Immigrant Experience Quotes

“And as any mixed-race person will tell you—to be half of two things is to be whole of nothing.”
― Gabrielle Zevin, Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow

“Fitting is a luxury rarely given to immigrants, or children of immigrants. We are stuck in emotional purgatory. Home, somehow, is always the last place you left, and never the place you're in.”
― Scaachi Koul, One Day We'll All Be Dead and None of This Will Matter

“I have seen them stagger out of their movie palaces and blink their empty eyes in the face of reality once more, and stagger home, to read the Times, to find out what's going on in the world. I have vomited at their newspapers, read their literature, observed their customs, eaten their food, desired their women, gaped at their art. But I am poor, and my name ends with a soft vowel, and they hate me and my father, and my father's father, and they would have my blood and put me down, but they are old now, dying in the sun and in the hot dust of the road, and I am young and full of hope and love for my country and my times, and when I say Greaser to you it is not my heart that speaks, but the quivering of an old wound, and I am ashamed of the terrible thing I have done.”
― John Fante, Ask the Dust

“Immigrant parents, when they first move to North America, push towards whiteness, towards assimilation, to survive and thrive. Naturally, their children do too for the first half of their lives. This usually tips the other way, but before we're taught anything, we're taught to hide.”
― Scaachi Koul, One Day We'll All Be Dead and None of This Will Matter

“When immigrants arrive in another country, we experience a lot of stress. We learn a new language, go to school, and work in a new environment, which is most likely some survival or transitional job initially. We probably lose social and professional status, and the overall experience is unpleasant and stressful. It sucks. I’ve been there myself.

We also have less time compared with locals. For example, we have to spend time learning English - they don’t. Most likely, they can get a job with a higher pay. In our case, we most likely get a minimum-paying job first, which means we have to work more and longer hours.

This means that if we want to progress in private and business life at the same rate as locals, we need to be better organized, more efficient, and more disciplined and use more effective and innovative tools and approaches. There is no other way around it.

Therefore, I wanted to emphasize that we immigrants need our unique approach to dating.”
― Max Smirnoff

“When things come to the worst, they generally mend.”
― Susanna Moodie, Roughing It in the Bush

“I want you to be very successful. Remember, people like us cannot afford to fail "People like us"… immigrants, exiles, refugees, newcomers, outsiders… Too many words for a shared, recognizable sentiment that, no matter how often described, remains largely undefined. Children of uprooted parents are born into the memory tribe. Both their present and their future are forever shaped by their ancestral past, regardless of whether they have any knowledge of it. If they flourish and prosper, their achievements will be attributed to a whole community; and, in the same way, their failures will be charged up to something bigger and older than themselves, be it family, religion, or ethnicity. While the journey of life may be full of reversals of fortune, children from displaced families can never allow themselves to fall below the level at which their parents started it out.”
― Elif Shafak, There Are Rivers in the Sky

“I never felt as much a citizen as I did when we became outlaws.”
― Jeremy Atherton Lin, Deep House

“...I never felt as much a
citizen as I did when we became outlaws.”
― Jeremy Atherton Lin, Deep House: The Gayest Love Story Ever Told

“Depression isn’t just being a bit sad. It’s feeling nothing. It’s not wanting to be alive anymore.”
― Elvira Cordileone

“I imagined I could have begged an old girlfriend from college to send money; enough of them had expressed ambivalence about their trust funds that this seemed a plausible path down which I might drag myself away from homelessness. But I’d sooner have hanged myself.”
― Jonathan Escoffery, If I Survive You

“He was an immigrant, and papa had told me a hundred times that we’d never have enough sympathy, enough respect for the uprooted who have had enough to suffer from their disorientation, without being added contempt or disdain.”
― Gabrielle Roy, Street of Riches

“You are not from here, you tell yourself. You repeat that until everything ends.”
― Ananda Devi, Eve out of Her Ruins

“کچھ تو فرق ہوتا ہے

نہیں جانے میں، اور لوٹ کر آنے میں۔

،نظارے چاہے وہی ہوں

پر فرق آ جاتا ہے اُن کے نظر آنے میں۔


مِل جاتے ہیں کچھ پہیلِیوں کے جواب،

کچھ سوال بھی نئے ڈھونڈ لیتے ہیں ہم نئے ٹھِکانوں میں

، روح میں اُتر جاتے ہیں کُچھ رِشتے اور بھی زیادہ

کُچھ دم توڑ دیتے ہیں، دور دراز کے بازاروں میں


عجب سے اب لگتے ہیں جان نے والوں کو ہم

کُچھ گِن بھی لیتے ہیں اب ہمیں دیوانوں میں

یہی فرق ہوتا ہے نہیں جانے میں، اور لوٹ کر آنے میں

کُچھ کھو جاتا ہے گُزرے زمانے میں

کُچھ مِل جاتا ہے نئے افسانے میں”
― Adeel Ahmed Khan

“All I could do was hide deep within the safety of my past memories.”
― Diana Kouprina, Borderline: A Poetic Memoir

“I didn’t want Marek to go over there, “he says. “It isn’t our fight, I told him. But it’s hard to take insults when you are a young pup. Marek got tired of being called a dumb bohunk just like Eberhard hated being called a Hun. I don’t know what it is with the Anglos of this city. They came from somewhere else, but if you ask them they just say they are Americans. Still we fight for America, same as they do. Pay the same price,” He puts the shotgun on the steps next to him. “I wanted to stay out of it. But Ray told me that we couldn’t bury our heads in the ground. That if the Hapsburg dynasty wins, it will try to rule the world. And I’ll be damned if I live under that yoke again.”
― Mary Relindes Ellis, The Bohemian Flats

