Jacques Derrida Quotes

I worry these days that Latinos in California speak neither Spanish nor English very well. They are in a kind of linguistic limbo between the two. They don't really have a language, and are, in some deep sense, homeless.

This happens to a lot of kids from different backgrounds - they lose a lot of their parents' and grandparents' teachings, language and culture because they have to deal with another language and culture 24/7. By the time I was 44, I was terrible at Spanish. I was always intimidated whenever I had to speak it.

From one till seven, when we moved to England, I spoke only Portuguese. But I can't speak a word of it now.

When you live in a country where your own language is considered foreign, you can feel a continuous sense of estrangement. You speak a secret, unknown language, lacking any correspondence to the environment. An absence that creates a distance within you.

I cannot speak your england.

Because I cannot write my native language and have no native home anymore, and am amazed by that horrible homelessness of all French-Canadian s abroad in America.

No one in this country has any root anywhere; we don't live in America, we board here, we are like spiders that run over the surface of the water.

We've been speaking English as a second language so long that we've forgotten it as our first.

My private tragedy, which cannot, and indeed should not, be anybody's concern, is that I had to abandon my natural idiom, my untrammeled, rich, and infinitely docile Russian tongue for a second-rate brand of English, devoid of any of those apparatuses–the baffling mirror, the black velvet backdrop, the implied associations and traditions–which the native illusionist, frac-tails flying, can magically use to transcend the heritage in his own way.

It's fascinating when you're from another place, but you don't speak the language.

I not only lived physically away from my native land, but the values and critical judgments of those closest to me became stranger and stranger.

My language is what I use, and if I lost that, I wouldn't be able to say anything.

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

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.

I don't know if I'm truly at home in any language.

I look at myself, and I see a Spanish person who's trying to be understood by an English-speaking audience and is putting a lot of energy into that, instead of into expressing himself freely and feeling comfortable.

I'd always somehow felt slightly as if I'd been born in the wrong country.

I no longer knew what it was like to feel Australian.

We are Martians who have come to earth to change everything—and we are afraid we will not be so well received. So we try to keep it a secret, try to appear as Americans…But that we could not do because of our accent. So we settled in a country nobody ever has heard about and now we are claiming to be Hungarians.

Unlike Conrad or Nabokov, I didn't have circumstances which would have coerced me out of my native tongue altogether.

Dejardins was so stunned, he momentarily forgot how to speak English. "Ce n'est pas possible. On ne pourrait pas-

When a person has an accent, it means he can speak one more language than you

I may speak many languages, but there remains one in which I live.

I'm a little bit older, I've traveled the world, spent lots of time in New York and Paris and lots of inspiring places, and I still feel alien.

People who think of themselves as exiles, I find, can never really put their lives together, really.