Ann Patchett Quotes

You tend to be afraid when someone seems foreign to you. But if you aren't careful, that can lead to bigotry.

We are all naturally xenophobic.

Hate and mistrust are the children of blindness.

I remember I was in a San Francisco nightclub, and I started talking to some girl, and it was like, 'Hey, what's going on, what's your name?' You know, 'Where are you from?' I go, 'I'm from Iran.' And literally, she just looked at me and walked away.

I had a funny last name, and I didn't look like everybody else, and I got faced with a lot of racism.

As human beings, we always have resistance against things that are different and there's always suspicion.

People are always going to, you know, find something wrong with people who are not the exact same as them. That's just what it is. Black, white, short, tall, religions, whatever. People are bad.

Since these early days, I have seen and have experienced many types of discrimination and all of them were rooted in the fear of people that were different than the majority.

We misjudge anybody who's different from us and the Jews diverge from our type, ethnically and religiously. That's their chief offense, but there are particular causes.

There are irrational fears. If you see a woman wearing a hijab and fear is your first thought, something's really wrong.

I'm Italian. I wouldn't know how to play a Jew.

I think there's a fear of difference in American cinema.

Yesterday's news feeds our fear that our neighbours are more likely than not to be bad eggs: benefit fraudsters, bogus asylum seekers, paedophiles or jihadist terrorists.

Islam is not a race, yet Islamophobia partakes of racist characteristics.

I am certainly not racist; I even like the British.

I remember people saying: 'You look funny, your hair is so black, you have a flat nose,' but I didn't think of it being racism, and I still don't. But there was a sense of difference, of being an outsider.

If my accent betrayed my foreign birth, it also stamped me as an enemy, in the imagination of the producers.

Islamophobia is a complex phenomenon.

We are never racist against somebody who is very far away. I don't know any racism against the Eskimos. To have a racist feeling, there must be an other who is slightly different from us - but is living close to us.

With most people, strangers are not only enemies, but inferiors.

Being offended is the natural consequence of leaving one’s home. I do not like after- shave lotion, adults who roller-skate, children who speak French, or anyone who is unduly tan. I do not, however, go around enacting legislation …

The tools of conquest do not necessarily come with bombs and explosives and fallout. There are weapons that are simply thoughts, attitudes, prejudices, to be found only in the minds of men. For the record, prejudices can kill, and suspicion can destroy. And a thoughtless, frightened search for a scapegoat has a fallout all of its own

The more I see of Arabs the less I think of them. By having studied them a good deal I have found out the trouble. They are the mixture of all the bad races on earth, and they get worse from west to east, because the eastern ones have had more crosses.

Should we distrust the man because his manners are not our manners, and that his skin is dark?

You do not trust white people. You have said that. You don't trust Jews. You have said that. You don't trust journalists. You have said that. Well, here I am.