Foreigner Quotes

A great writer is always like a foreigner in the language which he expresses himself, even if this is his native tongue. At the limit, he draws his strength from a mute and unknown minority that belongs only to him. He is a foreigner in his own language: he does not mix another language with his own language, he carves out a nonpreexistent foreign language within his own language. He makes the language itself scream, stutter, stammer, or murmur. ~ Gilles Deleuze

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

It might come as a surprise, but the Bible also addresses the importance of corporate responsibility. The Old Testament "law of gleaning" speaks loud and clear about this. Leviticus 19: 9-10 (NIV) summarizes this important social justice law which is also restated in Deuteronomy 24: "'When you reap the harvest of your land, do not reap to the very edges of your field or gather the gleanings of your harvest. Do not go over your vineyard a second time or pick up the grapes that have fallen. Leave them for the poor and the foreigner. I am the LORD your God." This law from God Himself, commanded landowners, business owners in our language today, to leave some of their potential profits for immigrants and the poor. ~ Robert Chao Romero

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

The good news was that he wasn't sixteen anymore and he had this, his art. His food. And if this dinner continued to go the way it was going, if Mrs. Raje stood by her word and gave DJ the contract for her son's fund-raising dinner next month based on tonight's success... well, then they'd be fine.
Mrs. Raje had been more impressed thus far. Everything from the steamed momos to the dum biryani had turned out just so. The mayor of San Francisco had even asked to speak to DJ after tasting the California blue crab with bitter coconut cream and tucked DJ's card into his wallet.
Only dessert remained, and dessert was DJ's crowning glory, his true love. With sugar he could make love to taste buds, make adult humans sob.
The reason Mina Raje had given him, a foreigner and a newbie, a shot at tonight was his Arabica bean gelato with dark caramel. DJ had created the dessert for her after spending a week researching her. Not just her favorite restaurants, but where she shopped, how she wore her clothes, what made her laugh, even the perfume she wore and how much. The taste buds drew from who you were. How you reacted to taste as a sense was a culmination of how you processed the world, the most primal form of how you interacted with your environment.
It was DJ's greatest strength and weakness, needing to know what exact note of flavor unfurled a person. His need to find that chord and strum it was bone deep. ~ Sonali Dev

It makes me feel good. Being a foreigner, (the American fans) they make me feel like I'm a citizen of this country. ~ Sergio Martinez

I can see clothes of silk, if materials that do not hide the body, nor even one's decency, can be called clothes ... Wretched flocks of maids labor so that the adulteress may be visible through her thin dress, so that her husband has no more acquaintance than any outsider or foreigner with his wife's body. ~ Seneca The Younger

Gift

Nothing will hurt you that much despite how you feel

the stress on your back shapes your insight

this splendid November rain Toussaint. I find

you by your marks, he says

an imprint

But when I summon you, I talk to - I say -

my memory of your face. It's kind of crazy

to others. They're not very interesting he says.

When I first came to this country, and now

I know the language I say, but I had in a dream

spoken it many years previously. That is,

not the language of the dead the language

of France. I took one year of French in 1964

and then nothing but once, in 1977 I spoke French

in a dream all night: I was in the future I

moved here in 1992. Country of the more

logical than I? though the people of my quartier

know and like me, even as I a foreigner remain strange

You do everything alone a woman said to me.

There are ways to care without interfering

but the French speak of anguish frequently

they are conscious of emotional extremity

a terrible gift. It's all a gift, he says . . .

some haven't been opened. I'm not sure

he said that it's nearly my sixty-seventh birthday

today though it's the day of the dead hello

we love you they say. ~ Alice Notley

The French have such an attractive civilization, dedicated to calm pleasures and general tolerance, and their taste in every domain is so sharp, so sure, that the foreigner (especially someone from chaotic, confused America) is quickly seduced into believing that if he can only become a Parisian he will at last master the art of living. ~ Edmund White

Americans are the most generous country on the planet. I've worked in Europe, I've worked in Australia. There is no where else where you get absolutely no attitude for being a foreigner. If you do your job well, they embrace you. ~ Hugh Jackman

