My Own Country Quotes

In order for peace to reign, one must speak the truth, and that is why I have spoken of a political abduction, ... Far from my own country, but in deep communion with all Haitians, including Haitians abroad, I continue to launch an appeal for peaceful resistance. ~ Jean-Bertrand Aristide

How long does a man live, after all?
Does he live a thousand days, or one only?
A week, or several centuries?
How long does a man spend dying?
What does it mean to say 'for ever'?
Lost in these preoccupation
I set myself to clear things up.
...
In my own country the undertakers
answered me, between drinks:
'Get yourself a good woman
and give up this nonsense.'
"And How Long" - Pablo Neruda ~ Pablo Neruda

I played in bombed-out houses and grew up with the ever-present consequences of a lost war and the awareness that my own country had inflicted terrible pain on many nations during the horrific World War II. ~ Dieter F. Uchtdorf

My reading has been lamentably desultory and immedthodical. Odd, out of the way, old English plays, and treatises, have supplied me with most of my notions, and ways of feeling. In everything that relates to science, I am a whole Encyclopaedia behind the rest of the world. I should have scarcely cut a figure among the franklins, or country gentlemen, in King John's days. I know less geography than a schoolboy of six weeks standing. To me a map of old Ortelius is as authentic as Arrowsmith. I do not know whereabout Africa merges into Asia, whether Ethiopia lie in one or other of those great divisions, nor can form the remotest, conjecture of the position of New South Wales, or Van Diemen's Land. Yet do I hold a correspondence with a very dear friend in the first named of these two Terrae Incognitae. I have no astronomy. I do not know where to look for the Bear or Charles' Wain, the place of any star, or the name of any of them at sight. I guess at Venus only by her brightness - and if the sun on some portentous morn were to make his first appearance in the west, I verily believe, that, while all the world were grasping in apprehension about me, I alone should stand unterrified, from sheer incuriosity and want of observation. Of history and chronology I possess some vague points, such as one cannot help picking up in the course of miscellaneous study, but I never deliberately sat down to a chronicle, even of my own country. I have most dim apprehensions of the four great monarc ~ Charles Lamb

I realised that I had set so many of my novels and stories abroad, because custom had prevented me from seeing how exotic my own country is. Britain really is an immense lunatic asylum. That is one of the things that distinguishes us among the nations ... We are rigid and formal in some ways, but we believe in the right to eccentricity, as long as the eccentricities are large enough ... Woe betide you if you hold your knife incorrectly, but good luck to you if you wear a loincloth and live up a tree. ~ Louis De Bernieres

Reading, once begun, quickly becomes home and circle and court and family; and indeed, without narrative, I felt exiled from my own country. ~ M.T Anderson

Happy am I, for every time I meditate on governments, I always find new reasons in my inquiries for loving my own country. ~ Jean-Jacques Rousseau

I feel that by getting rich in the way I did, I think my own example has hurt my own country. ~ Charlie Munger

In my own country I am in a far off land.
I am strong but have no power.
I win all yet remain a loser.
At break of day I say goodnight.
When I lie down I have great fear of falling. ~ Francois Villon

To this day, I get very nervous coming back into my own country. ~ Hasan M. Elahi

I went upstairs to my office. Lay in the dark among my books. The only comforting thing I have. An exile in my own house, my own family. Maybe in my own country. ~ Philipp Meyer

My heart does sometimes bleed for those who are hurting in my own country and abroad. ~ George McGovern

I'm the only Mauritanian filmmaker so it wouldn't make sense to make a film in France. I could shoot outside of my own country if the story was something that called for it. Africa really has to be the reason for me to make a new film. ~ Abderrahmane Sissako

We have no one to go to for help. Not even a church. Anything goes, now that our President Roosevelt signed the order to get rid of us. How can he do this to his own citizens? No lawyer has the courage to defend us. Caucasian friends stay away for fear of being labeled "Jap lovers." There's not a more lonely feeling than to be banished by my own country. There's no place to go. ~ Kiyo Sato

As far as the novel is concerned in my own country, I think it's in a pretty healthy state. ~ William Golding

It is entirely unacceptable that I should have no voice in the political affairs of my own country, for I am not a ward of America; I am one of the first Americans to arrive on these shores. ~ James Baldwin

I think it's also the case that I'm not as widely travelled, or as well-educated in history, as most of the other novelists I meet: so I have to write about my own country, at the present time, because it's more or less all I know about! ~ Jonathan Coe

I'd rather live like a beggar in my own country, than like a king in a foreign land. ~ R.L. Bartram

