any serious length of time is so inconceivable to me.

For the first time since I had arrived in America I had an almost physical sense of being in the wrong place, as if I were being tugged by an invisible cords to somewhere a million miles away.

He was just one of those people ... one of a thousand expats who'd dragged their unhappiness to the other side of the world, expecting everything to be different, and never quite got over the fact it felt the same.

The attitude of insolent haughtiness is characteristic of the relationships Americans form with what is alien to them, with others.

In the countries where they don't know me, which is only America, wherever I go, the hotel, the restaurant, the airport, people go, 'Oh, my! What's that?' That's good. That's good, because there is a curiosity there, which is great.

Seeing him there, a man as alien to the place as I was, let me picture myself in that world. What had seemed unimaginably strange and remote from my experience suddenly became possible, and comprehensible, and, finally, fascinating.

Travel causes some affliction of the eye, and after a while no place it rests looks like home.

Walking along, I occasionally had to stop by the side of the road to spit out the mucus that kept rising in my throat. It rather pleased me to think of the malignant tubercle bacilli that I had brought from Japan being scorched to death under the tropical sun.

The attitude of insolent haughtiness is characteristic of the relationships Americans form with what is alien to them, with others.

The thing about being black and having a different accent, in the beginning, is that it makes you foreign.

When I went to Australia, I had this feeling, like, 'Wow, this is really a different country.' I think that feeling of genuine foreignness, that this is a very different culture, which is increasingly rare in our globalised world.

The only home for an exile is exile.

I was 13 when my parents moved to Israel, and I was put in a Scottish mission school. Ninety-nine percent of the children were Israeli... Suddenly, I found myself speaking the wrong language, dressed in the wrong clothes, picked up by the wrong mode of transportation - an embassy car instead of a bus.

Our ways are not your ways, and there shall be to you many strange things

He would take refuge in a homey understanding of Faroese ways only to be slapped back to an uncomfortable position as an American by some terrible smell: uncomfortable because he could no more now imagine himself standing at an oak door with a brass knocker, wearing a tie and holding a bottle of Médoc, than he could picture eating rotten meat. He was floating around in cultural hyperspace; nothing felt right.