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

A logical analysis of reflexive usages in French shows, however, that this simplicity is an illusion and that, so far from helping the foreigner, it is more calculated to bother him. ~ Edward Sapir

Above all, translators must be native speakers. It's not because they speak the language better
I understand that sometimes a foreigner can learn a language better than native speakers. It has more to do with having an intimate knowledge of the society for which the book is being translated. ~ Sergei Lukyanenko

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

It was a different sense of isolation from what he normally felt in Japan. And not such a bad feeling, he decided. Being alone in two senses of the word was maybe like a double negation of isolation. In other words, it made perfect sense for him, a foreigner, to feel isolated here. The thought calmed him. He was in exactly the right place. ~ Haruki Murakami

My apologies, see, I forgot my manners.
I get on the mic 'cause it's my life. You show off for girls and cameras.
You a pop star, not a rapper. A Vanilla Ice or a Hammer.
Y'all hear this crap he dumping out? Somebody get him a Pamper.
And a crown for me. The best have heard about me.
You can only spell "brilliant" by first spelling Bri.
You see, naturally, I do my shit with perfection.
Better call a bodyguard 'cause you gon' need some protection,
And on this here election, the people crown a new leader.
You didn't see this coming, and your ghostwriters didn't either.
I came here to ether. I'm sorry to do this to you.
This is no longer a battle, it's your funeral, boo. I'm murdering you.
On my corner they call me coroner, I'm warning ya.
Tell the truth, this dude is borin' ya.
You confused like a foreigner. I'll explain with ease:
You're just a casualty in the reality of the madness of Bri.
No fallacies, I spit maladies, causin' fatalities,
And do it casually, damaging rappers without bandaging.
Imagining managing my own label, my own salary.
And actually, factually, there's no MC that's as bad as me.
Milez? That's cute. But it don't make me cower.
I move at light speed, you stuck at per hour.
You spit like a lisp. I spit like a high power.
Bri's the future, and you Today like Matt Lauer.
You coward. But you're a G? It ain't convincing to me.
You talk ab ~ Angie Thomas

We were born between blood and gunpowder; and between blood and gunpowder we were raised. Every so often the powerful from other lands came to rob us of tomorrow. For this reason it was written in a war song that unites us: "If a foreigner with his step ever dares to profane your land, think, Oh beloved motherland, that heaven gave you a soldier in each son." For this reason we fought. With flags and different languages the foreigner came to conquer us. He came and he went. ~ Subcomandante Marcos

I know many souls that toss and whirl and pass, but none there are that intrigue me more than the Souls of White Folk. Of them I am singularly clairvoyant. I see in and through them. I view them from unusual points of vantage. Not as a foreigner do I come, for I am native, not foreign, bone of their thought and flesh of their language. Mine is not the knowledge of the traveler or the colonial composite of dear memories, words and wonder. Nor yet is my knowledge that which servants have of masters, or mass of class, or capitalist of artisan. Rather I see these souls undressed and from the back and side. I see the working of their entrails. I know their thoughts and they know that I know. This knowledge makes them now embarrassed, now furious. They deny my right to live and be and call me misbirth! My word is to them mere bitterness and my soul, pessimism. And yet as they preach and strut and shout and threaten, crouching as they clutch at rags of facts and fancies to hide their nakedness, they go twisting, flying by my tired eyes and I see them ever stripped, - ugly, human. ~ W.E.B. Du Bois

He died at the wrong time, when there was much to be clarified and established. They hadn't even started to be grown-ups together. There was this piece of heaven, this little girl he'd carried around the shop on his shoulders; and then one day she was gone, replaced by a foreigner, an uncooperative woman he didn't know how to speak to. Being so confused, so weak, so in love, he chose strength and drove her away from himself. The last years he spent wondering where she'd gone, and slowly came to realise that she would never return, and that the husband he'd chosen for her was an idiot. ~ Hanif Kureishi

His face was the sort of British face from which emotion has been so carefully banished that a foreigner is apt to think the wearer of the face incapable of any sort of feeling; the kind of face which, if it has any expression at all, expresses principally the resolution to go through the world decorously, without intruding upon or annoying anyone. ~ Edward Lucas White

