Maria Semple Quotes

Quite suddenly Meggie felt fear rise in her like black brackish water, she felt lost, terribly lost, she felt it in every part of her. She didn't belong here! What had she done?

I'll always be a foreigner.

I never felt at home in London, because people were constantly telling me I didn't belong here, so after a while, you tend to believe that.

I would wake up in Moscow or somewhere else, my heart beating fast, feeling bitter and helpless.

I can't sleep in an isolated place without pills, earplugs, and both my children in bed with me for fear of scary, feral characters with a hankering for the wilderness.

There are moments in 'Body Snatchers' that touch the sort of thing that I find scary... like isolation and the inability to trust even familiar things. But - is that a horror movie - or a thriller? I don't really know the difference.

I can never be in the same place for too long. It feels like the world is caving in.

I've always craved to belong to somewhere, but I never have and never will.

I always had a weird thing with being the last person somewhere... like a movie theater or a classroom. I get a weird sense of anxiety.

Everywhere I go, I feel strange.

I don't want to detach. I don't want to go live in a gated community.

Lots of times you can feel as an exile in a country that you were born in.

I try so hard not to think that I am a stranger in a strange land. But I know that I stand out.

I belong nowhere and to no one.

I started my own class for people like me who can't find any place else to go.

I always feel like a foreigner in America.

I don't feel comfortable as an insider.

One girl used to call me Brownie and tell me to go back to my own country. At lunch, I'd get a bag of chips from the vending machine and eat it in the storage room so I wouldn't have to see her.

Part of me always felt like the other, the outsider, the observer. My father had two sons with his second wife, who I didn't meet until my late 20s. I was always on the periphery. In Madrid, I was the only Turk in a very international school, so I had to start thinking about identity. All these things affected me.

I've been quite lucky in that the roles that I've been able to play are all kind of outsiders. And, you know, I belong to so many places and belong to none of them at the same time, so there's this sense of displacement - I very much understand what it is to not fit in or belong somewhere.

Besides individual things like thunder and gunshots, what dogs fear most is not belonging, being alone.

Most of the time, I'm a little bewildered or sort of feel out of place.

The actual thought of not really having a home was, for me, very depressing, and it was something that I was dealing with for quite some time.

I feel like a crazy person all the time, and I feel like people are watching me, and I feel paranoid.

No matter where I go, I always feel unwanted eyes following me. It's a dirty world out there.