Lulu Wang Quotes

I first visited the Philippines when I was 29. I thought I would feel at home there, but I felt more out of place than I did in the U.S. I discovered I was more American than Filipino. It was shattering because I never felt quite at home in the U.S., either.

I've always felt like a foreigner wherever I've lived. I don't feel much towards my Italian or Scottish roots, although I do cook the pasta at home.

I always feel like a foreigner in America.

Although I hold a German passport, I feel very much alienated when I'm there.

During my childhood in Cyprus, the British talked about the Cypriots as if the Cypriots were outsiders in their own country. And even though I was born in Cyprus, my parents were American, and so I was an outsider in the land of my birth.

I'm an immigrant, and I think being an outsider in your home is something that I really relate to.

I'm stuck somewhere a small island in the middle of the Atlantic where I'm alone. Because in France, they're like, 'No, you're not like us, you're not a French guy.' And in America, they're like, 'You're not like us.' I'm really alone in my little thing.

I've always been an outsider. Even in London. If I returned to Scotland, I'd feel a complete foreigner.

I still have an accent. But when I return to Prague, I speak the language yet do not know what they are talking about.

I'd always somehow felt slightly as if I'd been born in the wrong country.

Lacey didn't like it, even though he was born here, I understand. I mean, he was born in Brooklyn. He told the staff that they better prepare themselves to say goodbye to some of their friends.

The fact that I am a writer comes from the experience of being cut away from my roots and living in Venezuela, where I couldn't find a place for myself, for years and years.

When you live in a country where your own language is considered foreign, you can feel a continuous sense of estrangement. You speak a secret, unknown language, lacking any correspondence to the environment. An absence that creates a distance within you.

Because I cannot write my native language and have no native home anymore, and am amazed by that horrible homelessness of all French-Canadian s abroad in America.

Every immigrant family, it seems, has someone who does not belong in the new country they have come to. It feels like permanent exile to that one brother or wife who cannot stand a silent fate in Boston or London or Melbourne. I’ve met many who remain haunted by the persistent ghost of an earlier place.

When you come back to a country that you've left, you're in a very peculiar situation because, in a way, you don't belong to that country any more, even though when I'm in America I feel I don't belong there either.

I woke up one day and realized I could never be an American.

I'll always be a foreigner.

Bearing an eternal longing for Jewishness, I threw myself in all directions and left to work for another people. I am not one of those lucky ones raised in their own environment, whose work is normal.

I'm interested in people who find themselves in places, either of their choosing or not, and who are forced to decide how best to live there. That feeling of both citizenship and exile, of always being an expatriate - with all the attendant problems and complications and delight.

New York is, of course, many cities, and an exile does not return to the one he left.

I've spent my whole life in Chicago being asked where am I from, so that I have a sense of displacement that also is very psychologically disorienting.

New York - that unnatural city where every one is an exile, none more so than the American.

I not only lived physically away from my native land, but the values and critical judgments of those closest to me became stranger and stranger.

I don't feel alienated from American culture, but I understand people who do.