Isabel Allende Quotes

I've inherited a sense of that loss from my parents because it was so palpable all the time while I was growing up, the sense of what my parents had sacrificed in moving to the United States, and yet at the same time, building a life here and all that that entailed.

Because of the Lebanese civil war, I had a scattered childhood. I had to build my own connections to each country we moved to.

I have lived in the United States for half of my life, my entire adult life.

I don't believe I could live in Iran again. A tree, once uprooted from the earth, is very difficult to plant again.

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 don't really remember much about Kosovo. I only remember growing up in London, where my parents had to basically start from scratch.

Immigration has defined my entire life. My parents left Mozambique with nothing but their wits in search of a better life for their kids. They moved to England in the 1970s, saw the classism there, and left for America soon after.

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'm an immigrant. I came here when I was 3 months old.

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

The fact of leaving one's country, one's family, one's roots, can be painful. My father had already found his place, but for us, for my mother, it was very difficult to get our bearings.

I was born in Iran, my parents are Armenian. We fled from Iran to the Netherlands when I was eight years old. We had a lot of family and friends in Iran, so it was hard to leave, especially for my parents. But we managed to settle well in the Netherlands, after a year in refugee camps. But I understood it was a process.

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.

I know what it's like when you are a refugee, living on the mercy of others and having to adjust.

I don't know what 'home' or 'abroad' is any more.

I wrote a techno song after I was deported. I was in America for a little bit, but then I was deported back to Germany. I was very sad.

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.

Maybe I am not French, maybe I am from nowhere.

Exile is like death. You cannot understand it until it happens to you.

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

Once a refugee, always a refugee. I can't ever remember not being all right wherever I was, but you don't give your whole allegiance to a place or want to be entirely identified with the society you're living in.

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.

Ours is the century of enforced travel of disappearances. The century of people helplessly seeing others, who were close to them, disappear over the horizon.

Every member of my family was displaced by Katrina.

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.