Chrissie Hynde Quotes

People don't know what it's like being the foreigner until they are one.

I'm a refugee from the past, and like other refugees I go over the customs and habits of being I've left or been forced to leave behind me, and it all seems just as quaint, from here, and I am just as obsessive about it.

Being uprooted from your own culture, provided you take with you the way of thinking and being that characterises the more integrated social culture from which you come, is not as disruptive to happiness and well-being as becoming part of a relatively fragmented culture.

I always think like I was born in the country where everybody ate apples. Then I ended up in the country where everybody eats bananas. So now, I eat bananas so long, I'm just remembering the apples.

If you take my own life, the longer you stay in a country, you almost lose your former self and become this third-party person who is caught in between two worlds.

Our society offers little in the way of reeducation for those who have been torn away from their traditional culture and suddenly exposed to all the blandishments of mass culture-even the churches which follow the hillbillies to the city often make use of the same "hard sell" that the advertisers and politicians do.

I never did very well as an immigrant. I've lived in several countries and been a disaster everywhere.

Everyone who's in America spends the first few years not experiencing it. The person is frightened by the newness of the place and doesn't see things. Her emotional universe becomes the entire universe. And then when she thinks of home, her distance in space can seem like a distance in time.

To pretend you don't feel a certain strangeness after living in England for 40 years is a fallacy.

I was born in London, and my family is here. America is an interesting place, but it's incredibly different culturally. It doesn't take long being there before I want to get back.

Being an expatriate doesn't go down well in America.

I think that foreignness is always with you. Indeed, I find California more foreign to me the longer I live here. In thirty years of living here on and off, it hasn't lost anything of foreignness. If anything, it has gained.

And yet, over the years I've met so many people like Jared who seem to be more at home, happier, living in a country on of their birth. ... Not political refugees, escaping a repressing regime, nor economic refugees, crossing a border in search of a better-paying job. The are hedonic refugees, moving to a new land, a new culture, because they are happier there. Usually hedonic refugees have an ephiphany, a moment of great clarity when they realize, beyond a doubt, that they were born in the wrong country.

I'm one of the millions of immigrant children, children of loneliness, wandering between worlds that are at once too old and too new to live in.

I lived in England for a long time, and even the English didn't think me as one of theirs. In America I'm not really accepted. In New Zealand now, I don't think they even think of me as a New Zealander.

I think immigrants, when they're stressed, think that there's something wrong with America, when it's really just difficult to leave a country and all that you know.

A German immersed in any civilization different from his own loses a weight equivalent in volume to the amount of intelligence he displaces.

The first 10 years of my life, I lived as 'Matangi.' When I came to England in '86, my first week of school was terrible because I would put my hand up to answer things, and no one would choose me because they couldn't say my name. My auntie came from Europe to visit us, and she was like, 'Just call yourself something else.'

I was six when we came to this country. When I was 14 or so, I still had a lot of trouble with it.

I was going to be living there and I didn't want to sound like a foreigner all my life.

I love having different cultures around, but when the parent culture kind of dissipates, you're left thinking, 'Well, what's going on?'

In this case it appealed to me partly because it felt close to me in some ways. This is about a confused, bewildered middle class Englishman adrift in smalltown America and that has definitely been me.

I know a lot of Americans in Paris who have married Frenchmen. They keep bringing up their experience, the clash of civilizations, the clash of personalities.

I probably felt most out of place as a young kid growing up in Sri Lanka. My mental world was somewhere else, partly because of reading and daydreaming.

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