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“You're an expatriate. You've lost touch with the soil. You get precious. Fake European standards have ruined you. You drink yourself to death. You become obsessed with sex. You spend all your time talking, not working. You are an expatriate, see? You hang around cafes.”
― Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises

“People wonder why so many writers come to live in Paris. I’ve been living ten years in Paris and the answer seems simple to me: because it’s the best place to pick ideas. Just like Italy, Spain.. or Iran are the best places to pick saffron. If you want to pick opium poppies you go to Burma or South-East Asia. And if you want to pick novel ideas, you go to Paris.”
― Roman Payne, Crepuscule

“But if I am not a criminal, I beg to be permitted to go abroad with my wife temporarily, for at least one year, with the right to return as soon as it becomes possible in our country to serve great ideas in literature without cringing before little men, as soon as there is at least a partial change in the prevailing view concerning the role of the literary artist. (“Letter To Stalinâ€�)”
― Yevgeny Zamyatin

“Giving up on the drive to succeed is a good part of what being an expat is all about. If you travel all the way to the Caribbean Sea, you probably have already decided to trade the dog-eat-dog competition of modern living for a hammock on the sand.”
― Anthony Lee Head, Driftwood: Stories from the Margarita Road

“I think I feel not at home in America, but not necessarily at home outside of America.”
― Jim Jarmusch

“You will be separated from yourself and yet be alive.”
― Ovid, Metamorphoses

“It wasn’t hard to understand. Mexican women are something special. They learn early on that men are subservient to them. They are trained by their mothers in the use of this power over these lowly creatures.”
― Anthony Lee Head, Driftwood: Stories from the Margarita Road

“With a very few exceptions, all liberal-minded creative forces—poets, novelists, critics, historians, philosophers and so on—had left Lenin’s and Stalin’s Russia. Those who had not were either withering away there or adulterating their gifts by complying with the political demands of the state. What the Tsars had never been able to achieve, namely the complete curbing of minds to the government’s will, was achieved by the Bolsheviks in no time after the main contingent of the intellectuals had escaped abroad or had been destroyed. The lucky group of expatriates could now follow their pursuits with such utter impunity that, in fact, they sometimes asked themselves if the sense of enjoying absolute mental freedom was not due to their working in an absolute void. True, there was among émigrés a sufficient number of good readers to warrant the publication, in Berlin, Paris, and other towns, of Russian books and periodicals on a comparatively large scale; but since none of those writings could circulate within the Soviet Union, the whole thing acquired a certain air of fragile unreality.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory

“A place has a curious quality when you have only a partial understanding of its language, and in those early months the sensation was especially peculiar. At first I moved in a cloud of unknowing, the speech around me impenetrable, but it quickly grew less elusive as I began to understand single words and then phrases and now even snippets of conversation. On occasion, I found myself stumbling into situations more intimate than I would have liked, the city was no longer the innocent place it had been when I arrived.”
― Katie Kitamura, Intimacies

“I carry exile in my heart. It animates my poetry and my politics; I will never be free of it, having lived outside of Teixcalaan for so long. I will always be measuring the distance between myself and a person who remained in the heart of the world; between the person I would have been had I stayed and the person I have become under the pressure of the frontier. When the Seventeenth Legion came through the jumpgate in bight star-snatching ships and filled up the Ebrekti sky in the shapes of my home, I was at first afraid. A profound discontinuity. To know fear in the shape of one's own face.”
― Arkady Martine, A Memory Called Empire

“I recognised just how different Alexander was from children raised in Britain. The most obvious distinctions were his maturity and broadness of view. He hadn't lost his innocence or childish ability to play, but he enjoyed conversations with adults, and he saw no problem in playing with any child of any age. He was wonderfully gentle with the little ones. He was never fazed by differences, and cultural diversity was of interest rather than a reason for prejudice, though, - like our Nepali friends - he liked to classify people.”
― Jane Wilson-Howarth, A Glimpse of Eternal Snows: A Journey of Love and Loss in the Himalayas