There is no disillusionment about India as far as I am concerned. There could never come a time when I would get disillusioned with my own country. ~ Dilip Kumar

My horizons are also broadened by working with so many people around Europe. They taught me what I never would have learned just staying in my own country. ~ Malgorzata Szumowska

Chinese were bornwith an accumulated wisdom, a natural sophistication, an intelligent naivete, and unless they were transplanted too young, these qualities ripened in them ... If ever I am homesick for China, now that I am home in my own country, it is when I discover here no philosophy. Our people have opinions and creeds and prejudices and ideas but as yet no philosophy. ~ Pearl S. Buck

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

It was very difficult to write about my own country, because I have always been the outsider looking in. ~ Asne Seierstad

I think in my own country, at the way we've seen through the ordination of women to the priesthood, which I'm delighted about, and that will move on to another level before very long. ~ George Carey

If I can teach cricket overseas, why wouldn't I do so in my own country? ~ Kapil Dev

You speak in ignorant disdain of the foremost nation of the world," Yongxing said, growing angry himself, "like all your country-men, who show no respect for that which is superior, and insult our customs."
"For which I might consider myself as owing you some apology, sir, if you yourself had not so often insulted myself and my own country, or shown respect for any customs other than your own," Laurence said. ~ Naomi Novik

I have the deepest regret about 9/11. Sept. 11, 2001, was one of the most difficult days I've ever had. I was in Lima, Peru, and had to fly back eight hours not knowing what happened in my own country, knowing thousands of my fellow citizens had died. ~ Colin Powell

Living in China has made me appreciate my own country, with its tiny, ethnically diverse population of unassuming donut-eaters. ~ Jan Wong

As much as I hated the injustices perpetrated against blacks in America, I couldn't bring myself to hate my own country, then or later. ~ Clarence Thomas

Increased immigration and diversity are not only inevitable, but over the long run they are also desirable. Ethnic diversity is, on balance, an important social asset, as the history of my own country demonstrates. ~ Len Fisher

Surely, though, I must have stolen into the future and landed in an H.G. Wells-style world - a horrific, fantastic society in which people's faces contained only eyes, millions of healthy young adults and children dropped dead from the flu, boys got transported out of the country to be blown to bits, and the government arrested citizens for speaking the wrong words. Such a place couldn't be real. And it couldn't be the United States of America, "the land of the free and the home of the brave."
But it was. I was on a train in my own country, in a year the devil designed. 1918. ~ Cat Winters

You are a servant of the Nameless One.

Oh, nothing as exciting as that, Lady Tané. Just a lonely old man, trying to get off this island so I can die in my own country. ~ Samantha Shannon

All France, it has often been said, is a garden, and if you love France, as I do, it can be a very beautiful garden. For myself I found it healing and soothing to the spirit; I recovered from the shocks and bruises which I had received in my own country. But there comes a day, when you are well again and strong, when this atmosphere ceases to be nourishing. You long to break out and test your powers. Then the French spirit seems inadequate. You long to make friends, to create enemies, to look beyond walls and cultivated patches of earth. You want to cease thinking in terms of life insurance, sick benefits, old age pensions and so on. ~ Henry Miller

For reading, once begun, quickly becomes home and circle and court and family, and indeed, without narrative, I felt exiled from my own country. By the transport of books, that which is most foreign becomes one's familiar walks and avenues; while that which is most familiar is removed to delightful strangeness; and unmoving, one travels infinite causeways, immobile and thus unfettered. ~ M T Anderson

We will convey our deep appreciation for the Islamic faith, which has done so much over the centuries to shape the world - including in my own country. ~ Barack Obama

I came to expect despair every time I set foot in my own country, and I was never disappointed. ~ Nina Simone

Nevertheless, I drove right past my landmark, an antique store which looked to me like an ordinary house with junk piled on the front porch. ~ Abraham Verghese

I returned to India after long years of international service, because I had always cherished the desire to make a difference in my own country. ~ Shashi Tharoor

In my own country, I play light comedies and funny parts. ~ Carice Van Houten

I have had to empty two family homes during the last few years - first, the house that had been my grandmother's since 1923, and then my own country home, which we had lived in for over twenty years. ~ Penelope Lively