If you left off traditions because you didn't know why they started you'd be no better than a foreigner. ~ Terry Pratchett

Eh? How 'bout that?" Bill nudged her. "Did I promise to show you love or did I promise to show you love?"
"Sure,they seem like they're in love." Luce shrugged. "But-"
"But what?Do you have any idea how painful that is? Look at that guy. He makes getting inked look like being caressed by a soft breeze."
Luce squirmed on the branch. "Is that the lesson here? Pain equals love?"
"You tell me," Bill said. "It may surprise you to hear this,but the ladies aren't exactly banging down Bill's door."
"I mean,if I tattooed Daniel's same on my body would that mean I loved him more than I already do?"
"It's a symbol,Luce." Bill let out a raspy sigh. "You're being too literal. Think about it this way: Daniel is the first good-looking boy LuLu has ever seen. Until he washed ashore a few months ago, this girl's whole world was her father and a few fat natives."
"She's Miranda," Luce said, remembering the love story from The Tempest, which she'd read in her tenth-grade Shakespeare seminar.
"How very civilized of you!" Bill pursed his lips with approval. "They are liek Ferdinand and Miranda: The handsome foreigner shipwrecks on her shores-"
"So,of course it was love at first sight for LuLu," Luce murmured. This was what she was afraid of: the same thoughtless,automatic love that had bothered her in Helston.
"Right," Bill said. "She didn't have a choice but to fall for him.But what's interesting here is Daniel. You see, he didn't have to teach he ~ Lauren Kate

The greatest missionary is the Bible in the mother tongue. It needs no furlough and is never considered a foreigner. ~ William Cameron Townsend

The fact is that Britain is the most warlike nation on earth. In the history of armed combat, we are the only democracy to have declared war on another democracy - England versus Finland in the second world war, in case you're interested - and we're always at the front of the queue when Johnny Foreigner gets a bit uppity. Who stood up to the Kaiser? Who stood up to Adolf? And let's not forget the Argies. What other country would have sent its fleet halfway round the world and lost 250 men to protect a flock of sheep and some oil that might or might not be there? We're still at it. ~ Jeremy Clarkson

To be fair, English is full of booby traps for the unwary foreigner. Any language where the unassuming word fly signifies an annoying insect, a means of travel, and a critical part of a gentleman's apparel is clearly asking to be mangled. ~ Bill Bryson

No one is a foreigner to no one. ~ Abhijit Naskar

I've always been an outsider. Even in London. If I returned to Scotland, I'd feel a complete foreigner. ~ Peter Doig

The allowance vanished absolutely; and in its place there came into being an arrangement. By this, his lordship was to have whatever money he wished, but he must ask for it, and state why it was needed. If the request were reasonable, the cash would be forthcoming; if preposterous, it would not. The flaw in the scheme, from his lordship's point of view, was the difference of opinion that can exist in the minds of two men as to what the words reasonable and preposterous may be taken to mean. Twenty pounds, for instance, would, in the lexicon of Sir Thomas Blunt, be perfectly reasonable for the current expenses of a man engaged to Molly McEachern, but preposterous for one to whom she had declined to remain engaged. It is these subtle shades of meaning that make the English language so full of pitfalls for the foreigner. ~ P.G. Wodehouse

[Just as any foreigner is not fully human.] ~ Michel De Montaigne

Basketball, in America, is like a culture. It is like a foreigner learning a new language. It is difficult to learn foreign languages and it will also be difficult for me to learn the culture for basketball here. ~ Yao Ming

He is a foreigner, he is from nowhere, from everywhere, citizen of the world, cosmopolitan. Do not send him back to his origins. ~ Julia Kristeva

The sort of dependence that results from exchange, i.e., from commercial transactions, is a reciprocal dependence. We cannot be dependent upon a foreigner without his being dependent on us. Now, this is what constitutes the very essence of society. To sever natural interrelations is not to make oneself independent, but to isolate oneself completely. ~ Frederic Bastiat

