Quotes About Emigration

I grew up in South Africa, but like many people at that time, I couldn't bear living in the country. The main motivation for moving to Britain was to get away.

I belong in America more than South Africa. I can't remember the feeling of living there anymore. It's like it was in another life. That's sad in a way. It is my country. It's where I grew up. You don't know what it's like to have these negative feelings about your homeland. There are roots you can't escape.

We emigrated to South Africa and later to Canada so I went to school in several places.

When I left South Africa in 1960 I was 20 years old. I wanted to try to get an education, and music education was not available for me in South Africa.

In Australia, I almost became a counsellor. At the end of each performance there would be a queue of sobbing people backstage. They all wanted to explain why they left South Africa.

Although I am losing my Soviet citizenship, I do not cease to be a Russian poet.

Brain drain is hard to reverse

En la posterioridad inmediata, la generación siguiente a la de los primeros emigrantes mostró la tonalidad más negra del puritanismo, y de tal manera oscurecía con ella el rostro de la nación, que todos los años siguientes no han sido suficientes para limpiarlo. Tenemos que volver a aprender el arte olvidado de la alegría.

Its most recent iteration, released in 2009, estimates that between 1500 and 1840, the heyday of the slave trade, 11.7 million captive Africans left for the Americas—a massive transfer of human flesh unlike anything before it. In that period, perhaps 3.4 million Europeans emigrated. Roughly speaking, for every European who came to the Americas, three Africans made the trip.

I am an Australian citizen, and I miss my country a great deal.

Every leaving of a Jewish community is a most difficult thing.

E quando l'emigrazione finisce, quando torni alla casa da cui te n'eri andata, pensi di aver chiuso il cerchio, ma visitando il museo ti rendi conto che il tuo è stato un viaggio di andata, di sola andata. Dall'esilio nessuno ritorna. Quello che hai abbandonato ti abbandona».

All five were profoundly shaken by the interwar catastrophe that struck their native Austria.

In mid-1608, or at about the time that Strachey started thinking of emigrating, Captain John Smith, the Virginia settler, had written a long letter to a friend about conditions in Jamestown.

Men run away to other countries because they are not good in their own, and run back to their own because they pass for nothing in the new places.

My favourite example (of ex-patriotism) is James Joyce, who left Ireland at nineteen and never came back. But he spent the rest of his life writing about Ireland from the perspective of living in Paris.

Die Emigration kann ein Zeichen der Stärke oder der Schwäche einer Nation sein.

I've always felt more at home in the UK than in France.

I can't live for more than four years outside of Canada. I'm Canadian, so ultimately that is my reference point.

At that time a lot of young men didn't want to go to the war and kill. This guy that I fell in love with was one of those so he escaped to Canada and I followed him.

Emigration is no longer a solution it's a defeat. People are risking death, drowning every day, but they're knocking on doors that are not open.

When we left school, it was the early eighties. This country was on its knees. There were no jobs, none. If you couldn't go into Daddy's business, you emigrated or went on the dole. Even if you had the money and the points for college—and we didn't—that just put it off for a few years.

My wife speaks very good French. She said she would miss lots of things in the U.S., but we can't live there if Trump's president.

In truth, I was desperate to leave New York. And Moscow was a special place for me. It was the city where my parents had grown up, where they had met; it was the city where I was born.