Phyllis Bottome Quotes

If I was in a refugee camp somewhere on the Pakistani border, of course I'd want to come to Australia.

I am the face of a refugee. I was once a refugee. I was with my family in exile.

As a teenager I became a boat person - a refugee - as I made my way to Palestine.

When we were in Egypt, we were refugees. My family and I were homeless. For five years, out of all of the countries in the world that my father was contacting, the only one that took us in was England.

I know what it's like when you are a refugee, living on the mercy of others and having to adjust.

I don't support terrorism and never have. As a Sri Lankan that fled war and bombings, my music is the voice of the civilian refugee.

You know, those of us who leave our homes in the morning and expect to find them there when we go back - it's hard for us to understand what the experience of a refugee might be like.

Americans are accustomed to welcoming, or at least receiving, refugees from other countries, not creating our own.

I sincerely wish that every member of Congress could visit the displaced person's camp in Germany and Austria and see just what is happening to 500,000 human beings through no fault of their own.

When I was first lady, I worked to call attention to the plight of refugees fleeing Cambodia for Thailand, I visited Thailand and witnessed firsthand the trauma of parents and children separated by circumstance beyond their control.

I grew up in a refugee camp. Thirty years. This so-called human-rights world didn't ask me what was happening for me to be there 30 years.

I feel, in 2015, when we see human beings and children dying to cross the ocean, trying to find safety, something more must be done to help them because refugees are just like me and you.

When the war started, we became refugees, and it was a really tough time. I was six years old. These were really hard times. I remember them vividly, but it's not something you want to remember or think about.

When I was in Afghanistan in 2007, I went from village to village where refugees had returned, and they were living out in the open under tents, sometimes completely exposed to the environment. And they were homeless, which meant they would lose children in the winter to the cold and in the summers in the extreme heat. It's extremely humiliating for them to be homeless, culturally it's very shameful.

It is a dreadful thing to see the dead city. Next to the port I found children, women, the old, waiting for a way to leave. I entered the houses, there were houses where the coffee and pita bread were left on the table, and I could not avoid [thinking] that this, indeed, had been the picture in many Jewish towns [i.e., in Europe, during World War II].

Ours is an age in which thousands are driven daily from their homelands by the unforgiving brutalities of war, terrorism, political oppression, starvation, disease, economic piracy, and the relentless suffocation of that singular breath which makes human beings individuals.

While migration is inevitable, the fact remains that most people leave their homes to escape violence and the certain persecution that comes from it.

I'm a living testament to the value of immigration. I escaped a civil war, and I came to Canada as a refugee, and they gave my family protection. I did my best to pay that country back, and I think I did that.

One of my uncles was actually a sapper who cleared land mines for Anzacs, Australian soldiers, and we had to flee Vietnam. There were 40 of us on a 9-meter fishing boat. We were at sea for five days, a very perilous journey. We were attacked by pirates twice.

People are realizing if they jump across our border and they have a child with them they can raise their hand and claim asylum and they will be caught and released into the homeland.

As children my grandparents were refugees. Eventually they got to the U.S. - in 1950 or something. They grew up as refugees. Their earliest memories are of living in a home with their family. It's in my blood, I guess, to have a fear about encouraging fascism.

My father was born on Christmas Day in 1934. He grew up in what is now part of North Korea. When the Korean War began, my father was 16, and he found passage on an American refugee ship, thinking he'd be gone for just a few days, but he never saw his mother or his sister again.

When refugees are at a distance it's easy to be compassionate.

I love 'Exit West' by Mohsin Hamid. It's a magical realism retelling of the refugee experience, where people find these magical doors that transport them to another country.

My parents are Vietnamese refugees; they left Vietnam after the war. They were part of the boat people, and they ended up in a refugee camp in Thailand after being on the water for three days, and I was born at that refugee camp in Thailand.