Quotes About Foreignness

Cosmopolitan evolutionism is an illusion, and it is everywhere being exposed as such. There is no solution to Foreignness. It is eternal - and radical. It is not a matter of wanting it to be that way. It simply is so.

The appeal of travel books is also the sense that you are different, an outsider, almost like the Robinson Crusoe or Christopher Columbus notion of being the first person in a new place.

Their delight in posing as aliens, as transients, made a boast out of what should properly have been a cause of shame. 'To them, a homeland is a foreign country, and a foreign country a homeland

On that first visit, Nogales seemed to me a border town trying to save itself, and I thought succeeding. Walking in the city, I was struck by the distinct air of foreignness mingled with a pleasing ordinariness

It's that moment about two months in, when you think you've finally got a handle on the place. Suddenly it feels within your grasp. It's a delusion—you've only been there eight weeks—and it's followed by the complete despair of ever understanding anything. But at that moment the place feels entirely yours. It's the briefest, purest euphoria.

In a sense, I'm used to a kind of linguistic exile. My mother tongue, Bengali, is foreign in America. When you live in a country where your own language is considered foreign, you can feel a continuous sense of estrangement. You speak a secret, unknown language, lacking any correspondence to the environment. An absence that creates a distance within you.

In a sense I'm used to a kind of linguistic exile. My mother tongue, Bengali, is foreign in America. When you live in a country where your own language is considered foreign, you can feel a continuous sense of estrangement. You speak a secret, unknown language, lacking any correspondence to the environment. An absence that creates a distance within you.

The result of this is a disrespect for the world in general and a foreignness to anything around him that isn't immediately recognizable to his everyday habits. He has even begun to lose perspective on what his own assets and faults are, because he has nothing to measure these things against.

Gli abitanti di Lansquenet hanno imparato l'arte di osservare senza incrociare i suoi occhi. Sento il loro sguardo come un respiro sulla nuca, stranamente privo di ostilità, e tuttavia freddo. Per loro siamo una curiosità, parte del carnevale, una ventata che viene da terre lontane.

in America it was all or nothing when it came to race. You were either white or you weren't. Funnily enough, I had never felt inferior because of my race during my foreign student days. I was foreign by definition and therefore was treated as a guest. But now, even though I was a card-carrying American with a driver's license, Social Security card, and resident alien permit, Violet still considered me as foreign, and

And 'barbarity,' I fear, is simply a word for unfamiliarity that threatens.

It was his foreignness, inability to make himself accepted, essential loserness, that made him look away.

And that is something I've heard from many people who immigrate is that when they go back to their home countries, in a way, they think they're going to be embraced and completely feel like they've come home. This disconcerting thing is when you go back there and you feel more foreign than you ever have.

O ato de partir é o mais corajoso e o mais belo. Estar só, ser livre de necessidades, ser ignorada, estrangeira e nativa em todos os lugares e caminhar, solitária e grande, à conquista do mundo.

O ato de partir é o mais corajoso e o mais belo. Estar só, ser livre de necessidades, ser ignorado, estrangeiro e nativo em todos os lugares e caminhar, solitário e grande, à conquista do mundo.

Arriving at each new city, the traveler finds again a past of his that he did not know he had: the foreignness of what you no longer are or no longer possess lies in wait for you in foreign, unpossessed places.

He too had been taken away from his home. He too had been put into the service of another without his consent. He too had been sent to a foreign country far from his native parts. He too had been forced to fight against other slaves of his own kind in a strange place.

I missed my studies with Dr. Trefusis inveterately; for reading, once begun, quickly becomes home and circle and court and family; and indeed, without narrative, I felt exiled from my own country. By the transport of books, that which is most foreign becomes one's familiar walks and avenues; while that which is most familiar is removed to delightful strangeness; and unmoving, one travels infinite causeways; immobile and thus unfettered.

You cannot know how frightened gods are of pain. There is nothing more foreign to them, and so nothing they ache more deeply to see.

I felt myself a stranger to the world

Wo Gottes Wort bei mir ist, finde ich in der Fremde meinen Weg, im Unrecht mein Recht, in der Ungewißheit meinen Halt, in der Arbeit meine Kraft, im Leiden die Geduld.

Denn bei historischer Forschung geht es doch gerade darum, Fremdartigkeit zu erhalten.

I have never been normal about my body. It has always seemed to me a strange and foreign entity. I don't know that there was ever a time when I was not conscious of it. As far back as I can think, I was aware of my own corporeality, my physical imposition on space.

The drink that characterized these new spaces quickly became a "normal" beverage: like the café itself, coffee subtly lost its foreignness. Providing what one café historian in Japan calls "dry inebriation," it was also seen as the drink of thoughtfulness, of solace, and it became associated more than any other drink with being "private in public.