Frances Mayes Quotes

I think living in a new country gives you a certain bravery that you don't have when you live in your own country - because of the freedom it gives you.

I love playing in America. I feel having been there a few times that I "get" America a lot more than I used to. It used to be so strange to me. It takes years to learn how to separate the actual, major, important differences from the superficial differences that aren't essential or crucial.

Everyone who's in America spends the first few years not experiencing it. The person is frightened by the newness of the place and doesn't see things. Her emotional universe becomes the entire universe. And then when she thinks of home, her distance in space can seem like a distance in time.

When I went to Australia, I had this feeling, like, 'Wow, this is really a different country.' I think that feeling of genuine foreignness, that this is a very different culture, which is increasingly rare in our globalised world.

Everything has changed since I came to China.

I was very surprised when I first started spending time in America. The culture shock was something I wasn't prepared for. I had a lot of work to do to try to begin to understand this enormous and complex country that I thought would be an easy process.

When you're a foreigner, at the beginning you are far away from the culture. Then, little by little, you start to interact with people, have friends, have a life, and then you feel more comfortable.

You can live in the same city your entire life and still be completely a foreigner when you step out, in your old age, onto the street.

The best reason for exposing oneself to foreign ways is to generate a sense of vitality and awareness - an interest in life which can come only when one lives through the shock of contrast and difference.

Travelers find virtue in a seeming minority in all other countries, and forget that they have left it in a minority at home.

Those who visit foreign nations, but who associate only with their own countrymen, change their climate, but not their customs 'caelum non animum mutant': they see new meridians, but the same men, and with heads as empty as their pockets.

The important thing about travel in foreign lands is that it breaks the speech habits and makes you blab less, and breaks the habitual space-feeling because of different village plans and different landscapes. It is less important that there are different mores, for you counteract these with your own reaction-formations.

I lived in England to learn English. When I went to England for the first time, it was like being on the Moon. I had no friends, I couldn't speak the language. I was very isolated.

It is an agreeable and yet a painful sense of novelty to stand for the first time in the midst of a people whose language and manners are different from one's own.

It was nice to be in my own country, where I didn't need a translator or a driver. Where I didn't need to figure out cultural references or what hijab I needed to wear to cover my hair.

Wherever we go, across the Pacific or Atlantic, we meet, not similarity so much as 'the bizarre'. Things astonish us, when we travel, that surprise nobody else.

We moved to Australia for two years though and that was a little bit tough trying to fit in.

Foreigners are not like the people I am used to here.

As an immigrant, I learned by watching other people.

It's been a bit of a struggle getting used to life in the States, adapting to a new lifestyle.

I'm always a big advocate for adapting to your new team, your new country and your new team-mates.

The first season in a new country like England is very difficult.

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

It is not easy to arrive in a different country and adapt quickly, but I think I'm getting there, and I'm proud of that.

I've gotten used to being a foreigner.