Expatriate Experience Quotes

After a few months' acquaintance with European 'coffee' one's mind weakens, and his faith with it, and he begins to wonder if the rich beverage of home, with it's clotted layer of yellow cream on top of it, is not a mere dream after all, and a thing which never existed.

Best way to live in California is to be from somewheres else.

I do think of myself very strongly as a New Zealander, but when I moved out to the States, I was aware that I didn't want to just live in a satellite community of only other New Zealanders.

It's hard to think of myself as an American, and yet I am not from India, a place where I was not born and where I have never lived.

I saw New York differently after being in Paris for a few years.

Although I've lived in England for more than twenty years, I still have a foreigner's passion for all the details of English history and rural life.

My mom is from Venezuela, and my dad is German and Japanese, and we lived in Brazil when I was a kid for a couple of years, and then I grew up on Long Island. I think all the traveling and all the nationalities put that stuff in my head. I was just around it a lot.

Six months after that, I left Taiwan, first for Hong Kong and then for mainland China, where I spent another three months studying still more Chinese and generally kicking around the country.

I remember coming back to the U.K. after spending five months in Charlotte for 'Homeland,' and I just found myself just wandering around London. There's nothing like it - the buildings, the architecture, the sense of history, the sense of culture - there really is nothing like it.

When I arrived in France, I cried every day. Not because I was in France - I could have been anywhere - but because I was so far, far away from my parents. I missed them so much.

I'm French - it's less important. Meaning, I remain a Frenchman in America, but I adapt to American culture. I feel good there - but I'm still a foreigner.

Moving abroad brings you on both as a player and a person.

I live between Europe, America and Asia.

I studied for my degree in London and consequently ended up spending five years away from Cornwall. I deliberately moved away from the coast to experience a different way of life.

I've only been living in England for the last 10 years, if you don't count my student years.

I was a westerner in Iran, an Iranian in the West. I had no identity. I didn't even know anymore why I was living.

I think I'm a global citizen. My parents came from China, were educated in France and emigrated to the United States. And I think that opened up my mind to be able to live and work anywhere.

Only when I came to America did I think of myself as British.

When I was 18, I left Dublin and moved to Paris. I didn't speak French. I didn't know anyone. I felt like a fish out of water.

I'm a city girl from Seoul City, where I grew up, to Tokyo & Paris.

Living in Germany Africanised me.

I only realised why I keep living in Shepperton when I returned to China. All the people who moved there had come from places just like Shepperton, and so they built and lived in houses exactly like these. I now know I was drawn here because, on an unconscious level, Shepperton reminds me of Shanghai.

In the Caribbean islands, especially in Jamaica, have I found a country similar to South Africa plus the racial freedom I had sought so long.

I was 18 when I first visited London, I'm very provincial like that, but I must confess the moment I got to America I thought: This is the place. It was more open, with 24-hour cities and pubs and restaurants that didn't close.

Americans should never come to Europe,' she said, and tried to laugh and began to cry, 'it means they never can be happy again. What's the good of an American who isn't happy? Happiness was all we had.