Foreigner In Switzerland Quotes

Yes, you do hate Switzerland. And," doctor Messerli paused for effect, "you love it. You love it and you hate it. What you don't feel is apathy. You're not indifferent. You're ambivalent."
Anna had thought about this before, when nights came during which she could do nothing but wander Dietlikon's sleeping streets or hike the hill behind her house to sit upon the bench where most often she went to weep. She'd considered her ambivalence many, many times, and in the end, she's diagnosed herself with a disease that she'd also invented. Switzerland syndrome. Like Stockholm syndrome. But instead of my captors, I'm attached to the room in which I'm held captive. It's the prison I'm bound to, not the warden.

Anna was absolutely right. It was the landscape. it was the geography. The fields, the streams, the lakes, the forests. And the mountains. On exceptionally clear days when the weather was right, if you walked south on Dietlikon's Bahnhofstrasse you could see the crisp outlines of snow-capped Alps against a blazing blue horizon eighty kilometers away. On these certain days it was something in the magic of the atmosphere that made them tangible and moved them close. The mutability of those particular mountains reminded Anna of herself. And it wasn't simply the natural landscape that she attached herself to emotionally. It was the cobblestone roads of Zürich's old town and the spires of this church and the towers of that one. And the trains, the trains, the goddamn ~ Jill Alexander Essbaum

Half of the time I don't know what they're talking about; their jokes seem to relate to a past that everyone but me has shared. I'm a foreigner in the world and I don't understand the language. ~ Jean Webster

It's the change of rhythm which I think is what keeps me alive. In Spain I hear so much noise from my window that can't stand it. In Switzerland it's the lack of noise that drives me crazy. ~ Geraldine Chaplin

A lifelong insomniac, I sleep like one newly dead every night and dream deeply harmonious dreams of swimming along with the current in a clear green river, playing and at home in the water. On the first night, I dreamed that the real name of the house was not Bramasole but Cento Angeli, One Hundred Angels, and that I would discover them one by one. Is it bad luck to change the name of a house, as it is to rename a boat? As a trepid foreigner, I wouldn't. But for me, the house now has a secret name as well as its own name. ~ Frances Mayes

In practice, Athenian democracy was very limited. There were twice as many slaves as citizens, and no woman or foreigner had citizenship rights. But for those who were included, this nascent democracy had extraordinary implications, undercutting the ability of aristocratic families to build and maintain their private power bases. ~ Stephanie Coontz

Islam will aim to establish itself as the majority in France, Germany, Austria, Sweden, Finland, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom. Any country, in which they successfully establish themselves will serve as their primary base for the invasion of neighbouring countries (such as Switzerland, Liechtenstein, Denmark, Hungary and the Mediterranean) ~ Anita B. Sulser PhD

If we heard that somebody starved to death in Sweden or Switzerland, we would be shocked. ~ P. J. O'Rourke

Is it necessary to say what my first impression was when I looked at my visitor's card? Surely not! My sister having married a foreigner, there was but one impression that any man in his senses could possibly feel. Of course the Count had come to borrow money of me.
"Louis," I said, "do you think he would go away if you gave him five shillings? ~ Wilkie Collins

To be an artist at all is like living in Switzerland during a world war. To be an artist in Zurich, in 1917, implies a degree of self-absorption that would have glazed over the eyes of Narcissus. ~ Tom Stoppard

The Catholic Inquisition is well-known for its persecutions, but the Protestants were no better. An infamous example of Protestant evil, an example given by Thomas Jefferson, is the execution of Michael Servetus. A Spanish physician, Servetus wrote that the doctrine of the Trinity makes no sense, that it contradicts the idea that there is only one God. Servetus was condemned to die by the Catholic Inquisition, but he wasn't present, so they couldn't kill him. He had fled to Protestant Switzerland, expecting to be protected there. Instead, the city leaders in Geneva, with the approval of John Calvin (one of the great fathers of Protestant thought) and other Protestant leaders across Europe, had Servetus burned alive (with green wood to give him longer to repent) in 1553. ~ Russ Kick