I have seen," he said, "the most beautiful scenes of my own country; I have visited the lakes of Lucerne and Uri, where the snowy mountains descend almost perpendicularly to the water, casting black and impenetrable shades, which would cause a gloomy and mournful appearance, were it not for the most verdant islands that relieve the eye by their gay appearance; I have seen this lake agitated by a tempest, when the wind tore up whirlwinds of water, and gave you an idea of what the waterspout must be on the great ocean; and the waves dash with fury the base of the mountain, where the priest and his mistress were overwhelmed by an avalanche, and where their dying voices are still said to be heard amid the pauses of the nightly wind; I have seen the mountains of La Valais, and the Pays de Vaud: but this country, Victor, pleases me more than all those wonders. The mountains of Switzerland are more majestic and strange; but there is a charm in the banks of this divine river, that I never before saw equalled. Look at that castle which overhangs yon precipice; and that also on the island, almost concealed amongst the foliage of those lovely trees; and now that group of labourers coming from among their vines; and that village half hid in the recess of the mountain. Oh, surely, the spirit that inhabits and guards this place has a soul more in harmony with man than those who pile the glacier, or retire to the inaccessible peaks of the mountains of our own country. "Clerval! beloved frie ~ Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

Without translation, I would be limited to the borders of my own country. The translator is my most important ally. He introduces me to the world. ~ Italo Calvino

I like Paris because I find something here, something of integrity, which I seem to have strangely lost in my own country. It is simplest of all to say that I like to live among people and surroundings where I am not always conscious of 'thou shall not.' I am colored and wish to be known as colored, but sometimes I have felt that my growth as a writer has been hampered in my own country. And so - but only temporarily - I have fled from it. ~ Jessie Redmon Fauset

It was nice to be in my own country, where I didn't need a translator or a driver. Where I didn't need to figure out cultural references or what hijab I needed to wear to cover my hair. ~ Lynsey Addario

I am conscious of having served England as I served my own country. ~ Ferdinand Foch

As I graduated from public schools and started working in newsrooms, I told myself that I am only the 'illegal' that my own country has not bothered to get to know. ~ Jose Antonio Vargas

I want my own country, not against Canada but for Quebec. ~ Gilles Duceppe

I'm trying to see my own country with fresh eyes. ~ Asne Seierstad

I keep saying I'm not at all famous in my own country, because people do not think I have done anything for India. ~ Freida Pinto

I am a bird of God's garden
and I do not belong to this dusty world
For a day or two they have put me here
in this cage of my own body
I did not come here of my own
I will not return of my own
to my own country. ~ Rumi

In my own country, many of the movies in recent years express our innate fears about what awaits us. They are apocalyptic visions that leave only a few people on earth-whole cities surviving under domes because we have depleted our natural resources. And often in these movies, for reasons that I question, we have space aliens who are always blowing up Washington, D.C., and the White House. ~ Hillary Clinton

It never really worked out for me in my own country. They said, 'You're not famous enough for the lead roles, and you're too present for the supporting roles - you'd overpower the lead.' ~ Antje Traue

I will defend Korea as I would my own country-just as I would California. ~ Douglas MacArthur

I don't think I am a citizen of the world; I am very much a citizen of my own country. But my own country is closely related to other parts of the world and influenced by what happens there. ~ Nadine Gordimer

I have never looked at foreign countries or gone there but with the purpose of getting to know the general human qualities that are spread all over the earth in very different forms, and then to find these qualities again in my own country and to recognize and to further them. ~ Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

If I should be so blessed as to revisit again my own country, but more especially Manchester, all that I could hope or desire would be presented before in one view. ~ Robert Clive

I am a thin layer of all those beings on [samadhi level] 3, mingling, connected with one another in a spherical surface around the whole known universe. Our "backs" are to the void. We are creating energy, matter and life at the interface between the void and all known creation. We are facing into the known universe, creating it, filling it. I am one with them; spread in a thin layer around the sphere with a small, slightly greater concentration of me in one small zone. I feel the power of the galaxy pouring through me. I am following the programme, the conversion programme of void to space, to energy, to matter, to life, to consciousness, to us, the creators. From nothing on one side to the created everything on the other. I am the creation process itself, incredibly strong, incredibly powerful.

This time there is no flunking out, no withdrawal, no running away, no unconsciousness, no denial, no negation, no fighting against anything. I am "one of the boys in the engine room pumping creation from the void into the known universe; from the unknown to the known I am pumping".