Crowds stand around all day long and criticise that bridge, and find fault with it, and tell with unlimited frankness how it ought to have been planned, and how they would have built it had the city granted them the $14,000 it cost. It is really refreshing to hang around these and listen to them. A foreigner would come to the conclusion that all America was composed of inspired professional bridge builders. ~ Mark Twain

T. S. Eliot and Jean-Paul Sartre, dissimilar enough as thinkers, both tend to undervalue prose and to deny it any imaginative function. Poetry is the creation of linguistic quasi-things; prose is for explanation and exposition, it is essentially didactic, documentary, informative. Prose is ideally transparent; it is only faute de mieux written in words. The influential modern stylist is Hemingway. It would be almost inconceivable now to write like Landor. Most modern English novels indeed are not written. One feels they could slip into some other medium without much loss. It takes a foreigner like Nabokov or an Irishman like Beckett to animate prose language into an imaginative stuff in its own right. ~ Iris Murdoch

That I am a foreigner is not my fault. I would rather have been born here. ~ Ernest Hemingway,

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

– But here is a question that is troubling me: if there is no God, then, one may ask, who governs human life and, in general, the whole order of things on earth?
– Man governs it himself, – Homeless angrily hastened to reply to this admittedly none-too-clear question.
– Pardon me, – the stranger responded gently, – but in order to govern, one needs, after all, to have a precise plan for a certain, at least somewhat decent, length of time. Allow me to ask you, then, how can man govern, if he is not only deprived of the opportunity of making a plan for at least some ridiculously short period, well, say, a thousand years , but cannot even vouch for his own tomorrow? And in fact, – here the stranger turned to Berlioz, – imagine that you, for instance, start governing, giving orders to others and yourself, generally, so to speak, acquire a taste for it, and suddenly you get ...hem ... hem ... lung cancer ... – here the foreigner smiled sweetly, and if the thought of lung cancer gave him pleasure - yes, cancer - narrowing his eyes like a cat, he repeated the sonorous word - and so your governing is over! You are no longer interested in anyone's fate but your own. Your family starts lying to you. Feeling that something is wrong, you rush to learned doctors, then to quacks, and sometimes to fortune-tellers as well. Like the first, so the second and third are completely senseless, as you understand. And it all ends tragically: a man who still recently thought he was gov ~ Mikhail Bulgakov

We have nothing to destroy," said Rud. "All these things are done for already. They are falling in all over the world. They are dead. No need for destructive activities. But if we have nothing to destroy we have much to clear away. That's different. What is needed is a brand-new common-sense reorganisation of the world's affairs, and that's what we have to give them. I can't imagine how the government sleeps of nights. I should lie awake at night listening all the time for the trickle of plaster that comes before a smash. Ever since they began blundering in the Near East and Spain, they've never done a single wise thing. This American adventure spells disaster. Plainly. Australia has protested already. India now is plainly in collapse. Everyone who has been there lately with open eyes speaks of the vague miasma of hatred in the streets. We don't get half the news from India. Just because there exists no clear idea whatever of a new India, it doesn't mean that the old isn't disintegrating. Things that are tumbling down, tumble down. They don't
wait to be shown the plans of the new building. The East crumbles. All over the world it becomes unpleasant to be a foreigner, but an Englishman now can't walk in a bazaar without a policeman behind him... ~ H.G. Wells

I have an accent, I'm limited, I have to play foreign parts - I would love to play American parts but I can't because I have an accent. You are more limited as a foreigner in every area. ~ Olivier Martinez

A Texan outside of Texas is a foreigner. ~ John Steinbeck

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

Japan functions on the basis of everyone sharing certain assumptions, where each person knows his part in a larger whole. The foreigner sits outside and is threatening. If he comes in, that's the most threatening of all. ~ Pico Iyer

Certain opponents of Marxism dismiss it as an outworn economic dogma based upon 19th century prejudices. Marxism never was a dogma. There is no reason why its formulation in the 19th century should make it obsolete and wrong, any more than the discoveries of Gauss, Faraday and Darwin, which have passed into the body of science... The defense generally given is that the Gita and the Upanishads are Indian; that foreign ideas like Marxism are objectionable. This is generally argued in English the foreign language common to educated Indians; and by persons who live under a mode of production (the bourgeois system forcibly introduced by the foreigner into India.) The objection, therefore seems less to the foreign origin than to the ideas themselves which might endanger class privilege. Marxism is said to be based upon violence, upon the class-war in which the very best people do not believe nowadays. They might as well proclaim that meteorology encourages storms by predicting them. No Marxist work contains incitement to war and specious arguments for senseless killing remotely comparable to those in the divine Gita. ~ Damodar Dharmananda Kosambi