My wife and I have spent most of our lives in France, and we are both pretty well bilingual, my wife more purely than I, since as a little girl she went to school in French Switzerland. ~ Patrick O'Brian

Finding an access to the 'open public space' is the challenge that really matters in life. We may know that everyone might feel like an alien to someone else or sometimes even to oneself, whether native, foreigner or exile, whether assimilated or singular, whether straight or gay. Be that as it may, a basic premise for the safeguard of self-fulfillment is the availability of a comforting maneuvering ground for one and all and an opportunity to enter a 'space of appearance' with a gate to a 'citizenship of the world'. ("His master's voice" ) ~ Erik Pevernagie

The turning-point [in Klosters, Switzerland in 1988]

[Diana's sister] Jane's wonderfully solid. If you ring up with a drama, she says: 'Golly, gosh, Duch, how horrible, how sad and how awful' and gets angry. But my sister Sarah swears: 'Poor Duch, such a shitty thing to happen.' My father says: 'Just remember we always love you.'
But that summer [1988] when I made so many cock-ups I sat myself down in the autumn, when I was in Scotland, and I remember saying to myself: 'Right, Diana, it's no good, you've got to change it right round, this publicity, you've got to grow up and be responsible. You've got to understand that you can't do what other 26- and 27-year olds are doing. You've been chosen to do a position so you must adapt to the position and stop fighting it.' I remember my conversation so well, sitting by water. I always sit by water when contemplating.
Stephen Twigg [a therapist] who comes to see me said once: 'Whatever anybody else thinks of you is none of your business.' That sat with me. Then once someone said to me, when I said I've got to go up to Balmoral, and they said: 'Well, you've got to put up with them but they've also got to put up with you.' This myth about me hating Balmoral--I love Scotland but just the atmosphere drains me to nothing. I go up 'strong Diana.' I come away depleted of everything because they just suck me dry, because I tune in to all their moods and, boy, are there some undercurrents there! Instead of having a holida ~ Andrew Morton

Every country has its cocktail-party question. A simple one-sentence query, the answer to which unlocks a motherlode of information about the person you just met ... In Switzerland it is, Where are you from? That is all you need to know about someone. ~ Eric Weiner

I'm a foreigner in the world and I don't understand the language. It's a miserable feeling. I've had it all my life. At the high school the girls would stand in groups and just look at me. I was queer and different and everybody knew it. ~ Jean Webster

If men were equal in America, all these Poles and English and Czechs and blacks, then they were equal everywhere, and there was really no such thing as foreigner; there were only free men and slaves. ~ Michael Shaara

That's the luck we have with making films in Europe. It's still, in some ways, a virgin territory for a lot of stories. It's funny to see people in 10-gallon hats somewhere in France or Switzerland. You think, "Wow, is this real?" You do it in Wyoming and it's redundant. ~ Thomas Bidegain

Perhaps it is not the belief of God that makes us happier but belief in something, anything. How else to explain the fact that the happiest countries in the world--Denmark, Iceland, Switzerland, the Netherlands--are hardly religious at all? ~ Eric Weiner

'Onward' was a song I wrote in Montreux, in Switzerland, when we were there camping out for the whole winter. In the summer, Montreux is a really, really big summertime-touristy, full-of-life kind of place. In the winter, it closes down. ~ Chris Squire

Me: What will I do?