I am coming down from level +3. There are a billion choices of where to descend back down. I am conscious down each one of the choices simultaneously. Finally I am in my own galaxy with millions of choices left, hundreds of thousands on my own solar system, tens of thousands on my own planet, hundreds in my own country and then suddenly I am down to two, one of which is this body. In ~ John C. Lilly

Nothing I ever wrote had a message. It was just my own personal experience. ~ Lana Del Rey

My own experience is use the tools that are out there. Use the digital world. But never lose sight of the need to reach out and talk to other people who don't share your view. Listen to them and see if you can find a way to compromise. ~ Colin Powell

I embraced being a pop artist, but I like doing it on my own terms, at my own pace. ~ Christina Aguilera

I saw, in looking over Cooper, elements of a comet of 1825 which resemble what I get out for this, from my own observations, but I cannot rely upon my own. ~ Maria Mitchell

In many respects, my work is very enjoyable, for I seem to get on pretty well with the fellows and enjoy the work of instruction as well as my own studies. ~ John Gresham Machen

It's all that's left,' Leon said in a suddenly weak voice. 'It's what is left of civilization. You take raw material and you transform it. That is civilization. Physical love is all raw meat. That's why everyone's so preoccupied with it now. I have been told by a colleague ten years older than myself--as if it were possible for anybody to be ten years older than I am--that salvation comes from staring at the pubic region of strangers, and freedom, from inducing in myself, by the use of a chemical, the kind of ecstatic lunacy in which I spent most of my adolescence, a condition I attribute solely to the strength of my body at that time and the conviction I had then that I would see socialism in the United States during my lifetime. Now that my bones are weak, my brain is stronger. I don't expect . . . anything. But I cannot bear the grotesque, lying piety of my own unhinged contemporaries. One man, a literary star'--and here he broke off, laughed once, choked and shook his head--'oh, yes, a star, told me he only regretted the pill had not yet been developed in his own youth. All those girls who might have been his! In this age of generalized cock, is this the whole revelation toward which my life has been directed? I would, in any case, prefer to contemplate the organ of a horse. It is handsomer, larger and more comic than anything my fellow man has to show. It is the age of baby shit, darling. Don't kid yourself. My privacy has been violated--what I've admired and thought abo ~ Paula Fox

There's so many people who move around our country and lose track of their own ancestry. It's nice to know where you come from. ~ Garrison Keillor

You had to suffer shipwreck through your own efforts before you were ready to seize the lifebelt he threw you. Believe me, I know from my own experience that the Master knows you and each of his pupils much better than we know ourselves. He reads in the souls of his pupils more than they care to admit. ~ Eugen Herrigel

This book is a fairy tale in which I am the prince and the princess. I am the king and the queen. I am my own wicked witch and fairy godmother. This book is a fairy tale in which I'm cursed and blessed by others. But, finally, I am the fair y finding my own magic. ~ Dean Atta

I craft most of my own tragedies without ever having even the remotest understanding that it is I myself who have done the crafting. ~ Craig D. Lounsbrough

I often must sacrifice my own needs and desires for the purpose of giving my children what they need and modeling for them the depths of Christ's love.
... make myself available in the routine tasks and myriad interruptions of daily life b/c I believe it is God's will for me to serve my family through them. ~ Sally Clarkson

In the United States, you might say every county has got its own separate system. There's not even one kind of ballot that you use all over the United States. We require that in a foreign country. ~ Jimmy Carter

From elementary school up to college I was never interested in things I was forced to study. I told myself it was something that had to be done,
I only began to enjoy studying after I got through the educational system and became a so-called member of society. If something interested me, and I could study it at my own pace and approach it the way I liked, I was pretty efficient at acquiring knowledge and skills. ~ Haruki Murakami

Some general officers should pay a stricter regard to truth than to call the depopulating other countries the service of their own. ~ Henry Fielding

We were moving off now. From each other. As cannot be. Helped. I didn't want it from that time on. You know. All that. When you said sit with me on the school bus. I said no. That inside world had caught alight and what I wanted. To be left alone. To look at it. To swing the torch into every corner of what he'd we'd done. Know it and wonder what does it mean. I learned to turn it off, the world that was not my own. Stop up my ears and everything. Who are you? You and me were never this. This boy and girl that do not speak. But somehow I've left you behind and you're just looking on. ~ Eimear McBride

Let me die the moment my love dies.
Let me not outlive my own capacity to love.
Let me die still loving, and so, never die. ~ Mary Zimmerman

My name is Lake Suck and this is my manifesto. I swear to be myself. To think for myself. I will not be led by social conventions. I will make my own way through the world. I will live on my own terms without conforming to society's expectations of who they think I should be, I will be the visible minority.
By being myself, I will help to save the world. I swear to always look, listen, learn, think, ask, act, and speak for myself. ~ Cecil Castellucci

I've never had a stylist, and I've always chosen my own clothes. ~ Bonnie Wright

Is the professor who insists we read Ernest Hemingway again instead of Gertrude Stein "obsessing"? Because although I did a BA in English, an MFA in Poetry, and a year's worth of a PhD, Stein was an author I had to discover on my own. She wasn't on the syllabus anywhere in all that time. ~ Laura Mullen

