Migrant Quotes

“Inevitably, though, there will always be a significant part of the past which can neither be burnt nor banished to the soothing limbo of forgetfulness— myself. I was and still am that same ship which carried me to the new shore, the same vessel containing all the memories and dreams of the child in the brick house with the toy tea set. I am the shore I left behind as well as the home I return to every evening. The voyage cannot proceed without me.”
― Luisa A. Igloria

“But, despite the dangers, people continue to take the risk. Children certainly take the risk. Children do what their stomachs tell them to do. They don't think twice when they have to chase a moving train. They run along it, reach for any metal bar at hand, and fling themselves toward whichever half-stable surface they may land on. Children chase after life, even if that chase might end up killing them. Children run and flee. They have an instinct for survival, perhaps, that allows them to endure almost anything just to make it to the other side of horror, whatever may be waiting there for them.”
― Valeria Luiselli, Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions

“Now we’re guests in a faraway land nearly 40 years on.
No trees, no cool breeze,
no best friends.
Only endless days spent in sending SMSs...”
― Nabeel Philip Mohan, No Return Address: A collection of poems

“Bob, I am grateful for your
Three letter name.
It's another reminder of home
Of a world predictable
Of a life I had.”
― Wilfred Waters, No Return Address: A collection of poems

“You are...the embodiment
of immediate good karma.
The equalizer between bottom
feeders and the sanctimonious
cogs in the system.”
― G.A.P. Gutierrez, No Return Address: A collection of poems

“Haris...as a naive migrant
who just moved here,
relying on you tapered worries.”
― Tammy Sulit, No Return Address: A collection of poems

“You stand for what is right-
for the patient and the staff.
Pressures of work may down you,
maybe bent but not broken.”
― Mujel Hasan, No Return Address: A collection of poems

“[Y]ou, one day, will knock lips with Turkish-coffee-clad veils whose beds our kin must tuck in misty-eyed.”
― Armineonila M., No Return Address: A collection of poems

“Even the new things that
I less than know,
I keep trying, did again
until perfect.”
― Alliah "Lenzkie" Tabaya, No Return Address: A collection of poems

“The Arab Spring whose seeds failed to bloom anything other than a chaotic mess that requires only blood to grow has contributed immensely to the rising numbers of these migrants.”
― Aysha Taryam

“Workers were required to stay six months, and even then permission to quit was not always granted. The factory held the first two months of every worker's pay; leaving without approval meant losing that money and starting over somewhere else. That was a fact of factory life you couldn't know from the outside: Getting into a factory was easy. The hard part was getting out.”
― Leslie T. Chang

“When an entire segment of the world is burned and reduced to a lawless battleground for thugs and mercenaries, a land where government does not exist, where the slate of history is being wiped out and hope has drowned in gallons of innocent blood, the only respite comes in the form of the open seas and what lies beyond the horizon. So ships are boarded and pain is tolerated just a little while longer.”
― Aysha Taryam

“At times it seems as if the whole world has become a refugee and the few of us, who are privileged enough to wake up to the sound of an alarm clock instead of a siren, those of us who are enveloped by a veil of safety many of us fail to appreciate, have become desensitised to the migrating numbers, to the images of the dead, shrugging them away as a collective misery that this ailing part of the world must endure.”
― Aysha Taryam

“People whose lives were determined for them by a group of politicians whose severing, dissecting and reattaching of their lands has turned their world into a monster that not even its creator can control.”
― Aysha Taryam

“It’s so easy to believe that others deserve their fate, and the fact was that if nobody bothered to help other people then the worst would always happen… She stares out of her window at the busy street, where the British go about their daily business, taking it for granted that they will never be arrested for not voting the right way, praying the right way, dressing the right way or for belonging to a different tribe.”
― Amanda Craig, Hearts and Minds

“Notably, during this era, the notion of illegal immigration did not conjure the same political and legal consequences that it would after 1965 [...] The southern border of the United States was not militarized or guarded in the manner it would become in the late twentieth century, and seasonal, uncapped migration from Mexico was an accepted and expected labor reality.”
― Pratheepan Gulasekaram, The New Immigration Federalism

“In the clay, there is a tiger and the problem is neither in the question nor is in the text, it is in interpretation. You can listen or read the answer in folk literature and Sufi music. To belong is to have a grammar and in grammar there are exceptions. You can never belong fully except to the gravity of the universe. We belong anyways.”
― Rana Abdulfattah, Tiger and Clay: Syria Fragments

“Ces fantômes n’ont pas le bon passeport et leur domicile se trouve quelque part dans le néant.”
― Sigríður Hagalín Björnsdóttir, Eyland

“That night in our tent, Justin told me how, ten thousand years ago, human beings were migrant—we were like the birds. The average human would see only about a hundred people in her lifetime and would know each one profoundly, deeply bonded. Today, humans in cities will see a hundred beings in just minutes, naming them strangers, a dehumanizing designation.

The next morning, I woke to wet rocks glittering in the slanted light, the day’s warmth shining in bars through the sparse canopy of maples. Happy here, I began to fear our next destination, hectic Manhattan—a surreal flip to witnessing ten thousand people a day. In these deep thickets, we walked a path that was streamlined, simple and clear.”
― Aspen Matis