Immigrant Experience Quotes

With all this snow, with the sun not there, with the cold and dreariness, this place doesn't look like my America, doesn't even look real. It's like we are in a terrible story, like we're in the crazy parts of the Bible, there where God is busy punishing people for their sins and is making them miserable with all the weather. The sky, for example, has stayed white all this time I have been here, which tells you that something is not right. Even the stones know that a sky is supposed to be blue, like our sky back home, which is blue, so blue you can spray Clorox on it and wipe it with a paper towel and it wouldn't even come off. ~ NoViolet Bulawayo

Ojiugo often asked, 'But are they treating you well? Are they treating you well?' as though the treatment was what mattered, rather than the blighted reality of it all, that he was in a holding center, about to be deported. Nobody behaved normally. They were all under the spell of his misfortune. ~ Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

I knew I had to write about Canada. I just could not find in literature any examples of the immigrant experience that I've had. ~ Shyam Selvadurai

I don't know if I can continue suffering like this just because I want to live in America. ~ Imbolo Mbue

There is a certain pride in work and in your body throbbing beyond any boundaries you imagined you could endure. You identify with those who come home with pieces of pork fat wedged into their boots, with gashes on their arms and legs from their tools and machines, and with black grime etched into the folds of their dark skin.
Too often this country has turned its back on the working class and the working poor, not to mention the undocumented workers who harvest the food for American tables and build our houses. ~ Sergio Troncoso

It's easier to surrender to confinement. ~ Jhumpa Lahiri

When things come to the worst, they generally mend. ~ Susanna Moodie

Today, I'm going to the grocery store. ~ Javier O. Huerta

The gaping hole in her heart is amplified when she catches a glimpse of the strands of silver hair framing her once young face in the mirror. ~ Raquel Cepeda

What is the wish of your city?
Why have I fallen in love with your city? ~ Avijeet Das

The immigrant experience in 'Ilustrado' was only a small part of what I intended to be a broader look at the Filipino experience, even if that broader look was itself merely a specific perspective. ~ Miguel Syjuco

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

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

Never mind that she's been hearing this soliloquy from strangers since she was born, in the Year of the Fire Horse, twin sixes after the nineteen. Never mind the order of questions invariably changes even if the questions themselves do not: 'How long have y'all lived here? Do you even speak English? Oh, well. Your English is so good. Bless your heart, you must miss your people. You stick out like a raisin in a big bowl of oatmeal. Is it true that you worship cows? . . . Have you even heard of the Bible? Don't get all uppity on me, don't turn away. I know you think you don't have to listen. But this is my country. You do. When are y'all heading back? Y'all best be getting back to where you came from, you hear? No need to overstay your welcome. ~ Devi S. Laskar

We wanted a labour force, but human beings came. ~ Terry Hayes

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

I instinctively decided that I would prove that I wasn't different, that it should not be odd to hear me speaking English. From that day forward I lived with this double impulse:the urge to disappear and the desperate desire to be accepted ~ Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston

From that day on, pay of me yearned to be invisible. In a way, nothing would have been nicer than for no one to see me. Although I could not have defined it at the Tom me, I felt if attention were drawn to me, people would see what this girl had first responded to. They wouldn't see me, the would see the slanted - eye face, the Oriental. ~ Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston

With just about every script, in almost every corner of the set, I was faced with the truth: This was my parents' life. My mother had sat in handcuffs; my father had once worn an orange jumpsuit like the dozens that sat folded in our wardrobe department. For the other actors and me on our show, this was all fantasy, the re-creation of a world we knew little about; for Mami and Papi, it could not have been any more real or painful...I've had so many scenes in which Flaca & I are doing the dirty work, like cleaning the kitchen or mopping the floors, which is when I think of my parents most. Long before they ended up in prison, they'd spent years handling the nastiest jobs, the ones often avoided by others. Manual labor. Low pay. No respect. They must've felt so trapped. It must've been so hard for them to maintain their dignity when others looked down on them or, worse, didn't see them at all. ~ Diane Guerrero

Asif Ali maneuvers the gleaming Mercedes down the labyrinthine lanes of Old Kolkata with consummate skill, but his passengers do not notice how smoothly he avoids potholes, cows and beggars, how skilfully he sails through aging yellow lights to get the Bose family to their destination on time. This disappoints Asif only a little. In his six years of chauffeuring the rich and callous, he has realized that, to them, servants are invisible. ~ Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

