Jose Bergamin Quotes

People don't know what it's like being the foreigner until they are one.

I grew up in a Mauritian bubble in France... I had the feeling of not belonging, but still living with French culture.

I have always felt more at home in a culture that has nothing to do with the one I was born and brought up in.

I love having different cultures around, but when the parent culture kind of dissipates, you're left thinking, 'Well, what's going on?'

II grew up in Australia, but I'm not from there originally. Like, my dad's South American, so I know what that's like to grow up in a culture that's not your own.

I think of myself as an Indian comedian, but I've had British and American schooling. I always had this feeling of not fitting in anywhere, of observing situations from the outside.

If you take my own life, the longer you stay in a country, you almost lose your former self and become this third-party person who is caught in between two worlds.

Over the course of my life, I have made many transitions - most of them taking me further away from my Somali roots and steadily toward the enlightened mentality of Western democracy.

I've gotten used to being a foreigner.

To be a foreigner may be an advantage but disadvantage as well. It was advantage for me for sure.

I was very surprised when I first started spending time in America. The culture shock was something I wasn't prepared for. I had a lot of work to do to try to begin to understand this enormous and complex country that I thought would be an easy process.

So I live among barbarous tribes, a stranger and exile for the love of God.

I'm interested in people who become culturally fluent. And when I meet young people I'm often amazed they don't quite seem to have a sense of where they're from. They're like the citizens of the airport.

I think that when you sequester yourself, when you put yourself into another area where you can't be part of the main traditional culture you're limiting your possibilities in the United States and I think that's one problem.

In addition to the research, I enjoyed learning French and assimilating the culture of another country.

I feel a little schizophrenic because my life is so totally different from here, obviously. And the French values are so different from American values.

Rather than be asked to abandon one's own heritage and to adapt to the mores of the new country, one was expected to possess a treasure of foreign skills and customs that would enrich the resources of American living.

Two hundred or more years ago most people on the planet were never aware of any reality other than the one into which they were brought up.

It's fascinating when you're from another place, but you don't speak the language.

Even though I'm very Westernized as an individual and very Canadian, I guess I've lost some of my Chinese culture.

When I got to Florida, I was a British kid, but I was also an Indian kid: a brown kid with an English accent. Talk about being an outsider. And that's become the theme of a lot of the stuff I write about.

What is Americanization? It manifests itself, in a superficial way, when the immigrant adopts the clothes, the manners and the customs generally prevailing here. Far more important is the manifestation presented when he substitutes for his mother tongue the English language as the common medium of speech.

In Geneva, I was seen as an outsider. In the U.S., I was considered Eurotrash. And in London, I'm seen as an American.

My identity is not based on performance; it's based on something that's pre-determined by someone else, and I don't even understand what that is because I'm an African who came to America.

The Indian community in Canada has integrated much better than the Indian community in United States. They've become really Canadian at the same time as keeping all their Indian characters and customs and social groups.