In the midst of this utopia, which only your fellow lone voyagers would perceive, you used to transgress society's rules unknowingly, and no one would hold you accountable for it. You would mistakenly enter private residences, go to concerts to which you had not been invited, eat at community banquets where you could only guess the community's identity when they started giving speeches. Had you behaved like this in your own country, you would have been taken for a liar or a fool. But the improbable ways of a foreigner are accepted. Far from your home, you used to taste the pleasure of being mad without being alienated, of being an imbecile without renouncing your intelligence, of being an impostor without culpability. ~ Edouard Leve

There's been this argument about Coldplay stealing this melody from Joe Satriani, but, if you listen to it, it's mine! It's the 'Foreigner Suite,' it is! ~ Cat Stevens

Though no longer pregnant, she continues, at times, to mix Rice Krispies and peanuts and onions in a bowl. For being a foreigner Ashima is beginning to realize, is a sort of lifelong pregnancy
a perpetual wait, a constant burden, a continuous feeling out of sorts. It is an ongoing responsibility, a parenthesis in what had once been an ordinary life, only to discover that previous life has vanished, replaced by something more complicated and demanding. Like pregnancy, being a foreigner, Ashima believes, is something that elicits the same curiosity of from strangers, the same combination of pity and respect. ~ Jhumpa Lahiri

In the early '80s, I spent a year working on a verse-play -- based on the life of Anne Maguire (whose sister, Mairead, founded the Peace People movement after Anne took her own life). Anne's three children were killed on the pavement as she was wheeling the pram one day in 1976 by an IRA fugitive's getaway car -- the driver fatally shot by a British soldier; this singular incident crystallized for me so much of the terror then in the air. Writing was a way of keeping clear -- in the sense of fixing it, restoring it facet by facet, to clarity. Catching a moment of history like a fly in amber with the chorus of witnesses alive, outside. After all, poetry affords this license and extreme economy.

I have no business, of course, to write about such matters, being a complete foreigner in Ireland. But you do it because it is nobody's business. What you write is nobody's business. Isn't that poetry?

- "What You Write Is Nobody's Business": An Interview With Wong May (The Believer, May 2014) ~ Wong May

Thousands of miles from Georgia, beginning that night in England, my dad became a foreign-language speaker to me – and I was utterly charmed by it. I found the foreigner in myself. ~ Robert Lane Greene

She was a foreigner and, like all foreigners, she carried with her the shadow of an elsewhere. ~ Elif Shafak

All cultures seem to find a slightly alien local population to carry the Hermes projection. For the Vietnamese it is the Chinese, and for the Chinese it is the Japanese. For the Hindu it is the Moslem; for the North Pacific tribes it was the Chinook; in Latin America and in the American South it is the Yankee. In Uganda it is the East Indians and Pakistanis. In French Quebec it is the English. In Spain the Catalans are "the Jews of Spain". On Crete it is the Turks, and in Turkey it is the Armenians. Lawrence Durrell says that when he lived in Crete he was friends with the Greeks, but that when he wanted to buy some land they sent him to a Turk, saying that a Turk was what you needed for a trade, though of course he couldn't be trusted.
This figure who is good with money but a little tricky is always treated as a foreigner even if his family has been around for centuries. Often he actually is a foreigner, of course. He is invited in when the nation needs trade and he is driven out - or murdered - when nationalism begins to flourish: the Chinese out of Vietnam in 1978, the Japanese out of China in 1949, the Jankees out of South America and Iran, the East Indians out of Uganda under Idi Amin, and the Armenians out of Turkey in 1915-16. The outsider is always used as a catalyst to arouse nationalism, and when times are hard he will always be its victim as well. ~ Lewis Hyde