Every woman who has ever approached me about being in my circle of lovers knows that I'm a bachelor with no plans to get married. Thanks to New York's tabloids, it's practically common knowledge. And, to avoid any possibility of doubt or misunderstanding, I very clearly told her from the start what I tell every potential lover: I don't date anyone exclusively. Ever. ~ Zack Love

The immigrant experience of all of us is what makes us Americans, because we value in our DNA liberty and opportunity above all else. ~ Ted Cruz

Fly you crows. My father was not a spectacle. He was the greatest man I ever knew. He was my everything. ~ Stacey Lee

What is it about me that gets them all crying? It's not the end of the world. ~ Diane Samuels

When you were the child of immigrants, you weren't just you; your success was also your parents' your cousins', your relatives' still struggling for life in Haiti or India, wishing they were you. It was your job, your preordained celestial existence or whatever, to make the most of it. ~ Ben Philippe

It's a great honor, m'ijo. We know that. I'm sure everyone in Ysleta is proud of you. But this is who you are," she said, for a moment scanning the dark night air and the empty street. A cricket chirped in the darkness. "God help you when you go to this 'Havid.' You will be so far away from us, from everything you know. You will be alone. What if something happens to you? Who's going to help you? But you always wanted to be alone; you were always so independent, so stubborn."

"Like you. ~ Sergio Troncoso

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

[Willis is] asking to be treated like an American. A real American. Because, honestly, when you think American, what color do you see? White? Black? We've been here two hundred years. Why doesn't this face register as American? ~ Charles Yu

In the face of all his handicaps, Jurgis was obliged to make the price of a lodging, and of a drink every hour or two, under penalty of freezing to death. ~ Upton Sinclair

That's what you do in America: you smile at people you don't know and you smile at people you don't even like and you smile for no reason. ~ NoViolet Bulawayo

Their analysis clearly revealed the existence of a color line that effectively blocked black occupational, residential, and social mobility. They demonstrated that any assumption about urban blacks duplicating the immigrant experience had to confront the issue of race. ~ William Julius Wilson

What is important about immigration is how immigrants arrived and what the individual immigrants do with their lives after arriving. Do they open a restaurant or other business, do they provide for their family, do they integrate into the larger community - in essence, do they become proud Americans? Or do they try their hardest to stay "economic migrants" or "hyphenated-Americans"? Or, at worst, do they attempt to convert America into the countries from which they escaped? ~ Mike Klepper

I made many decisions, some awful and others brilliant, but I found ways to keep that openness in my soul that meant more to me than breathing. I told them over the years what I was doing, how I was trying what no one in my family had ever tried to do. When I was failing, I admitted that as well, and they listened politely. I also knew that's all they could do. One lonely night in Connecticut, I pulled myself from a window's ledge. No one else next to me. Another day I chose to do something someone like me should have never accomplished, and yet I did, and kept going. I learned to recognize when others, like Jean, were much better than me, because they had faith in my soul. I believed in very little, but I kept going until I would get tired or defeated, and then I would take time to discover another wall to throw myself at. I was, and I am, and I will be, a peculiar kind of immigrant's son. I got old, and that made everything better, including me. ~ Sergio Troncoso

That could also be because at one point during the film, our hands found each other. And when I felt Michael's middle finger caress the inside of my palm, it sent a tickle up my spine, and the fingers of my right hand were soon exploring his left hand, and we each took turns tracing the contours of the other's hands. ~ Zack Love

Bela had thought she knew what love felt like, but when she saw Sanjay at the airport after six long months, her heart gave a great, hurtful lurch, as though it were trying to leap out of her body to meet him. This, she thought. This is it. But it was only part of the truth. She would learn over the next years that love can feel a lot of different ways, and sometimes it can hurt a lot more. ~ Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

Mostly, they were ashamed of us. Our floppy straw hats and threadbare clothes. Our heavy accents. Every sing oh righ? Our cracked, callused palms. Our deeply lined faces black from years of picking peaches and staking grape plants in the sun. They longed for real fathers with briefcases who went to work in a suit and tie and only mowed the grass on Sundays. They wanted different and better mothers who did not look so worn out. Can't you put on a little lipstick? They dreaded rainy days in the country when we came to pick them up after school in our battered old farm trucks. They never invited over friends to our crowded homes in J-town. We live like beggars. They would not be seen with us at the temple on the Emperor's birthday. They would not celebrate the annual Freeing of the Insects with us at the end of summer in the park. They refused to join hands and dance with us in the streets on the Festival of the Autumnal Equinox. They laughed at us
whenever we insisted that they bow to us first thing in the morning and with each passing day they seemed to slip further and further from our grasp. ~ Julie Otsuka

