Isabelle Huppert Quotes

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

When I first moved from Shanghai when I was five, I just thought of myself as Chinese.

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

Those who go overseas find a change of climate, not a change of soul.

Splendid to arrive alone in a foreign country and feel the assault of difference. Here they are all along, busy with living; they don't talk or look like me. The rhythm of their day is entirely different; I am foreign.

I'm one of the millions of immigrant children, children of loneliness, wandering between worlds that are at once too old and too new to live in.

I think people look at me and realize that I am definitely not in line to the throne. It feels very easy living in Great Britain. The world is a much smaller place than it used to be, it doesn't feel like a huge cultural difference living here.

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.

I am like the fish in the aquarium, thinking in a different language, adapting to a life that’s not my natural habitat. I am the people in the other cars, each with his or her own story, but passing too quickly to be noticed or understood.

There never has been a culture since this world began in which a New Testament Christian could feel at home.

Our society offers little in the way of reeducation for those who have been torn away from their traditional culture and suddenly exposed to all the blandishments of mass culture-even the churches which follow the hillbillies to the city often make use of the same "hard sell" that the advertisers and politicians do.

It's frustrating when you come over here [Hollywood], especially from a position that I was in, in Sweden, where most people know who you are, but then you come here.

People came to America and they did not abandon their own cultures, but they assumed new ones, a new one, an American culture rooted in liberty and freedom that they had never enjoyed in their lives prior. They didn't have to sacrifice who they were. They didn't have to change or give it up, but they were eager to become Americans.

Being in a foreign country means walking a tightrope high above the ground without the net afforded a person by the country where he has his family, colleagues, and friends, and where he can easily say what he has to say in a language he has known from childhood.

I was in Las Vegas when the Nogueira brothers first touched down in America. There was a bus, this is a true story. There was a bus that pulled up to a red light, and Little Nog tried to feed it a carrot, while Big Nog was petting it. He thought it was a horse. This really happened. He tried to feed a bus a carrot, and now you're telling me this country has computers? I didn't know that.

I'm a refugee from the past, and like other refugees I go over the customs and habits of being I've left or been forced to leave behind me, and it all seems just as quaint, from here, and I am just as obsessive about it.

I took movement classes that I wore my double-breasted suits to. I worked on my elocution because people spoke differently then. I was really trying to toe the line. I think that if I had spoken exactly the way that people spoke back then, it probably would have alienated people.

I must admit I suffered a bit when I first came to England. But then I realised that there was nothing to be intimidated by, everybody had two legs.

No one can estimate the power of authority among poor and uneducated people in a world whose problems confuse even the wisest.

I'm opposed to wearing headscarves in public places. That's not France. There's something I just don't understand: the people who come to France, why would they want to change France, to live in France the same way they lived back home?

The same image that I have of all the countries where I am supposed to go: it's far, it's different, it will be necessarily complicated ... It's another part of the world for me coming [from] the United States.

The oppressors develop a series of methods precluding any presentation of the world as a problem and showing it rather as a fixed entity, as something given--something to which people, as mere spectators, must adapt.

While learning the language in France a young man's morals, health and fortune are more irresistibly endangered than in any country of the universe.

Not acknowledging that beauty is complex-that's the problem. I enjoy making it complex for people, because that's my world.

I feel displaced when I'm back in America, like a visitor. I feel like if I don't get a cup of tea I'm going to lose my mind.