Immigrant Experience Quotes

“And as any mixed-race person will tell you—to be half of two things is to be whole of nothing.”
― Gabrielle Zevin, Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow

“Fitting is a luxury rarely given to immigrants, or children of immigrants. We are stuck in emotional purgatory. Home, somehow, is always the last place you left, and never the place you're in.”
― Scaachi Koul, One Day We'll All Be Dead and None of This Will Matter

“I have seen them stagger out of their movie palaces and blink their empty eyes in the face of reality once more, and stagger home, to read the Times, to find out what's going on in the world. I have vomited at their newspapers, read their literature, observed their customs, eaten their food, desired their women, gaped at their art. But I am poor, and my name ends with a soft vowel, and they hate me and my father, and my father's father, and they would have my blood and put me down, but they are old now, dying in the sun and in the hot dust of the road, and I am young and full of hope and love for my country and my times, and when I say Greaser to you it is not my heart that speaks, but the quivering of an old wound, and I am ashamed of the terrible thing I have done.”
― John Fante, Ask the Dust

“Immigrant parents, when they first move to North America, push towards whiteness, towards assimilation, to survive and thrive. Naturally, their children do too for the first half of their lives. This usually tips the other way, but before we're taught anything, we're taught to hide.”
― Scaachi Koul, One Day We'll All Be Dead and None of This Will Matter

“You can date attractive local women right now - without waiting until your language or social status improves.”
― Max Smirnoff

“When immigrants arrive in another country, we experience a lot of stress. We learn a new language, go to school, and work in a new environment, which is most likely some survival or transitional job initially. We probably lose social and professional status, and the overall experience is unpleasant and stressful. It sucks. I’ve been there myself.

We also have less time compared with locals. For example, we have to spend time learning English - they don’t. Most likely, they can get a job with a higher pay. In our case, we most likely get a minimum-paying job first, which means we have to work more and longer hours.

This means that if we want to progress in private and business life at the same rate as locals, we need to be better organized, more efficient, and more disciplined and use more effective and innovative tools and approaches. There is no other way around it.

Therefore, I wanted to emphasize that we immigrants need our unique approach to dating.”
― Max Smirnoff

“When things come to the worst, they generally mend.”
― Susanna Moodie, Roughing It in the Bush

“If this is the American dream, wake me when it's over.”
― E.L. Shen

“The next generation would acquire a skill on their behalf - one that we could also use against them. Commanding the language seemed like our only way of surpassing them. Home life took on a kind of casual litigiousness. The calm and composed children, a jaunty bounce to our sentences, laying traps with our line of questioning. The parents, tired and irritated, defaulting to the native tongue.”
― Hua Hsu, Stay True

“The immigrant's resourcefulness requires an exhaustion of possibilities. You may master tenses and forms, grammatical rules, what passes for style. And yet, consequently, you may struggle to hold a conversation with your grandparents. It's possible they secretly wanted this to happen - a measure of generational progress. The child has learned to speak for himself, but to talk back as well. You write well, not good. The devoted student also internalizes a relationship to the language itself, one in which you remain conscious of your distance from the source, from who draws on this language to mine their authentic self, because you've been led to believe such a thing matters. A simple pronoun of "I" or "we," a first-person perspective, all of it seemed mysterious. We could never write in a way that assumed anyone knew where we were coming from. There was nothing interesting about our context. Neither Black nor white, just boring to everyone on the outside. Where do you even begin explaining yourself?”
― Hua Hsu, Stay True

“Immigration is an opaque glass box whose front door opens outwards.”
― Eva Asprakis, Thirty-Eight Days of Rain

“How strange it is to be a continent away from ¨home¨ and you don't know where ¨home¨ is anyhow and all the ¨home¨ you've got is in your head.

[letter to Neal Cassady, Jan. 8, 1951]”
― Jack Kerouac, Jack Kerouac Selected Letters 1940-1956

“I want you to be very successful. Remember, people like us cannot afford to fail "People like us"… immigrants, exiles, refugees, newcomers, outsiders… Too many words for a shared, recognizable sentiment that, no matter how often described, remains largely undefined. Children of uprooted parents are born into the memory tribe. Both their present and their future are forever shaped by their ancestral past, regardless of whether they have any knowledge of it. If they flourish and prosper, their achievements will be attributed to a whole community; and, in the same way, their failures will be charged up to something bigger and older than themselves, be it family, religion, or ethnicity. While the journey of life may be full of reversals of fortune, children from displaced families can never allow themselves to fall below the level at which their parents started it out.”
― Elif Shafak, There Are Rivers in the Sky

“Here is a secret Chang E knew, though her mother didn't.
Past a certain point, you stop being able to go home. At this point, when you have got this far from where you were from, the thread snaps. The narrative breaks. And you are forced, pastless, motherless, selfless, to invent yourself anew.
At a certain point, this stops being sad - but who knows if any human has ever reached that point?”
― Zen Cho, The Four Generations of Chang E