Most everybody is from someplace else, therefore there is nothing special about immigration, regardless of how much immigrants are apotheosized. ~ Mike Klepper

Ebb and flow, ebb and flow, our lives. Is that why we're fascinated by the steadfastness of stars? The water reaches my calves. I begin the story of the Pleiades, women transformed into birds so Swift and bright that no man could snare them. ~ Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

Though grammatically perfect, a French accent stretches his English out of shape. ~ Stacey Lee

Every immigrant family, it seems, has someone who does not belong in the new country they have come to. It feels like permanent exile to that one brother or wife who cannot stand a silent fate in Boston or London or Melbourne. I've met many who remain haunted by the persistent ghost of an earlier place. ~ Michael Ondaatje

As many Chinas as there were, there were that many Charleses as well. Every immigrant is the person he might have been and the person he is, and his homeland is at once the place it would have been to him from the inside and the place it must be to him from the outside. ~ Jade Chang

From eating at El Pollo Loco salsa bar to the Golden Globes buffet, I managed to stumble through this journey with the perseverance of an immigrant and the mindset of an American. I learned to thrive on being uncomfortable to pursue what I loved. The English language was uncomfortable, so I studied BET until it became my natural tongue. Doing stand-up was uncomfortable, so I hung out at the Comedy Palace until it became my second home. Auditions were uncomfortable, so I spent six hundred bucks a month on acting classes while I slept in some dude's living room for three hundred bucks until acting became my profession. I never looked at these challenges as barriers; I saw them as opportunities to grow. I'd rather try to pursue my dream knowing that I might fail miserably than to have never tried at all. That is How to American. ~ Jimmy O. Yang

We keep drifting from one city to another, inhaling the inimitable fragrances of the myriad places. ~ Avijeet Das

Take the things from America that speak to you, that excite you, that inspire you, and be the Americans we all want to know; then cook it up and sell it back to them for $28.99. Cue Funk Flex to drop bombs on this. All my peoples from the boat, let 'em know: WEOUTCHEA. ~ Eddie Huang

I haven't written about an immigrant experience because I haven't experienced that before and am focused on existential themes. ~ Tao Lin

Give me someone who was born elsewhere yet clearly demonstrates he wants to get involved over someone who was born here yet believes he/she has a right to the money you and I have worked so hard for ~ Karl Wiggins

I am a stranger in this city, but this city gave me
a new life! ~ Avijeet Das

I am in between. Trying to write to be understood by those who matter to me, yet also trying to push my mind with ideas beyond the everyday. It is another borderland I inhabit. Not quite here nor there. On good days I feel I am a bridge. On bad days I just feel alone. ~ Sergio Troncoso

An ocean could not explain the distance we have traveled. ~ Jonathan Safran Foer

As writers, we don't just need to write about poverty or war or the immigrant experience. ~ Jennifer Gilmore

They might be talking in perfect latin tongue and without warning begin to talk in perfect anglo tongue and keep it up like that, alternating between a thing that believes itself to be perfect and a thing that believes itself to be perfect, morphing back and forth between two beasts until out of carelessness or clear intent they suddenly stop switching tongues and start speaking that other one. In it brims nostalgia for the land they left or never knew when they use the words with which they name objects; while actions are alluded to with an anglo verb conjugated latin-style, pinning on a sonorous tail from back there. Using in one tongue the word for a thing in the other makes the attributes of both resound: if you say Give me fire when they say Give me a light, what is not to be learned about fire, light and the act of giving? It's not another way of saying things: these are new things ~ Yuri Herrera

Mammoth is an incredible community and world-class attraction, ... Were committed to creating a vibrant living experience that matches the natural, majestic beauty of the area. 80/50 Mammoth will make the new Village at Mammoth one of the hottest year-round playgrounds in North America. For the first time, Mammoth will be a place where outdoor enthusiasts can experience the unparalleled amenities and services of a five-star resort hotel combined with privileges of owning a prestigious second home. ~ Puff Daddy

If the work is poor, the public taste will soon do it justice. And the author, reaping neither glory nor fortune, will learn by hard experience how to correct his mistakes. ~ Jacques-Louis David

A bicycle has transformed my experience of London. ~ Iain Glen

I'm conscious of race whenever I'm writing, just as I'm conscious of class, religion, human psychology, politics - everything that makes up the human experience. I don't think I can do a good job if I'm not paying attention to what's meaningful to people, and in American culture, there isn't anything that informs human interaction more than the idea of race. ~ Dwayne McDuffie

