Tim Pratt Quotes

All I ever want is to return to either Bangladesh, my motherland, or India, my adopted home.

We're a migrant nation made up of people who've been torn out of other worlds, and you'd think we would have some compassion.

Once you are an immigrant, you never forget that you are one.

Being a great believer in Scottish tradition, I followed the example of my fellow countrymen and moved to England.

We are not now a country of Africa but a country of Europe.

Most human experience has been that of statelessness.

In America, we all come from somewhere else, and we carry along some dream myth of home: a notion that something - our point of origin, our roots, the home country - is out there.

I've gotten used to being a foreigner.

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.

When you move a border, suddenly life changes violently. I write about nationality.

I came to America to make it my home, and I did.

America took me into her bosom when there was no longer a country worthy of the name, but in my heart I am German - German in my soul.

When I was in Paris, all of the German refugees began to flow in and it was a very sad time.

I feel most at home in the United States, not because it is intrinsically a more interesting country, but because no one really belongs there any more than I do. We are all there together in its wholly excellent vacuum.

During my youth, the idea of moving from Lebanon was unthinkable. Then I began to realise I might have to go, like my grandfather, uncles and others who left for America, Egypt, Australia, Cuba.

The Africans know I'm not an African. I'm an American.

I'm living in California but I have a place that is mine in Chile and I belong there. I am no longer an exile.

As someone who is displaced - I left London almost fifteen years ago to make Connecticut my home - I am drawn to stories about people who don't belong, whether physically or emotionally, and who find their families of choice in their friends.

I was born in Peru, and we moved to Scotland when I was 15, but I've not lived here for a long time. But I would always say that I am Scottish, and Scotland is as close to a home as I have.

The question about my Canadianness comes up a lot, and I'm never quite sure what to say about it. I've carved a life out for myself in Oregon, and it feels like home, not because it's the States but because that's where my friends are and where my son is.

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.

The United States is lucky: It has only two neighboring countries and oceans on both sides. We have over a dozen neighboring countries and we have a long and complicated history with them.

One of my clearest impressions about India as a child was that my parents' stories would have been impossible had they stayed. Of course, such a vision was self-serving, for it made a virtue of our displacement.

I didn't choose to come to the United States, but being raised here has shaped exactly who I am today, and I can't imagine that being taken away from me.

I don't have a place anywhere but Australia; I just don't spend much time there.