“Know this: You are our future. And knowing and protecting the past will help you create that future.”
― Berta de Miguel, Immigrant Architect: Rafael Guastavino and the American Dream

“There's a telos of self-improvement baked into the immigrant experience. As a teenager, I busied myself with the school newspaper or debate club because, unlike with math or science, I thought I could actually get better at these things.”
― Hua Hsu, Stay True

“There comes a moment for the immigrant's child when you realize that you and your parents are assimilating at the same time.”
― Hua Hsu, Stay True

“I told them about all the protests and rallies at Berkeley, the late-night hours I was spending on the Asian American newspaper on campus. I thought they'd be proud. But they didn't understand why these were distinctions worth fighting for. I was sympathetic, reflecting on their struggles back when they arrived - my mother's isolation, my dad getting mugged on his first day in New York. I was grateful they had made these sacrifices for me. "For you?" my dad said with a laugh. "We came for ourselves. There was nothing in Taiwan when we left.”
― Hua Hsu, Stay True

“I'm the unwanted, the unknown face,
the wandering ignored past,
the mysterious façade that has been
alter throughout mirrors and centuries;
whose voice impress or discomforts
those who belong in the other side.”
― Elvis Dino Esquivel

“An immigrant? An immigrant feels like when you go to the movies and you get there late. You can’t see, and the people are not happy you’re there. The movie has already started, and you missed parts. You have a lot of catching up to do if you’re going to get it, and you need to find your place in the dark without stepping on people. Then, if you find your place, shut up and pay attention; you might get what the movie is all about.”
― Amarilys Gacio Rassler, Cuban American Dancing On The Hyphen

“RENAULT
I have often speculated on why you do not return to America. Did you abscond with the church funds? Did you run off with the President's wife? I should like to think you killed a man. It is the romantic in me.

RICK
It was a combination of all three.

RENAULT
And what in Heaven's name brought you to Casablanca?

RICK
My health. I came to Casablanca for the waters.

RENAULT
Waters? What waters? We are in the desert.

RICK
I was misinformed.”
― Aljean Harmetz, Round Up the Usual Suspects: The Making of Casablanca--Bogart, Bergman, and World War II

“Hero had the sense that Pol's Ilocano was stuck in time, that he only wanted to speak it with the people he'd always spoken it to, but even when Hero and Pol spoke in Ilocano with each other in California, there was a playacting stiffness in their voices that hadn't been there back in Vigan, when Hero used to hang on every word.”
― Elaine Castillo, America Is Not the Heart

“The seeds of my ancestors have been planted in Poland, but I have since been uprooted.”
― Dr. Gabby Miniscalco

“Just like my peers in school who didn’t understand my Polish culture, my family did not understand my American identity. I was always “too Polish” in my friend group and “too American” in my family. I couldn’t win, further isolating me into a grief I didn’t yet understand.”
― Dr. Gabby Miniscalco

“Uiteindelijk kwam ze weer uit op de vraag: was ze nu Turks of Nederlands en welke nationaliteit was voor haar het belangrijkst?”
― Karin Hilterman, Meryem

“Die eerste avond in bed vroeg ze zich af waarom ze ook alweer zo naar Nederland verlangde. Het was er koud, er waren geen leuke brieven en de buren hadden hen niet verwelkomd. Er leek niets leuk aan Nederland.”
― Karin Hilterman, Meryem

“I imagined I could have begged an old girlfriend from college to send money; enough of them had expressed ambivalence about their trust funds that this seemed a plausible path down which I might drag myself away from homelessness. But I’d sooner have hanged myself.”
― Jonathan Escoffery, If I Survive You

“He was an immigrant, and papa had told me a hundred times that we’d never have enough sympathy, enough respect for the uprooted who have had enough to suffer from their disorientation, without being added contempt or disdain.”
― Gabrielle Roy, Street of Riches

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

“کچھ تو فرق ہوتا ہے

نہیں جانے میں، اور لوٹ کر آنے میں۔

،نظارے چاہے وہی ہوں

پر فرق آ جاتا ہے اُن کے نظر آنے میں۔


مِل جاتے ہیں کچھ پہیلِیوں کے جواب،

کچھ سوال بھی نئے ڈھونڈ لیتے ہیں ہم نئے ٹھِکانوں میں

، روح میں اُتر جاتے ہیں کُچھ رِشتے اور بھی زیادہ

کُچھ دم توڑ دیتے ہیں، دور دراز کے بازاروں میں


عجب سے اب لگتے ہیں جان نے والوں کو ہم

کُچھ گِن بھی لیتے ہیں اب ہمیں دیوانوں میں

یہی فرق ہوتا ہے نہیں جانے میں، اور لوٹ کر آنے میں

کُچھ کھو جاتا ہے گُزرے زمانے میں

کُچھ مِل جاتا ہے نئے افسانے میں”
― Adeel Ahmed Khan