Chris Abani Quotes

I feel like a visitor just about everywhere.

There was no time when I lived anywhere longer than two years. I was always a social outcast. Maybe I didn't care what people thought because I was like, 'Well, I probably won't stick around here for too long.'

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

Everywhere is nowhere. When a person spends all his time in foreign travel, he ends by having many acquaintances, but no friends.

It is about this very abstract sense of displacement that he feels the moment he turns off the television.

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.

Exile is not a time frame. Exile is an experience. It's a sentiment.

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

Exile is more than a geographical concept. You can be an exile in your homeland, in your own house, in a room.

I stand before you as a writer without any ground of being out of which to write: really blown about from country to country, culture to culture till I feel - till I am - nothing. As it happens, I like it that way.

The hardest thing about being at Sony was not the travel; it was being divorced from the public and private life I had in New York. Travelling as much as I did, while I didn't lose connection with my friends, I lost a sense of belonging.

Many writers today are wanderers. There is not only an unhousedness in language - how to convey, to say nothing of converge - but an unhousedness of place.

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

In Mumbai, I feel like a stranger.

Here in Canada, I haven't people, I haven't family, I haven't friends. So I'm not happy here.

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.

I moved schools seven or eight times, but I never thought of it as a problem. I didn't become attached to people.

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

Americans love to pick up, move on, start over. But instead of being somebody fresh and new, they become somebody lonely and lost, or, far too often these days, they become nobody at all, a machine for satisfying hunger, without loyalty or honor or duty.

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.

If you can't go home, there is nowhere to go, and nowhere is the biggest place in the world-indeed, nowhere is the world.

In a sense, I feel a lot more an outsider in Los Angeles than I did in Newfoundland.

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

There is a huge sense of loneliness as people leave villages and move to cities. It's hard to find that human connection as you move away from where you started.

When I was growing up, I never felt that I belonged anywhere because we never lived in a house for more than three months. That's all I knew, and that's why I don't really belong anywhere.