He simply wanted more money without additional responsibility. A sound investment. That is the sort of fellow that makes other people's Empire possible. Sells his birthright to a foreigner. ~ James Aldridge

In Britain, you never get away from the fact that you're a foreigner. In the U.S., the view is it doesn't matter where you come from. ~ Aasif Mandvi

One believed what one was told to believe, what it made sense to believe. Unless one was a foreigner, of course, or a philosopher. ~ Iain M. Banks

He was a foreigner here. There was no profit in discontent. He could not apply his bitterness. It was American-made and had no local standing. For the first time he realized what a dangerous thing he'd done, leaving his country. He struggled against this awareness. He hated knowing something he didn't want to know. ~ Don DeLillo

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

Our citizenship is in heaven. ... The words were a physical comfort to Hannah as one after another Scriptures filled her mind. She was only passing through, a foreigner in a strange land. Like all who followed Christ, whether she walked this planet eight years or eighty, it was only a journey. She wouldn't ever really be home until she reached heaven's doorsteps. ~ Karen Kingsbury

Frankly, I was surprised at how generous the Japanese press has been to the idea of a foreigner running Sony. ~ Howard Stringer

Or should one recognize that one becomes a foreigner in another country because one is already a foreigner from within? ~ Julia Kristeva

I've moved around so much my whole life, and I've gotten so used to being the Other in situations - the foreigner, the outsider. The first time I've ever felt like there was no separation between me and the other elements was in music. ~ Abigail Washburn

She the stranger, the foreigner, of alien blood and mind, did not share his power or his conscience or his knowledge or his exile. She shared nothing at all with him, but had met him and joined with him wholly and immediately across the gulf of their great difference: as if it were that difference, the alienness between them, that let them meet, and that in joining them together, freed them. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

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

I was going to be living there and I didn't want to sound like a foreigner all my life. ~ John Mahoney

I am illegitimate," she said distinctly, as if he were a foreigner trying to learn English. "You are a viscount. You can't marry a bastard."
"What about the Duke of Clarence? He had ten bastard children by that actress ... what was her name ... "
"Mrs. Jordan."
"Yes, that one, Their children were all illegitimate, but some of them married peers."
"You're not the Duke of Clarence."
"That's right. I'm not a blueblood any more than you are. I inherited the title purely by happenstance"
"That doesn't matter. If your married me, it would be scandalous and inappropriate, and doors would be closed to you."
"Good God, woman, I let two of my sisters marry Gypsies. Those doors have already been closed, bolted, and nailed shut. ~ Lisa Kleypas

This was the first of the St. Augustines. Previous memos had borne messages from Zwingli, Lévi-Strauss, Rilke, Chekhov, Tillich, William Blake, Charles Olson and a Kiowa chief named Satanta. Naturally the person responsible for these messages became known throughout the company as the Mad Memo-Writer. I never referred to him that way because it was much too obvious a name. I called him Trotsky. There was no special reason for choosing Trotsky; it just seemed to fit. I wondered if he was someone I knew. Everybody seemed to think he was probably a small grotesque man who had suffered many disappointments in life, who despised the vast impersonal structure of the network and who was employed in our forwarding department, the traditional repository for all sex offenders, mutants and vegetarians. They said he was most likely a foreigner who lived in a rooming house in Red Hook; he spent his nights reading an eight-volume treatise on abnormal psychology, in small type, and he told his grocer he had been a Talmudic scholar in the old country. This was the consensus and maybe it had a certain logic. But I found more satisfaction in believing that Trotsky was one of our top executives. He made eighty thousand dollars a year and stole paper clips from the office. ~ Don DeLillo

I have been a foreigner all my life, first as a daughter of diplomats, then as a political refugee and now as an immigrant in the U.S. I have had to leave everything behind and start anew several times, and I have lost most of my extended family. ~ Isabel Allende

I am an Indian. In fact, I feel like a foreigner when I go abroad. ~ Sonia Gandhi

my mother thinks i'm a living proof of cultural appropriation
but aren't i a foreigner in my own country
an outsider
but only on the inside ~ Xayaat Muhummed

