Seanan McGuire Quotes

I remember my first day at grammar school, being the only person who was me. Everybody else was like everybody else, and there I was, tanned, in a freezing cold playground in the middle of Middlesbrough, wondering what on earth I was doing there.

I'm Egyptian, and my parents stupidly decided to move us down to South Carolina when I was five, which was pretty brutal.

If you're Australian, you feel it in your bones because you're at odds with everybody else, except other Australians, in the sense that people always seem to be behaving strangely. People always seem to be behaving the wrong way, in a different way. You say things and there are silences.

I couldn't settle in Italy - it was like living in a foreign country.

You can feel as brave as Columbus starting for the unknown the first time you enter a Chinese lane full of boys laughing at you, or when you risk climbing down in a Tibetan pub for a meal of rotten meat.

I remember being this little girl missing her daddy and living so far away in France and from anything that was familiar to me. I felt so different and so isolated. When you're removed from everything that's familiar, you realize who you are.

I can't see America any other way than with a European's eyes. It fascinates me and terrifies me at the same time.

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.

It has been stressful to be a French resident in America.

I remember that coming to America was scary for me because everything here is just bigger, better, shinier, you know?

I only saw one English-speaking person all the way across Siberia.

We are all naturally xenophobic.

When I came to America in 1978, I was a huge sports fan - the problem was, my sport was cricket. Shockingly enough, no one wanted to talk cricket with me!

National isolation breeds national neurosis.

Of all the bewildering things about a new country, the absence of human landmarks is one of the most depressing and disheartening.

Hemingway has expressed with genius the terrors of the modern man at the danger of losing control of his world

The loneliest ebb of my life came on that Christmas eve, only one day after my arrival in New York. The abyss of loneliness. I ate a solitary dinner in a small cafe, and the very food tasted bitter with my unshed tears. One doesn't dare cry in America. It is unmanly here.

People don't know what it's like being the foreigner until they are one.

I was very affected as a foreigner coming from Copenhagen, which is the safest, most liberal town in the entire galaxy. I was like an alien stranded in a strange land for the first time in the U.S.

In certain cultures, they'll eat an eyeball. I'm never gonna be that guy.

I have nothing to do with Russia. Haven't made a phone call to Russia in years. Don't speak to people from Russia. Not that I wouldn't. I just have nobody to speak to.

It's definitely different in the States. Americans are much different people compared to us. We're much more laid back. I itch to get back to Australia every summer because it's so fast paced there and so stressful.

I didn't know the English were good at swimming. I have been in this country for 12 years and I haven't seen a swimming pool.

The less sophisticated of my forbears avoided foreigners at all costs, for the very good reason that, in their circles, speaking in tongues was commonly a prelude to snake handling. The more tolerant among us regarded foreign languages as a kind of speech impediment that could be overcome by willpower.

I´m a stranger in a strange land.