“He has left Europe and yet come home to it. He works in the city and lives in a rural village. He’s never seen such poverty and at the same time felt such wealth. There are rumblings of a labor strike at the mill but even that does not frighten him. The possibility of workers striking is amazing, incomprehensible in his previous life. Here, even with the darker things he has observed, is still the possibility of change. Here is the chaos of creativity, and at the same time a strange harmony. Here is where conformity is only for the sake of getting things done by a large group of people, not a cultural dictate ruling one’s entire life. Here he can fashion his own way, think ahead without prescription.”
― Mary Relindes Ellis, The Bohemian Flats

“But if I knew any of this back then, I didn't yet have the vocabulary for that knowledge. And perhaps because of that, without intending to do so, I had continued the pattern of some of the men, and most of the women, in my family, reaching s far back as we had memory. We were careless, and shiftless, and unthinking. We left our ancestral homes, we birthed and sometimes buried our children in far-flung places, and we started afresh over and over. We cared for land, but too often it wasn't our land to care for.”
― Alexandra Fuller, Leaving Before the Rains Come

“Praat me niet over vrede. Praat me niet over vrede als die vrede betekent dat er een openluchtgevangenis bestaat waarin meer dan twee miljoen mensen opgesloten zitten. Een gevangenis zonder zuiver drinkwater, met onvoldoende voedsel, met te weinig brandstof om de ziekenhuizen draaiende te houden. Praat me niet over vrede als te vroeg geboren kinderen sterven omdat er niet genoeg elektriciteit is voor de couveuses. Als mensen met kanker alle hoop op genezing ontzegd wordt omdat hun therapie moet worden stopgezet. Als elke tien minuten een kind gedood wordt in Gaza. Praat me niet over vrede als mensen tientallen jaren lang, zelfs in zogenaamde vredestijd, uit hun huizen verdreven werden en worden.”
― Erik Wouters, Malak

“Ik ben twintig nu. Ik wil blij zijn en genieten van het leven. Maar hoe kan ik gelukkig zijn terwijl mijn land vermoord wordt? Zelfs als je niet dood bent, zoals ik, ben je het als Palestijn wel, vanbinnen. Dus praat me niet over vrede die geen vrede is.”
― Erik Wouters, Malak

“Ik vind dat een heel mooi woord, 'moedertaal'. Nederlands is niet mijn moedertaal, en zal het ook nooit zijn. Hoe goed ik die taal ook leer, ik zal, denk ik, nooit meer leven in een land waar mijn moedertaal wordt gesproken. En dat doet pijn...”
― Erik Wouters, Malak

“11 mei 2021

Morgen is het Eid al-Fitr, het einde van de ramadan.
Ik zal blij zijn als de vasten afgelopen is. Niets eten of drinken van zonsopgang tot zonsondergang...
Ik hoef de ramadan niet te volgen, maar ik doe het wel. Baba en mama ook, en Hossein, maar die heeft het niet lang volgehouden
Waarom ik de ramadan volg? Ik weet het niet precies. Het is gewoon zo, mijn cultuur. Waarom eet jij paaseitjes?”
― Erik Wouters, Malak

“Een eigen huis hier in België, is dat huis dan mijn 'thuis'?
Wil ik dat wel?
Ik heb hier geen vrienden of vriendinnen zoals ik die in Gaza had. Nog niet?
Wordt een eigen huis ooit thuis? Zonder mijn familie uit Gaza?”
― Erik Wouters, Malak

“I began to look at them in a new light and finally understood that they had always wanted what was best for me, had always wished for my success, but lacked the tools and knowledge to help me. They did what they could, escaping poverty and persecution to bring my brothers and me to what they saw as this promised land. They could not have anticipated all the hardships we would face here. Faith was all they had.”
― Ly Tran, House of Sticks

“The expectation of justice is not a privilege with which I had been raised, and staring at the piece of paper, it occurs to me how black and white I have made my entire life out to be. I was going to get my justice; it was rightfully mine. How American of me.”
― Anna Qu, Made in China: A Memoir of Love and Labor

“Instead of the Irish love of liberty warming America, the winds of republican slavery blew back to Ireland. The Irish had faded from Green to white, bleached by, as O'Connell put it, something in the "atmosphere" of America.”
― Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White

“Borders, though, are rarely as definite as they appear on maps. The longer you spend living around them, the less sense these kinds of simplistic divisions make. Frontiers are places where identities take on absurdly definite forms, in barbed wire fences and vigilante patrols. At the same time, they're places where boundaries between different cultures break down. Sicilian history is white, Christian and Western, certainly, but it has also been, and still is, black, Arab, Muslim among other things. Such ambiguities are present everywhere, but they are particularly visible on the shores of the Mediterranean. This is what makes the region so exciting. It's also what makes it difficult and, for some, uncomfortable.”
― Jamie Mackay, The Invention of Sicily: A Mediterranean History

“In quantum physics, particles change when they’re observed. But this isn’t quantum: my book doesn’t alter by being seen or unseen. It is exceptional whether it reaches 100 readers or 100 million.”
― S. Lucia Kanter St. Amour, The Covert Buccaneer

“People say you shouldn't forget where you come from, yet in my experience, where you come from never lets you forget.”
― Alejandra Campoverdi, First Gen: A Memoir

“The mental sophistication of Europe has killed something good and natural in us, killed it for good … for ever. To me, now, it is apparent that we have, both Font and myself, lost the best thing we ever had: the gift of our birth, as it were; something indescribable but solid and hidden and, most of all, natural. We have lost it for ever. And those who know what it is, cannot possess it… Gradually, I have lost my natural self. I have become a character in a book or in some other feat of imagination; my own actor in my own theatre; my own spectator in my own improvised play. Both audience and participant in one – a fictitious character.”
― Waguih Ghali, Beer in the Snooker Club