Meg Rosoff Quotes

Southall Broadway, in west London, has been a constant part of my life from the day I arrived in England as a baby from Kenya in 1962. My parents rented a room in one of the terraces off the Broadway, and I've seen it change from an ordinary English high street to what is now 'Little India.' with a confident Asian community.

One does not live in a country for 34 years and find it easy to go.

I was born abroad, but my parents were both English. Still, those few years of separation, and then coming back to England as an outsider, did give me an ability to see the country in a slightly detached way. I suppose I was made aware of what Englishness actually is because I only became immersed in it later in life.

My father and mother emigrated to Canada in 1958, but there's nobody more English than an Englishman who no longer lives in England, and our home was a shrine to all things English.

I love New York, but I have to admit that I feel very English, and I do miss that sense of history that you have everywhere in Britain.

We can make the United States a 'Hispanic Quebec' without much effort. The key is to celebrate diversity rather than unity.

I myself have already spent a third of my life in Germany, first in Cologne and then, since 1994, in Berlin.

In general, I have felt more at home in the U.S. than I ever felt in England.

The historical problem of the United States is to admit that it is a multiracial and multi-ethnic nation.

America changed my life, but I still think of home and working in Scotland was an important part of that.

More often than not, we think of ourselves as black, white, Asian, or Hispanic pretty much in this country, but the real America is much more than that.

To come to England in the 1970s was to return to this strange other-world of half-known history. I found the imperial architecture curiously familiar: the post office, the town hall, the botanic gardens.

Whatever country you go to, you need to definitely follow the rules. So I believe it's very important for people, wherever they go, any immigrant should know or should try to learn something about the culture.

For the tidal wave of new immigrants Canada is more a land for the realization of private dreams than for maintaining a ... compact between founding races. No common identity was provided for the millions of new Canadian immigrants other than a week vision of mutual multi-cultural indifference.

This is nothing less than a national tragedy…. It is time to consider these refugees arriving from Poland and elsewhere purely on their merits as migrants and in an unsentimental light. In the last 50 years these people have swarmed all over Europe, coming principally from Armenia, Russia and the Balkans. We should remember that they are European neither by race, standards, nor culture. They are, in fact, an Eastern people. In 2000 years no one but Britain has been successfully able to absorb them, and for the most part they owe loyalty and allegiance to none.

Our nation has been called a melting pot. I think of it more as a mosaic, one to which many groups make their own distinct contributions.

Our country should be all Canadian and all British.

There is less and less of France abroad, and more that is foreign in France.

… mongrel nation

We are a British nation with British characteristics. Every country can take some small minorities and in many ways they add to the richness and variety of this country. The moment the minority threatens to become a big one, people get frightened

We used to have a view that to really be a good Australian, to love Australia, you almost had to cut your links with the country of origin. But I don’t think that was right and it never was right.

The fallacies of the Melting Pot theory have also become obvious. Years before the war [WWI] it had become increasingly apparent that the Melting Pot was no longer successfully performing its function; that the American population was losing its homogeneous character; that various nationalities of recent immigrants were forming more and more compact racial "blocs," each bloc tenaciously maintaining its own racial character, customs, and traditions.

European countries simply do not have the ideological framework the United States has in the shape of the 'American dream' that has helped to absorb successfully wave after wave of immigration to the States, including Muslim Americans who are well integrated into American society. There is no analogous French dream or German dream.

The British are much more cynical and regard the idea of a Globe reconstruction as an Elizabethan Disneyland. But the Americans have a real hunger for what they see as their history, their culture and their Shakespeare.

The longer I lived overseas, the more I appreciated being from South Africa.