Quotes About Expatriate

When I moved to Europe 12 years ago, my biggest concern was whether I'd ever speak decent French. Practically every American I knew came to visit, many saying they dreamed of living here, too.

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.

When people used to ask me what I missed about America, I would say, 'The optimism.' I grew up in the land of hope, then moved to one whose catchphrases are 'It's not possible' and 'Hell is other people.' I walked around Paris feeling conspicuously chipper.

I got space from Travis Air Force Base, went back to the Philippine Islands and made it a point to meet the only American casting director in the Philippines. I was off and running.

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.

My wife and I have spent most of our lives in France, and we are both pretty well bilingual, my wife more purely than I, since as a little girl she went to school in French Switzerland.

Alabama did not want to leave Paris where they were so unhappy.

Consul - in American politics, a person who having failed to secure an office from the people is given one by the Administration on condition that he leave the country.

It is the Bohemian fad to expatriate himself, to seek strange and bizarre environments. As soon as a place begins to attract civilization he flees it for some new hiding place. When he chooses a Chinese dinner he must have a restaurant where no white man has ever before trod, if he can find one. . . . As soon as others begin to frequent it also, again he flies.27

I see my future with my family, with my grandsons and daughters, and I want to look after some welfare institutions I had set up at different places in the country with the help of expatriate Pakistanis.

We were Londoners for about seven years during the decade they called the naughties. My first son, Finn, was born over there. He's actually very proud of that fact.

Family life is by its nature cocooned, and expatriate family life doubly so. We had many friends and a few intimate ones, but it is in the nature of family rhythm—up too early, asleep too soon—to place you on a margin, and to the essential joy—just the three of us!—was added the essential loneliness, just the three of us.

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 with sex. You spend all your time talking, not working. You are an expatriate, see? You hang around cafes.

Not many foreigners move to Paris for their dream job. Many do it on a romantic whim.

I see myself as a perennial expatriate because, frankly, I don't think I fit comfortably in any conventional form of filmmaking, and I feel at the same time, depending on the project, I fit into many different ones.

The best of America drifts to Paris. The American in Paris is the best American. It is more fun for an intelligent person to live in an intelligent country. France has the only two things toward which we drift as we grow older—intelligence and good manners.

I worked in the book publishing business for nearly two decades before I turned my attention to writing, first with a couple ghostwriting projects, plus a crappy novel that absolutely no one wanted to publish. Then I moved to Luxembourg for my wife's job and found the inspiration for 'The Expats.'

If you think of India in the 1980s, there weren't many writers in English around. The ones that were there, Amitav Ghosh or Vikram Seth, were living abroad or publishing from abroad.

I'm a third-generation Miamian. I'm fond of it. I'm an expatriate, so it's the only American city I can still legitimately claim.

My dream is to have a small company in France.

I]f you live abroad any good while, the notion of home is permanently compromised. You will always be missing another place, and no national logic will ever again seem fully obvious to you.

No one had forewarned me, however, that if you live abroad any good while, the notion of home is permanently compromised.

I see myself raising my children in Europe, probably in Paris.

I think we probably will end up in America because he would be giving up much more to come and live here. If you want to work in film, that's really where you have to be. But I'm not sure that being an ex-pat is very good for one's sense of self.