Luol Deng Quotes

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

I remember when we were in Egypt as refugees. It was tough, but there was always hope - hope that there's light at the end of the tunnel.

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.

You know, those of us who leave our homes in the morning and expect to find them there when we go back - it's hard for us to understand what the experience of a refugee might be like.

If anyone has to leave their homeland by boat, they all have difficult stories. But my parents had a difficult journey, and their story always seems like a movie to me.

I arrived in this country as a refugee child with my sister and my mother.

My parents left Germany in a very, very precarious way.

As a political exile, you always think you're going home next year.

For some reason, I have always been interested in the stories of people who are exiled and who are deprived of rights. My main motive to make a film is to keep the society in mind and the hospitality adhered.

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

My father left Nazi Germany a year after Dr. Kissinger, and so in my household he was very much an icon. He was a kind of immigrant success story, a refugee success story.

I was born in a tiny little enclave of terrified Jewish refugees, less than half a million of them, with no clear perspective of a future - hopes, yes, but no clear perspective.

I was the child of refugees.

My grandmother - my mother's mother - was a German Jewish refugee, an only child who came here from Berlin in 1936 at the age of 17.

My parents are Vietnamese refugees; they left Vietnam after the war. They were part of the boat people, and they ended up in a refugee camp in Thailand after being on the water for three days, and I was born at that refugee camp in Thailand.

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.

When we were in Egypt, we were refugees. My family and I were homeless. For five years, out of all of the countries in the world that my father was contacting, the only one that took us in was England.

When the war started, we became refugees, and it was a really tough time. I was six years old. These were really hard times. I remember them vividly, but it's not something you want to remember or think about.

My mother left Hungary as a refugee, and she is not nostalgic for the life that she had back in Hungary, and yet Cubans certainly want the economic opportunity in the United States, but they're desperately homesick for the culture that they left behind.

I am driven out of fatherlands and motherlands. Thus I now love only my children's land, yet undiscovered, in the farthest sea; for this I bid my sails search and search.

Every night when I go to bed I think, In the morning I will wake up in my own house and things will be back the way they were. It hasn’t happened this morning, either.

I brought Hassan’s son from Afghanistan to America, lifting him from the certainty of turmoil and dropping him in a turmoil of uncertainty

As children my grandparents were refugees. Eventually they got to the U.S. - in 1950 or something. They grew up as refugees. Their earliest memories are of living in a home with their family. It's in my blood, I guess, to have a fear about encouraging fascism.

In 1989, when I was just a baby, we moved to France because of some conflicts that were brewing in Armenia.

My father was born on Christmas Day in 1934. He grew up in what is now part of North Korea. When the Korean War began, my father was 16, and he found passage on an American refugee ship, thinking he'd be gone for just a few days, but he never saw his mother or his sister again.