Quotes About Expatriate

I grew up in the Middle East. My folks have a very thick, kind of Oklahoma accent; that's where I was born. But we moved to the Middle East right after I was born, so I guess we were surrounded by English people and French people.

During one of these arguments, Diego picked up one of his paintings of the Mexican desert and shouted, I don't want to go back to that! He had spent fifteen years in Paris and the life of an expatriate suited him. It was easier to be a passionate Mexican nationalist when he wasn't living there

Paris is a Roach Motel for top American journalists: They check in, having won the plum foreign posting, but never leave.

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

I'm definitely an American, because I grew up here. But I've lived very happily in Britain.

I like the distance that Europe gives me. Also if I stayed in America I'd be a full-time politician and have no time for writing, which is why I went to Europe to live in 1961.

When I became Jason, an English computer expert, I returned to a calmer and far more comfortable lifestyle. The cover verged on perfection; the one tiny defect was my complete ignorance of the English language and computers.

For Americans, the idea of living in another country has not only exotic, but let us be frank, vaguely unpatriotic connotations. But having to explain what is after all one's own self over and over again makes the American abroad more ferociously patriotic than he would ever dare to be at home.

When I was 12 years old, living in Cairo, my parents enrolled me in the American school. Most of the Americans there appeared oddly stifled, determined to remain, if not physically then sentimentally, back in the United States.

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.

For employers, mobility no longer means merely traditional expatriate placements, but moving jobs to where talented people are located.

There were lots of words which had fallen out of my vocabulary, living abroad so long.

Though I am a born American, though I became what is called an expatriate, I look upon the world not as a partisan of this country or that but as an inhabitant of the globe.

My father is an expatriate American; he fell in love with New Zealand in his youth and never went home.

Exile, like memory, may be a place of hope and delusion. But there are rules of light there and principles of darkness. . . . The expatriate is in search of a country, the exile in search of a self. —Eavan Boland, OBJECT LESSONS

All you will have is the present. Waste no energy crying over yesterday or dreaming of tomorrow. Nostalgia is fatiguing and destructive, it is the vice of the expatriate. You must put down roots as if they were forever, you must have a sense of permanence.

I think of my destiny as an expatriate. It is my fate to wander from place to place, and to adapt to new soils. I believe I will be able to do that because handfuls of Chilean soil are caught in my roots; I carry them with me always.

I'm a chronicler of Negroland, a participant-observer, an elegist, dissenter, and admirer; sometime expatriate, ongoing interlocutor.

I have a brother-in-law who lives in Spain.

I lived in Moscow for four years and really, really enjoyed it, and I have a really deep love for the Russian language and Russian culture.

My father was an Episcopal minister, and for 14 years my family lived in China, in a city called Wuchang. We four children spoke Chinese before we spoke English. We left when the communists came, in the early 1930s. I was about 5 years old.

Quizá finalmente ese sea el precio de vivir en un país extranjero. No es sólo que vives una vida distinta de la que dejaste atrás. Es que la vida en el extranjero te vuelve extraño.

People ask if I miss it, but they don't understand that American culture is so ubiquitous that there's nothing to miss. I don't see myself moving back. It's not that I hate the United States. I just always thought it would be a shame not to live in a foreign country.

As an American married to an Englishman and living in France, I've spent much of my adult life trying to decode the rules of conversation in three countries. Paradoxically, these rules are almost always unspoken.