Cultural Longing Quotes

When you're from another country, you want to spend time with your family. All your family can't come here. All your friends can't come here. You spend so much time here, you want to go there, too.

One thing that I miss because we spend a lot of time in America is English food, like cooked breakfast and Sunday dinners.

London is my home. I miss my family so much; it's hard being away. And I miss salt and vinegar crisps. And Marmite. And good fudge. Oh my God. Clotted cream fudge.

People are starved for a way of life - they're hunting for a way to be or to act toward the world.

I'm really kind of a little bit romantic for the lost era. There's a lot of us that are - kind like James Murphy, same thing - we feel like it's this magic era that happened before us. And it wasn't even necessarily disco.

Nostalgia is a particular affliction of immigrant fiction, and it's led to a kind of sclerosis of the form. I hate nostalgia, and I feel it's good to be aware of the politics of these genres.

I need my fill of Indian home cooking.

I think I was born in Elizabethan times.

I was sad to leave Europe in 1890, after my student days in Germany... But then, once back in New York, I experienced an intense longing for Europe, for its vital tradition of music, theatre, art, craftsmanship... I felt bewildered and lonely. How was I to use myself?

For some Chicago expats, food is the medicine that blunts the pain of separation.

I feel like I was supposed to be born in the '90s. Everything from that era needs to come back.

It's like this - because I travel so much, I crave certain foods or certain things, like from certain places that I've been.

I liked the books I read that said things like 'I shan't'. I would try to find a way to say in my life, to reply, 'I shan't do that, mother.' That was so far away from my barrio world.

I am tired of loving a foreign muse.

At lilac evening I walked with every muscle aching among the lights of 27th and Welton in the Denver colored section, wishing I were a Negro, feeling that the best the white world had offered was not enough ecstasy for me, not enough life, joy, kicks, darkness, music, not enough night.

Words began to appear in English and to make some kind of equivalent. For what satisfaction it is hard to say, except that something seems unusually piercing, living, handsome, in another language, and since English is yours, you wish it to be there too.

Whenever I go abroad, I never return home craving roast beef and Yorkshire pudding or fish and chips. Instead all I really want is a particularly good lamb dopiaza.

I have this obsession with the '80s because I missed all of it.

One of the things I miss most about the U.K. is political TV, and I have one of those little gadgets, which means I can download British programmes illegally - that's why it's a guilty pleasure.

My encounter with another world and another culture and the beginnings of an attachment to them had set up an irritation, barely perceptible but incurable-rather like unrequited love, like a symptom of the hopelessness of trying to grasp what is boundless, or unite what cannot be joined; a reminder of how finite, how curtailed, our experience on earth must be

The Sixties were different in an isolated place. We got two television channels if the wind was blowing in the right direction. The radio stations went off at sundown. Then you picked up Chicago and heard the teenage music you really yearned for.