“What if we are all simply lost souls blown off course, just trying to get home?”
― Anthony Lee Head, Driftwood: Stories from the Margarita Road

“Life down here is kind of a permanent Halloween where you choose a costume more fitting for your self-image than reality could ever offer. Do you want to be a captain or a cowboy? No problem. People will call you by whatever title or name you choose. You say you’re a reincarnated pirate queen or the abandoned love child of a famous entertainer? That’s fine with me. We believe each other’s stories about who we were and who we are. Being an expat means you can have a whole new life. It’s a little like being in the Witness Relocation Program only with flip flops and margaritas.”
― Anthony Lee Head, Driftwood: Stories from the Margarita Road

“And here in Britain the wind moaned through the desolate woods, the skies wept, and wet gale-blown leaves pattered against the windows and stuck there, making little pathetic shadows against the steamy glass. There had been wild weather often enough in his own country, but that had been the wild weather of home; here was the wind and and rain and wet leaves of exile.”
― Rosemary Sutcliff, The Eagle of the Ninth

“If you are gone [from your homeland] for fifteen years, you will not return. Even if you return, you will not return.”
― Bruno Bettelheim

“exile happened in the heart and the mind long before it happened to the body”
― Arkady Martine, A Desolation Called Peace

“I am an international kind of guy.”
― Steven Magee

“I am a British guy living in the USA.”
― Steven Magee

“I am a British guy with a USA family.”
― Steven Magee

“I am a British guy with a USA passport.”
― Steven Magee

“Oh sure, there was a gringo gulch where the sunbirds lived in the winter months. But if you avoided them, you might hook up with the small community of Margarita Road refugees: a group of wanderers from up north; a crazy Irish sailor; a few Italians; some young, fast-living kids from Mexico City; and one beautiful girl from Brazil. All in all, it was a nice place to stay—or hide, if that’s what you needed.”
― Anthony Lee Head, Driftwood: Stories from the Margarita Road

“The Margarita Road isn’t just about flip flops and late-night beach parties. Running away can be hard work.”
― Anthony Lee Head, Driftwood: Stories from the Margarita Road

“He kept ordering beers and making what he thought were humorous jokes about how Mexicans sleep all day, all the while telling me how great my life was without a ‘real job.â€� After an hour or so of this, I was ready to pour the next drink over his head.”
― Anthony Lee Head, Driftwood: Stories from the Margarita Road

“I did not know whether I wished to stay or not. But where would I go, if I were to leave? I was not yet able to envision an alternative. For this reason alone it was not a matter of small interest to me, whether or not the Court would extend my contract.”
― Katie Kitamura, Intimacies

“On growing up internationally - from the Daughter of Copper.

And so, with the greatest of ease, both as children and adults, we float back and forth between our two languages and cultures, seamlessly navigating the moments of time and place that define us.”
― Susan Bayless Herrera, Daughter of Copper, A Memoir of Love, Loss, and Identity, Growing up on Borrowed Land

“Though I am a born American, though I became what is called an expatriate, I look upon the world not as a partisan of this country or that but as an inhabitant of the globe.”
― Henry Miller, The Air-Conditioned Nightmare

“For Americans, the idea of living in another country has not only exotic, but let us be frank, vaguely unpatriotic connotations. But having to explain what is after all one's own self over and over again makes the American abroad more ferociously patriotic than he would ever dare to be at home.”
― Barbara Chase-Riboud, I Always Knew: A Memoir

“Ask any child from Chile to sketch something, anything at all. Before any human figure, a cloud, a tree, they'll fill the upper space with an array of jagged peaks.”
― Ariel Dorfman, Feeding on Dreams: Confessions of an Unrepentant Exile

“The best reason for exposing oneself to foreign ways is to generate a sense of vitality and
awareness � an interest in life which can come only when one lives through the shock of
contrast and difference.”
― Edward T. Hall, The Silent Language

“You are not from here, you tell yourself. You repeat that until everything ends.”
― Ananda Devi, Eve out of Her Ruins