What is the point of our lives? There isn't any. I can't seem to decide how much horror and how much joy lies within that simple truth, but I know it is both of those things at once. ~ Ashly Lorenzana

When you touch the celestial in your heart, you will realize that the beauty of your soul is so pure, so vast and so devastating that you have no option but to merge with it. You have no option but to feel the rhythm of the universe in the rhythm of your heart. ~ Amit Ray

I have seen death face to face and returned to the world of living beings. I have savored the fear of death by the drops, My conviction is strong because my experience is direct. Life is full of agitation and anxieties, death is calm, cool and peaceful. It is not death but the fear of death that is painful. And that fear, I tell you, is entirely baseless. ~ Manoje Basu

Happily ever after does not mean they don't experience exasperation with each other, or are somehow exempt from life's hardships and misery. Living happily ever after is hard work, but you do it because you want to stay in love with the other person. Because your life without this one other, very special person would be something not full, but only half-alive ~ Nadia Lee

If the incarceration experience doesn't break your spirit, it changes you in a way that you lose many fears. You begin to realize that your life is not ruled by your ego and ambition and that it can end any day at any time. So why worry? You learn that just like on the street, there is life in prison, and random people get there based on the jeopardy of the system. The prisons are filled by people who crossed the law, as well as by those who were incidentally and circumstantially picked and crushed by somebody else's agenda. On the other hand, as a vivid benefit, you become very much independent of material property and learn to appreciate very simple pleasures in life such as the sunlight and morning breeze. ~ Michael Lewis

In order to make any permanent changes, you have to be willing. Willing to see things differently. Willing to experience new ideas. Willing to listen to the people who cheered you on rather than ones who echoed your fears. ~ Rhonda Britten

Tis what marriage is all about, madam," he said. "Have you not realized it? 'Tis about discovering unknown facets of the character and experience and taste of one's spouse and learning to adjust one's life accordingly. 'Tis learning to hope that one's spouse is doing the same thing. ~ Mary Balogh

The heart of the objectivist tradition in philosophy comes directly out of the myth of objectivism: the world is made up of distinct objects, with inherent properties and fixed relations among them at any instant. We argue, on the basis of linguistic evidence (especially metaphor), that the objectivist philosophy fails to account for the way we understand our experience, our thoughts, and our language. An ~ George Lakoff

Cinema – all art really – has great power. Power to illuminate. Power to transform. For those of us who experience film as literature, classic movies comprised an introductory education in the genre. As kids, many of us went searching through library shelves for obscure source novels after seeing some old movie or other. It was the start of many an adventure. ~ Robert Dunbar

Women administer the home. They set the rules, enforce them, mete out justice for violations. Thus, like Congress, they legislate; like the Executive, they administer; like the courts, they interpret the rules. It is an ideal experience for politics. ~ Margaret Chase Smith

Never make a principle out of your experience. Allow God to be as creative with others as He is with you. ~ Oswald Chambers

I always think the recipe for success for a game or any sort of a fantasy experience is to think of a character that hasn't really been explored before, who is unique and has special abilities that not everybody has, and plop them into whatever is the most interesting situation to plop them into. ~ Tim Schafer

There is no "only one" Vietnam experience - there are as many as there are those who went to Vietnam - but this is mine - the combat, the excitement, the discomfort, the fear, the accomplishments, the hubris, the politics, the challenges, and the sex. This is 1968 - MY Vietnam experience. ~ Joseph E Abodeely

Haiku are meant to evoke an emotional response from the reader ... to light the spark that triggers creative rumination ... They act as literary manifestations ... visions of nature's seasonal modulations ... They're emotionally tinged words, barely perceptible sensory flickers ... literary etchings of lucid visions transposed into the minds of its readers ... They're meant to act as sensory catalysts ... like the passing of a penciled baton laid out upon a piece of paper that a reader might grasp for in their mind's eye ... all of which prompts the reader to continue exploring the sensory experience elicited from the writers pen ... This is how the literary sketching of poets are intended to function ... as creative muses with which readers can draw from and viscerally apply to their own artistic idioms ... from that lucid space within their heads ... where their minds eye can spark their own creative visions"

