Quotes About Emigration

The night before I left home, there was the wake in our kitchen as was the custom for anyone going so far away. The kitchen was full of people, two men left their flash lamps lit

The capitalist model, the developed model, the consumer model which comes from the North, which it has forced on the world, is falling apart on Earth, and there is no planet nearby that we can emigrate to.

I'm out of Russia and have no plans to go back.

When I was a little boy, my dream was to play baseball and leave Cuba.

Sweden endured a potato famine like in Ireland and loads of people emigrated to the US.

I never felt truly at home in Switzerland.

French people feel intellectually superior also assumes that the French therefore think Italians are suitable mainly for manual labor when emigrating to France.

A family of Jews were showing their tickets at the head of the gangplank. All Jews wanted to go to America, in Grigori's experience. They had even more reason than he did. In Russia there were laws forbidding them to own land, to enter the civil service, to be army officers, and countless other prohibitions. They could not live where they liked, and there were quotas limiting the number who could go to universities. It was a miracle any of them made a living.

Giorni miei Solo a sera m'è dato assistere alla deposizione della luce, quando la vita, ormai senza rimedio, è perduta. Mio convoglio funebre di ogni notte: emigrazione di sensi, accorgimenti delle ore tradite, intanto che lo spirito è rapito sotto l'acutissimo arco dell'esistenza: l'accompagna una musica di indicibile silenzio. Invece dovere ogni mattina risorgere sognare sempre impossibili itinerari.

drowned or run away to Canada.

En España no se podía vivir, pero vivíamos. Los que tenían una oportunidad, se fugaban a Francia o se echaban al monto. Los que habían perdido todas, se suicidaban. Para los que no teníamos la ocasión ni el coraje de escapar, sólo existía una receta, conformidad, paciencia y, sobre todo, resignación

Estoy cansada de no saber dónde morirme. Ésa es la mayor tristeza del emigrado. ¿Qué tenemos nosotros que ver con los cementerios de los países donde vivimos? [...] ¿No comprendéis? Nosotros somos aquellos que miraron sus pensamientos uno por uno durante treinta años. Durante treinta años suspiramos por nuestro paraíso perdido, un paraíso nuestro, único, especial.

si fuera más joven no estaría tan preocupada, porque para crisis, las que he tenido que chuparme yo, hijo mío. Pero nosotros podíamos, nosotros éramos fuertes, estábamos acostumbrados a sufrir, a emigrar, a pelear, y sin embargo, ahora...

A lot of Polish and Russian Jews had this experience: they would emigrate, thinking they were on their way to New York. Then their captains would stop in Dublin and say, 'Everybody off.' They would leave, and by the time they discovered they weren't in America, they didn't have enough money to continue.

My grandfather, in 1848, had fled from Germany to find political freedom in the United States.

Emigration is no longer politically homogenous and is no longer called 'exile,' with the new migrants and new generations of Cubans and despite the minority and extremist current that still promotes confrontation between Cubans living abroad and their homeland.

My wife and son cried when we left Portugal, but I had to move.

I am a Londoner and I love my home. There are many things about this country which drive me crazy, but when I am in America, I feel wrong there.

There is a big cry in California to stop everyone from running to Canada.

Well, you know, I left Cuba as a kid when I was 6 years old back in 1971.

If I hadn't left Czechoslovakia, I would have been dead.

Page 15: This prohibition to emigration [from China] applied not only to persons wishing to settle permanently abroad but often to itinerant merchants as well. It seems to have stemmed, at least in part, from the Chinese attitude of superiority with regard to other peoples. A Chinese who preferred to live among barbarians must likewise be an inferior person.

Forgive me. It's true. I wander. I wander in my heart and my thoughts. Such is the curse of any emigrant, to abandon one's home and never find another, to always flounder in a sea of remorse.

many of the young people who are, in fact, progressive have been emigrating en masse for jobs and new lives abroad, leaving the reactionary ones behind.