Foreigner Quotes (18 Quotes)

• 

  “The intellectual is called on the carpet... Don't you conceal something? You talk a language which is suspect. You don't talk like the rest of us, like the man in the street, but rather like a foreigner who does not belong here. We have to cut you down to size, expose your tricks, purge you.”

  Herbert Marcuse

  14 Copy to clipboard Copy quote

• “What strikes me now as the most wonderful proof of my fitness, or unfitness, for the times is the fact that nothing people were writing or talking about had any real interest for me. Only the object haunted me, the separate, detached, insignificant thing. It might be a part of the human body or a staircase in a vaudeville house; it might be a smokestack or a button I had found in the gutter. Whatever it was it enabled me to open up, to surrender, to attach my signature. To the life about me, to the people who made up the world I knew, I could not attach my signature. I was as definitely outside their world as a cannibal is outside the bounds of civilized society. I was filled with a perverse love of the thing-in-itself - not a philosophic attachment, but a passionate, desperately passionate hunger, as if in this discarded, worthless thing which everyone ignored there was contained the secret of my own regeneration.”

  Henry Miller

  3 Copy to clipboard Copy quote
• 

  “None of them seemed to mind sliding around in the faeces and choking in the smoke. They were determined not to miss the opportunity of watching a foreigner make a fool of himself.”

  Tahir Shah

  2 Copy to clipboard Copy quote
• 

  “As far as Samson was concerned I was just another foreigner in pursuit of a lunatic quest.”

  Tahir Shah

  2 Copy to clipboard Copy quote
• 

  “It’s still hard to live in a foreign country with unfamiliar people, even when you’re with the person you love. I don’t have any roots or history of my own here. A person needs their history around them to remember who they were and to remind them of where they’re going. I’m worried about leaving my history and memories behind me.”

  Alex Z. Moores

  2 Copy to clipboard Copy quote
• 

  “You are a foreigner in an actual world, a human co-worker, a truth, a divine word, and a perfect mistake.”

  Michael Bassey Johnson

  2 Copy to clipboard Copy quote
• 

  “The attitude to foreigners is like the attitude to dogs: dogs are neither human nor British, but so long as you keep them under control, give them their exercise, feed them, pat them, you will find their wild emotions are amusing, and their characters interesting.”

  V.S. Pritchett

  2 Copy to clipboard Copy quote
• 

  “Yes, you have been away a very long time. "
  "Oh, centuries and centuries; so long," she said, "that I’m sure I’m dead and buried, and this dear old place is heaven;”

  Edith Wharton

  1 Copy to clipboard Copy quote
• 

  “Refuse to feel foreign on your own planet.”

  Ben Tolosa

  1 Copy to clipboard Copy quote
• 

  “We are all 'foreigners' to [the remainder of: the human race minus our countrymen].”

  Mokokoma Mokhonoana

  1 Copy to clipboard Copy quote
• 

  “Biting into a samosa is like trying to pronounce words in English, you have to shape your mouth in a way to get every bit.”

  Alain Bremond-Torrent

  1 Copy to clipboard Copy quote
• 

  “to bring a furrin child into the coonthry; an' depend on't, whether you an' me lives to see't or noo, it'll coom to soom harm. The first sitiation iver I held—it was a hold hancient habbey, wi' the biggest orchard o' apples an' pears you ever see—there was a French valet, an' he stool silk stoockins, an' shirts, an' rings, an' iverythin' he could ley his hands on, an' run awey at last wi' th' missis's jewl-box. They're all alaike, them furriners. It roons i' th' blood.”

  George Eliot

  0 Copy to clipboard Copy quote
• 

  “Foreigners have become people everywhere.”

  Miriam Lichtheim

  0 Copy to clipboard Copy quote
• 

  “If you think it's bad now, my friend, wait till we reach a town!' He shook his head and brushed at his tattered, dirty shirtsleeve. 'Do try to remember we're visitors-and not welcome ones-if you should feel moved to reason with anyone.”

  David Weber

  0 Copy to clipboard Copy quote
• 

  “Dopo aver trascorso un anno a Roma torno per un mese in America. Lì, subito, sento la mancanza dell'italiano. Non poterlo parlare e ascoltare ogni giorno mi angoscia. Quando vado nei ristoranti, nei negozi, in spiaggia, m'infastidisco: come mai la gente non parla italiano? Provo un sentimento di nostalgia struggente.”

  Jhumpa Lahiri

  0 Copy to clipboard Copy quote
• 

  “Elle était étrangère et, comme tous les étrangers, transportait avec elle l'ombre d'un ailleurs.”

  Elif Shafak

  0 Copy to clipboard Copy quote
• 

  “There is a French expression that says something like: “No one is prophet in his own country.” and there is another one that approximately says: “Who goes hunting loses his place.” somewhere in between i try to find my space.”

  Alain Bremond-Torrent

  0 Copy to clipboard Copy quote
• 

  “I am a human, if i was a foreigner i’d know.”

  Alain Bremond-Torrent

  0 Copy to clipboard Copy quote