Alvin Toffler Quotes

I'll always be a foreigner.

I'm interested in people who find themselves in places, either of their choosing or not, and who are forced to decide how best to live there. That feeling of both citizenship and exile, of always being an expatriate - with all the attendant problems and complications and delight.

Maybe I am not French, maybe I am from nowhere.

Growing up outside your own country makes you feel that you don't belong when you return, so you feel free to make friends with whomever you like.

I have my husband and children near me in Rome, and I feel this is where we are temporarily belonging. But personally, all my life, I have felt the absence of a sense of history.

I love being a foreigner.

I refused to learn English for two years when we moved to London, hoping to send my family back home. It was tough, but at the same time, it has given me a sense of displacement that actually really suits the life that I'm living now.

I've gotten used to being a foreigner.

Although I hold a German passport, I feel very much alienated when I'm there.

I can't imagine life without Poland. I find it very hard to find a place for myself in the West.

People say to me all the time, 'When did you know that you had fully become an American?' And I say, 'The day I realized I loved peanut butter.'

Part of me always felt like the other, the outsider, the observer. My father had two sons with his second wife, who I didn't meet until my late 20s. I was always on the periphery. In Madrid, I was the only Turk in a very international school, so I had to start thinking about identity. All these things affected me.

They've lived here now for more than half of their lives, and they raised a family here and now have grandchildren here... It has become their home, but at the same time, for my parents, I don't think either of them will ever consciously think, 'I am an American.'

I was born in America. I don't agree with 99.9 percent of the things America does around the world or at home, but I have no other home.

I used to feel I was more French than anything, but I don't feel that way anymore. I really don't feel like I belong to a specific country, and it is so difficult for people to understand that.

I was raised in Brussels as a Belgian but, at the same time, feeling that I wasn't necessarily from here.

I am comfortable combining the old and the new.

I left Cameroon when I was 13 years old, and I've lived more in Europe than Africa.

Every time someone asks me where I'm from, I'm not sure how to answer that question... so I say I have no roots.

During my childhood in Cyprus, the British talked about the Cypriots as if the Cypriots were outsiders in their own country. And even though I was born in Cyprus, my parents were American, and so I was an outsider in the land of my birth.

I see myself as a transient, not an immigrant.

I'm sort of half-Chilean at this point anyway, half-Argentine. This is where I have been living and working for a long time now.

It's good to be progressive, but don't shun the good things about tradition.

My family settled in Cairo in 1980. I was nine. I missed Libya terribly, but I also took to Cairo. I perfected the accent. People assumed I was Egyptian.

Definitely that was a big part of my childhood: wanting to fit. As an immigrant, you talk funny, you look funny, you smell funny. I wanted to do nothing but fit in and talk English and sit with everybody else.