Quotes about emigration

Roots make the commonality of errantry and exile, for in both instances roots are lacking. We must begin with that. ("Errantry, Exile")

I stowed away in a great steel boat, but the horror stowed away inside me. When I left my homeland I thought I had escaped—but out on the open sea, I started to have nightmares. I was naïve to suppose I had left my country with nothing.

Truly, this is the one thing that people from your country and people from my country agree on. They say, That refugee girl is not one of us. That girl does not belong. That girl is a halfling, a child of an unnatural mating, an unfamiliar face in the moon.”

Most days I wish I was a British pound coin instead of an African girl. Everyone would be pleased to see me coming.”

I have taken into myself some of the assumptions of life in a Western democracy—certain ideas about legality, for instance, certain expectations of due process—and in that sense I have returned a stranger.”

When we lived in Cuba, I was smart. But when we got to Queens, in New York City, in the United States of America, I became dumb, just because I couldn't speak English. (first lines)

His sister had come over here in 1994, and then he'd come himself, to get away from all the trouble over there. Never regretted it. Said this was a fine country except they let in too many immigrants.

I still think that being forced to leave your home out of fear is one of the worst injustices a human being can face.

Leaving, I discovered, did not cure my displacement, but rather reinforced it.

You must know, my dear young lady, that in Lagos you may be a million publicity officers for the Americans; you may be earning a million pounds a day; you may have hundreds of servants: you may be living like an elite, but the day you land in England, you are a second-class citizen.”

For me, the person I was becoming when we left was erased, and another one was created.

As the plane climbed over the town and swung above the sea I knew how it felt to go into exile.