Rita Ora Quotes

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.

I was born in Iran, left at a very young age - less than a year old - and grew up and was educated in the West.

I left Cameroon when I was 13 years old, and I've lived more in Europe than Africa.

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.

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

The history of Buenos Aires is written in its telephone directory. Pompey Romanov, Emilio Rommel, Crespina D. Z. de Rose, Ladislao Radziwil, and Elizabeta Marta Callman de Rothschild - five names taken at random from among the R's - told a story of exile, desolation, disillusion, and anxiety behind lace curtains.

My parents and my brother and I left the Soviet Union in 1981. I was six, and Dima was sixteen, and that made all the difference. I became an American, whereas Dima remained essentially Russian.

I refused to learn English for two years when we moved to London, hoping to send my family back home. It was tough, but at the same time, it has given me a sense of displacement that actually really suits the life that I'm living now.

I never considered myself as somebody in exile because, different to my father who, yes, was in exile because he left Haiti as an adult, for me it was just to be somewhere else. I carried Haiti with me everywhere, but I also carried, you know, my youth in a public school in Brooklyn. It's part of who I am as well.

In 1979, when I was toddler, the Russians invaded Afghanistan, and my whole family fled to Vienna, Virginia. Far from home, my parents were determined to raise my two sisters and me according to Afghan traditions.

Migration is the story of my life: my parents and grandparents journeyed across four continents to flee war and find jobs, eventually finding their way to the U.S.

My family history, like that of many Polish, German and Jewish families from Central Europe in the 20th century, is complex.

Emigration, forced or chosen, across national frontiers or from village to metropolis, is the quintessential experience of our time.

My father is from Newark in Nottinghamshire and my mother is from the very north of Ireland. They've ended up in Scotland, where my father - well, both of them - will always be seen as having come from somewhere else.

In 1975, I left the burning city of Beirut for the quiet insanity of England. To say that short, frail and wispy 15-year-old me didn't fit in would be such an understatement as to be a joke.

I have been a foreigner all my life, first as a daughter of diplomats, then as a political refugee and now as an immigrant in the U.S. I have had to leave everything behind and start anew several times, and I have lost most of my extended family.

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.

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

I became more interested in the idea of being an immigrant and particularly of being in a country you're not familiar with. And so I began reading migrants' stories. The fact that my father is Chinese - he emigrated from Malaysia when he was about 20 - may have had some bearing on my attraction to the subject.

I hear from non-Afghan immigrants - Africans, Indians, Pakistanis, Arabs in France - all the time. These people have had to redefine their lives, which is what my family went through when we came to the U.S. in 1980.

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.

A cultural thing that is funny to me is that every time I go out in D.C. after a show, all the nightclubs and restaurants are owned by Iranians and Afghans. It's funny to me how we lost our countries but we gained the nightlife.

I've basically grown up in America. Even if Iran were to change, I wouldn't see myself moving there. That feeling exists for my mother and people of her generation. They say, 'Hopefully, one day.'

From the beginnings of literature, poets and writers have based their narratives on crossing borders, on wandering, on exile, on encounters beyond the familiar. The stranger is an archetype in epic poetry, in novels. The tension between alienation and assimilation has always been a basic theme.