MK: What you always do--only in Switzerland. ~ Nina Stibbe

Note another element of Switzerland: it is perhaps the most successful country in history, yet it has traditionally had a very low level of university education compared to the rest of the rich nations. Its system, even in banking during my days, was based on apprenticeship models, nearly vocational rather than the theoretical ones. In other words, on techne (crafts and know how), not episteme (book knowledge, know what). ~ Nassim Nicholas Taleb

I'll disappear in the fog as a foreigner to all life, as a human island detached from the dream of the sea, as a uselessly existing ship that floats on the surface of everything. ~ Fernando Pessoa

Of little use, the man you may suppose,
Who says in verse what others say in prose;
Yet let me show a poet's of some weight,
And (though no soldier) useful to the state,
What will a child learn sooner than a song?
What better teach a foreigner the tongue?
What's long or short, each accent where to place
And speak in public with some sort of grace? ~ Alexander Pope

Some kid can say, "Hey, I really want you to play my town in Switzerland, or Sweden, or Latvia," and they could have a fun night at the show. On the other hand, all those kids could have a record that means something to them in a more personal way a couple months down the road. The live band is a really important thing for us, but my focus is on the album now. ~ Zachary Cole Smith

German is more familiar now since I live part of the year in Rome and part in the German part of Switzerland. But it's not difficult to sing in German; it's difficult to feel in German. This takes time. It's a culture. ~ Cecilia Bartoli

[Israel's military occupation is] in gross violation of international law and has been from the outset. And that much, at least, is fully recognized, even by the United States, which has overwhelming and, as I said, unilateral responsibility for these crimes. So George Bush No. 1, when he was the U.N. ambassador, back in 1971, he officially reiterated Washington's condemnation of Israel's actions in the occupied territories. He happened to be referring specifically to occupied Jerusalem. In his words, actions in violation of the provisions of international law governing the obligations of an occupying power, namely Israel. He criticized Israel's failure "to acknowledge its obligations under the Fourth Geneva Convention as well as its actions which are contrary to the letter and spirit of this Convention." [...] However, by that time, late 1971, a divergence was developing, between official policy and practice. The fact of the matter is that by then, by late 1971, the United States was already providing the means to implement the violations that Ambassador Bush deplored. [...] on December 5th [2001], there had been an important international conference, called in Switzerland, on the 4th Geneva Convention. Switzerland is the state that's responsible for monitoring and controlling the implementation of them. The European Union all attended, even Britain, which is virtually a U.S. attack dog these days. They attended. A hundred and fourteen countries all together, the parties to ~ Noam Chomsky

The Czechs are downright crazy about mushrooms! In late summer and autumn, a foreigner might even get the impression that the number of sponge-hunting Czechs roaming about in the forests with a punnet largely exceeds the possible number of mushrooms. ~ Terje B. Englund

Life on the open road is liberty ... to be alone, to have few needs, to be unknown, everywhere a foreigner and at home, and to walk grandly and solitarily in conquest of the world. ~ Isabelle Eberhardt

I grew up partially in Switzerland but mostly in Australia. I lived in Kakadu for a short time - it's an Aboriginal community. My best friend growing up was Aboriginal. She taught me so much. ~ Isabel Lucas

Speaking to a foreigner was the dream of every student, and my opportunity came at last. When I got back from my trip down the Yangtze, I learned that my year was being sent in October to a port in the south called Zhanjiang to practice our English with foreign sailors. I was thrilled.

Zhanjiang was about 75 miles from Chengdu, a journey of two days and two nights by rail. It was the southernmost large port in China, and quite near the Vietnamese border.

It felt like a foreign country, with turn-of-the-century colonial-style buildings, pastiche Romanesque arches, rose windows, and large verandas with colorful parasols. The local people spoke Cantonese, which was almost a foreign language. The air smelled of the unfamiliar sea, exotic tropical vegetation, and an altogether bigger world.

But my excitement at being there was constantly doused by frustration. We were accompanied by a political supervisor and three lecturers, who decided that, although we were staying only a mile from the sea, we were not to be allowed anywhere near it. The harbor itself was closed to outsiders, for fear of 'sabotage' or defection. We were told that a student from Guangzhou had managed to stow away once in a cargo steamer, not realizing that the hold would be sealed for weeks, by which time he had perished. We had to restrict our movements to a clearly defined area of a few blocks around our residence.