Desire, loneliness, wind in the flowering almond
surely these are the great, the inexhaustible subjects
to which my predecessors apprenticed themselves.
I hear them echo in my own heart, disguised as convention. ~ Louise Gluck

I can testify, from my own experience and observation, that slavery is a curse to the whites as well as to the blacks. It makes the white fathers cruel and sensual; the sons violent and licentious; it contaminates the daughters, and makes the wives wretched. And as for the colored race, it needs an abler pen than mine to describe the extremity of their sufferings, the depth of their degradation. ~ Harriet Ann Jacobs

I am a believer in sensible choices, so different from many of my own. Also in sensible names for children. ~ Margaret Atwood

The people who were behind my abuse were very clever. They had created something which would be so difficult to explain, so difficult to make sense of, that it would be easier to dismiss it all out of hand as the ramblings of an over-imaginative child.
Many people don't want to believe that child abuse exists, or are only willing to believe that certain kinds of abuse go on. They don't want to consider that something so horrific, and yet so widespread, is taking place in their community, perhaps only a door away from them, a few steps from their lives - or even in their lives if they would only open their eyes.
I know this, not just because of my own personal experience, but through my work supporting and listening to survivors and those still experiencing abuse.
To ask people not only to believe in the abuse but also to take on board all the details of what I'm revealing is a big step, and it has taken me many years to make the decision to tell my story, but it has to be done. This type of abuse is ongoing, as is the culture of disbelief to make people dismiss anyone who talks about it. This needs to be challenged. The things I'm telling you in this book have been kept close to me all my life; I have always known that talking of them, telling my full story, would make some people incredulous - but it's true. It's all true.
Whatever the set dressing, they were rapists and abusers - just plain and simple/ The trappings that surrounded the abuse was just a w ~ Laurie Matthew

I'm a bit insane when it comes to doing my own stunts and getting down and dirty. It's fun, you know? It's things I wouldn't normally do in my real life, so when I go to work and get to beat people up and shoot guns and get waterboarded, those are things I find completely interesting. ~ Katee Sackhoff

My gaze returns to earth and when it does, it's her eyes I see. Not the way I used to see them - around every corner, behind my own closed lids at the start of each day. Not in the way I used to imagine them in the eyes of every other girl I laid on top of. No, this time it really is her eyes. A photo of her, dressed in black, a cello leaning against one shoulder like a tired child. Her hair is up in one of those buns that seem to be a requisite for classical musicians. She used to wear it up like that for recitals and chamber music concerts, but with little pieces hanging down, to soften the severity of the look. There are no tendrils in this photo. I peer closer at the sign. YOUNG CONCERT SERIES PRESENTS MIA HALL. ~ Gayle Forman

I want someone who will adore me so much that they cannot even walk past me without touching me in some way. I want someone who will worship me, even when.. I'm sitting around in fluffy slippers with no makeup on and hair scraped back.
I'm sick and tired of being on my own. Most of the time I'm fine. Some of the time I even quite enjoy it. But at this precise moment in time I'm fed up with it. I've had enough.. ~ Jane Green

If I label someone as "bad," I know my own meaning: he will hurt someone to get what he wants. If I use "evil" it means he will hurt someone even when he doesn't want anything. ~ Rory Miller

My dream was to set up my own e-commerce company. In 1999, I gathered 18 people in my apartment and spoke to them for two hours about my vision. Everyone put their money on the table, and that got us $60,000 to start Alibaba. I wanted to have a global company, so I chose a global name. ~ Jack Ma

When I write stories I am like someone who is in her own country, walking along streets that she has known since she was a child, between walls and trees that are hers. ~ Natalia Ginzburg

I bow before the authority of special men because it is imposed upon me by my own reason. ~ Mikhail Bakunin

My goal
and this is kind of my own little secret
but when I get married, just to head out and finish football and, and, and be a missionary around the world. Places where Steve Young
not that it's big really that many places
but places where they have no idea about football. ~ Steve Young

Stories come to me and I don't know where they come from, but afterwards I can look back and say, 'Oh yes, that's got a little bit of me, or a little bit of my own son in it'. That's where ideas come from. ~ Anthony Browne

Gospel music played a huge part of my life. I was too scared to audition for the choir, but through my own music, I was also able to find spirituality for myself. ~ Leon Bridges

He is not a ghost; yet every nerve I have is unstrung: for a moment I am beyond my own mastery. What does it mean? I did not think I should tremble in this way when I saw him, or lose my voice or the power of motion in his presence. ~ Charlotte Bronte

I never dreamed that in my lifetime my own genome would be sequenced. ~ James D. Watson