When we finish this tour we are going to begin writing and go into the studio to hopefully have a brand new Foreigner album out in early spring next year. This will be the first Foreigner album out in about ten years. ~ Lou Gramm

Let me simply state that it is wrong to regard any other human being, a priori, as an object, or an 'It.' This is so because each and every human being - you, every friend, every stranger, every foreigner - is precious. ~ M. Scott Peck

The Korean man nodded, the way you do when you're a foreigner and understand that someone has finished a sentence. ~ David Sedaris

The basic tenet of black consciousness is that the black man must reject all value systems that seek to make him a foreigner in the country of his birth and reduce his basic human dignity. ~ Steven Biko

I'm a stranger in my own home! The tragedy of our whole country is the same: we are all alienated, strangers in our own land. It's tragic. The odd thing is that we have never got used to it. Yet, woe betide us we do. The irony is that, if you really want to be seen as a good Iranian, and especially if you aspire to high office in this country, you first have to be a foreigner, someone who wasn't born here at all. On the other hand, if you were born and bred here and try to remain true to yourself, your country and your people, then alienation is the most lenient punishment you expect. ~ Mahmoud Dowlatabadi

I was never very interested in my own experience, I think, in fact, if my films have a common link, maybe it's being a foreigner - it's common for people who are born abroad - they don't know so well where they belong. ~ Claire Denis

I love the Twins, ... I bleed the Twins. That's all I know. If I go anywhere else, I'd be a foreigner. ~ Torii Hunter

The first thing you notice about New Orleans are the burying grounds - the cemeteries - and they're a cold proposition, one of the best things there are here. Going by, you try to be as quiet as possible, better to let them sleep. Greek, Roman, sepulchres- palatial mausoleums made to order, phantomesque, signs and symbols of hidden decay - ghosts of women and men who have sinned and who've died and are now living in tombs. The past doesn't pass away so quickly here. You could be dead for a long time.

The ghosts race towards the light, you can almost hear the heavy breathing spirits, all determined to get somewhere. New Orleans, unlike a lot of those places you go back to and that don't have the magic anymore, still has got it. Night can swallow you up, yet none of it touches you. Around any corner, there's a promise of something daring and ideal and things are just getting going. There's something obscenely joyful behind every door, either that or somebody crying with their head in their hands. A lazy rhythm looms in the dreamy air and the atmosphere pulsates with bygone duels, past-life romance, comrades requesting comrades to aid them in some way. You can't see it, but you know it's here. Somebody is always sinking. Everyone seems to be from some very old Southern families. Either that or a foreigner. I like the way it is.

There are a lot of places I like, but I like New Orleans better. There's a thousand different angles at any moment. At any time you ~ Bob Dylan

What a foreigner may see in a fool, a bigot, an idiot or others of their kinds? Really I cannot say. As normalcy goes beyond natural light and extremism is sometimes loosely defined. But every fool must be a foreigner to his potential in the positive light, a degenerate in the negative light. In between potentials is where normalcy may hide. ~ Dew Platt

...the intranslatable intonations of a foreigner, the inevitable cross-cultural misunderstandings lurking in tones and glances and assumptions. ~ Arthur Phillips

And suddenly he became almost lyric. "For three thousand years the Common Man has been fended off from the full and glorious life he might have had, by Make Believe. For three thousand years in one form or another he has been asking for an unrestricted share in the universal welfare. He has been asking for a fair dividend from civilisation. For all that time, and still it goes on, the advantaged people, the satisfied people, the kings and priests, the owners and traders, the gentlefolk and the leaders he trusted, have been cheating him tacitly or deliberately, out of his proper share and contribution in the common life. Sometimes almost consciously, sometimes subconsciously, cheating themselves about it as well. When he called upon God, they said 'We'll take care of your God for you', and they gave him organised religion. When he calls for Justice, they say 'Everything decently and in order', and give him a nice expensive Law Court beyond his means. When he calls for order and safety too loudly they hit him on the head with a policeman's truncheon. When he sought knowledge, they told him what was good for him. And to protect him from the foreigner, so they said, they got him bombed to hell, trained him to disembowel his fellow common men with bayonets and learn what love of King and Country really means.