Regulations like these were part of our daily li ~ Jung Chang

Switzerland is a land where crime is virtually unknown, yet most Swiss males are required by law to keep in their homes what amounts to a portable, personal machine gun. ~ Tom Clancy

Norway, Iceland, Australia, Canada, Sweden, Switzerland, Belgium, Japan, the Netherlands, Denmark, and the United Kingdom are among the least religious societies on [E]arth. According to the United Nations' Human Development Report (2005) they are also the healthiest, as indicated by life expectancy, adult literacy, per capita income, educational attainment, gender equality, homicide rate, and infant mortality. Insofar as there is a crime problem in Western Europe, it is largely the product of immigration. Seventy percent of the inmates of France's jails, for instance, are Muslim. The Muslims of Western Europe are generally not atheists. Conversely, the fifty nations now ranked lowest in terms of the United Nations' [H]uman [D]evelopment [I]ndex are unwaveringly religious.
Other analyses paint the same picture: the United States is unique among wealthy democracies in its level of religious adherence; it is also uniquely beleaguered by high rates of homicide, abortion, teen pregnancy, sexually transmitted disease, and infant mortality. The same comparison holds true within the United States itself: Southern and Midwestern states, characterized by the highest levels of religious literalism, are especially plagued by the above indicators of societal dysfunction, while the comparatively secular states of the Northeast conform to European norms. ~ Sam Harris

Oh! How good it is to be your age! I remember, and I know that blue haze like the mist on the mountains of Switzerland. That mist which covers everything in that blissful time when childhood is just ending, and out of the vast circle, happy and gay, there is a path growing narrower and narrower, and it is delightful and alarming to enter the ballroom, bright and splendid as it is... ~ Leo Tolstoy

CREATED by an eighteen-year-old girl during the freakishly cold, rainy summer of 1816 while on holiday in Switzerland with her married lover, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and two other writers, the poet Lord Byron and John Polidori, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein would become the foundational work for two important new genres of literature - horror and science fiction. ~ Mary Shelley

Every once in a while, someone would call me a foreigner or a Yankee, or whatever. In the United States, someone might say something, like how kids do, to point out that you're different. That would come as a surprise to me. As you get old, you either get defensive about it or you accept it and you reach out, because you realize the world's full of people like that. ~ Viggo Mortensen

Lederhosen Maker Opens First U.S. Store in Cincinnati By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS Wiesnkoenig (pronounced VEE-sehn-koh-neg), the official supplier of lederhosen for the Munich Oktoberfest, opened its first store in the United States on Wednesday, in a brewery in Cincinnati's Over-the-Rhine neighborhood. Oliver Pfund, a Wiesnkoenig consultant, said, "We want to show people here in the U.S. you can wear the lederhosen with Chuck Taylors, you don't have to wear the suspenders." Founded in 2007, Wiesnkoenig has five stores in Germany and sells in department stores there and in Switzerland and Austria. Mr. Pfund said a brewery was a perfect location. He said the company hoped visitors to the brewery would "have an interest in the German culture, as well. ~ Anonymous

So in the streets of Calcutta I sometimes imagine myself a foreigner, and only then do I discover how much is to be seen, which is lost so long as its full value in attention is not paid. It is the hunger to really see which drives people to travel to strange places. ~ Rabindranath Tagore

If I had not grown up in Nigeria- and if all I knew of Africa were of popular images- I too would think that africa was a place of beautiful landscapes, beautiful animals and incomprehensible people fighting sensless wars, dying of poverty and aids- unable to speak for themselves and waiting to be saved by a kind white foreigner. ~ Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