Bukusai Ashagawa ~ Bukusai Ashagawa

When we align our thoughts, emotions, and actions with the highest part of ourselves, we are filled with enthusiasm, purpose and meaning. Life is rich and full. We have no thoughts of bitterness. We have no memory of fear. We are joyously and intimately engaged with our world. This is the experience of authentic power ~ Gary Zukav

Art is an emotional experience ~ Tony Curtis

Why is it important to look at fiction writing through the lens of emotional experience? Because that's the way readers read. They don't so much read as respond. They do not automatically adopt your outlook and outrage. They formulate their own. You are not the author of what readers feel, just the provocateur of those feelings. You may curate your characters' experiences and put them on display, but the exhibit's meaning is different in thousands of ways for thousands of different museum visitors, your readers. Not ~ Donald Maass

Sports can unite a group of people from different backgrounds, all working together to achieve a common goal. And even if they fall short, sharing that journey is an experience they'll never forget. It can teach some of the most fundamental and important human values: dedication, perseverance, hard work, and teamwork. It also teaches us how to handle our success and cope with our failure. So, perhaps the greatest glory of sport is that is teaches us so much about life itself. ~ Ahmad Rashad

I was a long time learning that wisdom and experience are things apart; that to taste life is not to be confused with understanding what life is really all about. ~ Wallis Simpson

My experience says :
People change,
stuff goes wrong,
but just remember ,
life goes on ... !!!! ~ Lovely Goyal

The arts alone give direct access to experience. To eliminate them from education - or worse, to tolerate them as cultural ornaments - is antieducational obscurantism. It is foisted on us by the pedants and snobs of Hellenistic Greece who considered artistic performance fit only for slaves ... ~ Peter Drucker

He was the devil, but she didn't care. On some level she even knew he was using her own body against her, pitting her innocence against his experience, but she didn't care about that, either. She wanted to leap into the fire with both feet, arms wide, eyes open. She knew his world might be something she would have a difficult time accepting, but he was worth it. ~ Christine Feehan

My dear boy', Le Chiffre spoke like a father, 'the game of Red Indians is over, quite over. You have stumbled by mischance into a game for grown-ups and you have already found it a painful experience. You are not equipped, my dear boy, to play games with adults and it very foolish of your nanny in London to have sent you out here with your spade and bucket. Very foolish indeed and most unfortunate for you.'
'But we must stop joking, my dear fellow, although I am sure you would like to follow me in developing this amusing little cautionary tale. ~ Ian Fleming

There are times when the actual experience of leaving something makes you wish desperately that you could stay, and then there are times when the leaving reminds you a hundred times over why exactly you had to leave in the first place. ~ Shauna Niequist

Even though I went to Exeter and Yale, and I enjoyed all the trappings of those places, I think at the same time - and maybe it's because I'm an immigrant kid and not white - there was always this other consciousness; that is, I was conscious of everything that was going on. ~ Chang-rae Lee

Hold thought steadfastly to the enduring, the good, and the true, and you will bring these into your experience proportionately to their occupancy of your thoughts. ~ Mary Baker Eddy

Who cares where you went to school or where you work? The question is: Is your everyday experience good, healthy, beautiful? Because I have to tell you, while it might be "cool" to work for certain companies, if your job is stupid, stressful and your boss is a jerk, there is nothing good or prestigious about that. While it might seem right to go to a prestigious school, if classes are overcrowded and students are nervous, anxious, religious zealots from certain counties, are you sure you want to go there? What's good about that? To believe in prestige is to privilege abstract, collective impression over palpable, daily experience. To which I say: fuck prestige. Do what serves your everyday vitality. ~ Daniel Coffeen

I think there are a number of things that you can do to encourage your kids' dreams, but I do believe in speaking by experience of having a lot of help along the way, stumbling in the past. We've all stumbled, and we certainly all deserve to get up and walk again. ~ Dwayne Johnson

Most of my formal choices are a combination of everything I learned about form - semiotics, linguistics, and the history of style experimentations tethered to literary movements (formalism, deconstruction, modernism, and postmodernism), and the basic principal of breaking every rule I ever learned from a patriarchal writing tradition that never included my body or experience, and thus has nothing to offer me in terms of representation. ~ Lidia Yuknavitch

Myth is the isthmus which connects the peninsular world of thought with that vast continent we really belong to. It is not, like truth, abstract; nor is it, like direct experience, bound to the particular. ~ C.S. Lewis

If you're not ready to be in a relationship, going out with someone much younger than you is probably a great idea, because you both can have a decent experience and hopefully nobody will end up feeling cheated when it ends. ~ Uma Thurman