"All with the best intentions in the world, mind you.

"Most of these people, I tell you, have acted in perfect good faith. They manage to believe that i ~ H.G. Wells

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

There was a moment of hesitation in which Joe looked into her eyes, and she looked back without flinching. Many a time, he had been at the same game with her, and she had always crumbled, bowing to his will. Now, he must have realized he was looking into the eyes of a stranger. She was someone he could not recognize, a foreigner inhabiting the body of that old Clairey, the girl he had abused, intimidated, and broken. Clairey decided then and there she would no longer cower before him. It was almost as if she were daring him to strike her in their unspoken exchange. ~ Tracy Winegar

It is hard for me to imagine what it means to be a complete foreigner, a person to whom no one shows any sign of recognition. ~ Henri J.M. Nouwen

I'm not the only foreigner who took up golf while living in Jakarta. ~ Raymond Bonner

Few doctrines throughout History have been able to eradicate hatred, most of them have simply tried to deflect it from one object to another: to the infidel, the foreigner, the apostate, the master, the slave, the father. Naturally, hatred is only called hatred when we see it in others; the hatred which is in ourselves bears a thousand different names. ~ Amin Maalouf

I doubled back to school and overheard Mrs. Andersen in the classroom talking to another teacher. "Can you believe it?" she was saying. "A foreigner winning our spelling bee! ~ Bich Minh Nguyen

I was born in the year 1632, in the city of York, of a good family, though not of that country, my father being a foreigner of Bremen, who settled first at Hull. He got a good estate by merchandise, and leaving off his trade, lived afterwards at York, from whence he had married my mother, whose relations were named Robinson, a very good family in that country, and from whom I was called Robinson Kreutznaer; but, by the usual corruption of words in England, we are now called - nay we call ourselves and write our name - Crusoe; and so my companions always called me. ~ Daniel Defoe

Love is a country, with closed borders and a language no foreigner can speak. The only people who can understand its customs, traditions, and history are its citizens. A relationship doesn't have to make sense to all people. It only has to make sense to two people. ~ Jillian Keenan

A foreigner could be excused for thinking that to know set is to know English. ~ Bill Bryson

I think being a foreigner and talking about Hollywood allowed me to use some cliches and some references that an American would maybe not use. ~ Michel Hazanavicius

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

[the truth in regards to studying abroad] "you know what else is nice about being a foreigner? Whatever you do takes place in a capsule that need not be discovered and opened by someone back home. Nothing really counts--it was the life that falls in the forest. That's how I looked at it. I felt free to...oh, I don't know. ~ Patricia Marx

Oh, but once one has returned to the land of one's birth – there is no place more constricting – one's surroundings no longer permit such freedom, and one can no longer simply transcend the demands of social position. ~ Kafū Nagai

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

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

I read in a newspaper that I was to be received with all the honors customarily rendered to a foreign ruler. I am grateful for the honors; but something within me rebelled at that word 'foreign'. I say this because when I have been in Canada, I have never heard a Canadian refer to an American as a 'foreigner'. He is just an 'American'. And, in the same way, in the United States, Canadians are not 'foreigners', they are 'Canadians'. That simple little distinction illustrates to me better than anything else the relationship between our two countries. ~ Franklin D. Roosevelt

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

America shudders at anything alien, and when it wants to shut its mind against any man's ideas it calls him a foreigner. ~ Max Lerner

A modern gentleman [rich person] is necessarily the enemy of his country. Even in war he does not fight to defend it, but to prevent his power of preying on it from passing to a foreigner. ~ George Bernard Shaw

What people in the U.S. have to understand is that there is sometimes a deep political content in my work that's rooted in the postwar reconfiguration in Europe. I'm still a foreigner in America. I'm someone who's bringing nuanced stories from somewhere else that will always be harder to take. ~ Liam Gillick

'Ouch' is not independent of social training. One has only to prick a foreigner to appreciate that it is an English word. ~ Willard Van Orman Quine

And the usual course of affairs is that, as soon as a powerful foreigner enters a country, all the subject states are drawn to him, moved by the hatred that they feel against the ruling power. ~ Niccolo Machiavelli