Ruth Prawer Jhabvala Quotes

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.

A man who lives everywhere lives nowhere.

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

I am realising this now more as I grow up: that I never really felt connected to locations. In some sense, I always kind of felt a little lost in that I never had any hometown pride. While I experience a lot different places and experiences, I always felt a little detached.

Sometimes I feel very alone. I am a bit of a nomad. Many people in sort of emerging countries, emerging economies, find themselves displaced. So there is that sense, and so I'm part of a whole, I think, group of displaced people.

I'm stuck somewhere a small island in the middle of the Atlantic where I'm alone. Because in France, they're like, 'No, you're not like us, you're not a French guy.' And in America, they're like, 'You're not like us.' I'm really alone in my little thing.

I come from no country, from no city, no tribe. I am the son of the road... all tongues and all prayers belong to me. But I belong to none of them.

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

In England I am not English, in India I am not Indian. I am chained to the 1,000 square miles that is Trinidad; but I will evade that fate yet.

I was a supporting character in other people's lives, which seemed right and familiar to me. I was also an outsider: English in the U.S., American in England, dogged yet comforted by that familiar feeling of alien-ness, which occupied that space where my sense of self should have been.

In New York City, everyone is an exile, none more so than the Americans.

Sometimes I wonder where I am from. I am either way ahead or I come from another world. I don't recognise this world.

I'm a misplaced American, but don't know where I was misplaced.

I liked the idea of being from 'somewhere else.' I do think that's inherited. My father never had a fixed sense of where home was, and for my sister and me, it is much easier not to belong than to belong.

I don't feel that I belong anywhere. Or rather, if there's a place I belong, I don't feel I'm there.

Growing up, I never really felt like anything was my own. I moved a lot, and I never belonged anywhere.

We moved around a lot when I was younger. I never really felt at home until we moved to Canada, but even then, I always felt strangely out of place and alien.

And there are new kinds of nomads, not people who are at home everywhere, but who are at home nowhere. I was one of them

I feel completely detached from any country, any group. I am a metaphysically displaced person

When you come back to a country that you've left, you're in a very peculiar situation because, in a way, you don't belong to that country any more, even though when I'm in America I feel I don't belong there either.

Bearing an eternal longing for Jewishness, I threw myself in all directions and left to work for another people. I am not one of those lucky ones raised in their own environment, whose work is normal.

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

I've spent my whole life in Chicago being asked where am I from, so that I have a sense of displacement that also is very psychologically disorienting.

New York - that unnatural city where every one is an exile, none more so than the American.

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.