She understood that for her to excel at Oxford she had to improve her English. Her brain was in need of words to express itself fully, the way a sapling was in need of raindrops to grow to its potential. She purchased stacks of coloured Post-it notes. On them she wrote the words she chanced upon, fell in love with and intended to use at the earliest opportunity -- just as every foreigner did, one way or another:
- Autotomy: The casting off of a body part by an animal in danger
- Cleft Stick (from Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings): To be in a difficult situation
- Rantipole (from the Legend of Sleepy Hollow): Wild, reckless, sometimes quarrelsome person.
In her first Political Philosophy essay, she wrote 'In Turkey, where daily politics is rantipole, each time the system is in a cleft stick, democracy is the first thing to be severed and sacrificed in an act of autotomy. ~ Elif Shafak

Everybody in those days was a foreigner, no matter where they were born; as industrial modernization had its way with people and places, no one was native to the transformation of the United States from an agricultural economy to the foremost industrial power in the world--the factory being both the cause and the effect of an act of becoming, the likes of which nobody had ever seen before. ~ Jerry Herron

A continent ages quickly once we come. The natives live in harmony with it. But the foreigner destroys, cuts down the trees, drains the water, so that the water supply is altered, and in a short time the soil, once the sod is turned under, is cropped out and, next, it starts to blow away as it has blown away in every old country and as I had seen it start to blow in Canada. The earth gets tired of being exploited. ~ Ernest Hemingway,

Dominated by Zionism's particular concept of nationality, the State of Israel
still refuses, sixty years after its establishment, to see itself as a republic that
serves its citizens. One quarter of the citizens are not categorized as Jews, and
the laws of the state imply that Israel is not their state nor do they own it. The
state has also avoided integrating the local inhabitants into the superculture it
has created, and has instead deliberately excluded them. Israel has also refused
to be a consociational democracy (like Switzerland or Belgium) or a multicultural democracy (like Great Britain or the Netherlands) - that is to say, a state
that accepts its diversity while serving its inhabitants. Instead, Israel insists on
seeing itself as a Jewish state belonging to all the Jews in the world, even though they are no longer persecuted refugees but full citizens of the countries in which
they choose to reside. The excuse for this grave violation of a basic principle of
modern democracy, and for the preservation of an unbridled ethnocracy that
grossly discriminates against certain of its citizens, rests on the active myth of an
eternal nation that must ultimately forgather in its ancestral land. ~ Shlomo Sand

We played some gigs in Switzerland a couple of weeks ago and it was the first time I really felt the group was really a band in the sense of something I could write for. ~ Fred Frith

Feeling at home anywhere on earth, and a foreigner even in the country where I was born, I consider myself an earthling, a citizen of the world.
I love nature dearly and all creatures that contribute to make it what it is. I see the beauty in all expressions of life, and I see how blind so many of us still are. Our planet is remarkably abundant and there's more than enough for us all.
It is greed and shortsightedness that create the illusion of scarcity. I have lived through tremendous adventures and survived only because other people risked their lives for me. Realising how interconnected and interdependent we all are, I am neither shy or embarrassed when it is time for me lean on another to ask for help. And when I have the opportunity to help another, I view it as my duty and privilege. ~ Yossi Ghinsberg

I live in Italy. I visit my family in Switzerland. ~ Ursula Andress

One thing is overlooked, which is this: That the kind of dependence that results from exchange, from commercial transactions, is a reciprocal dependence. We cannot be dependent on the foreigner without the foreigner being dependent on us. Now, this is the very essence of society. To break up natural relations is not to place ourselves in a state of independence, but in a state of isolation. ~ Frederic Bastiat

She was, in truth, one of those bigoted fanatics, one of those stubborn Puritans, whom England breeds in such numbers, those pious and insupportable old maids, who haunt all the tables d'hôte in Europe, who ruin Italy, poison Switzerland, and render the charming towns on the Riviera uninhabitable, introducing everywhere their weird manias, their manners of petrified vestals, their indescribable wardrobes, and a peculiar odour of rubber, as if they were put away in a waterproof case every night. ~ Guy De Maupassant