Michelle Rodriguez Quotes

I remember my first day at grammar school, being the only person who was me. Everybody else was like everybody else, and there I was, tanned, in a freezing cold playground in the middle of Middlesbrough, wondering what on earth I was doing there.

I'm an immigrant, and I think being an outsider in your home is something that I really relate to.

The ideal place for me is the one in which it is most natural to live as a foreigner.

I went to 13 schools in 12 years. We moved all over the place. Music was the only thing that I could get behind... I wasn't that good at socializing. I'm still not.

In 1975, I left the burning city of Beirut for the quiet insanity of England. To say that short, frail and wispy 15-year-old me didn't fit in would be such an understatement as to be a joke.

I still have an accent. But when I return to Prague, I speak the language yet do not know what they are talking about.

I don't have any friends from my childhood because I didn't stay at one school for very long.

I was a supporting character in other people's lives, which seemed right and familiar to me. I was also an outsider: English in the U.S., American in England, dogged yet comforted by that familiar feeling of alien-ness, which occupied that space where my sense of self should have been.

Yeah, my dad was in the foreign service. We lived in India, Indonesia and Africa, and we traveled a lot from those places. I was 10 when we moved back, and I felt like the odd guy out. It wasn't until later that I appreciated it. But coming back I didn't know any TV shows or music, which was even worse.

I was always in new schools and had British parents, which was not the norm, and I think there was also... I'm not particularly religious, but I was born Jewish, and I always felt like the outsider because I wasn't Christian or Catholic.

I was born on the island of Singapore, and I grew up there until I was 11 years old, when I was forcibly removed by my dad and planted into suburban Houston. I was in shock for the first year and then began to really love it - but didn't love it quite enough to stay.

It's not a lighthearted decision to change your language, your country, your citizenship, and come to a world where you don't know anybody, to leave a place where you've had opportunities to build friendships from childhood. That's quite a big decision to make.

I always was a weird child. My mother told me the story that, in kindergarten, I would come home and tell her about this weird kid in my class who drew only with black crayons and didn't speak to other kids. I talked about it so much that my mother brought it up with the teacher, who said, 'What? That's your son.'

When I moved to Atlanta, I felt like an outsider - away from my friends and family except for the LGBTQ community.

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

When I came to Mumbai from Indore, I knew nobody.

I've gotten used to being a foreigner.

In my first few years of being in New York, I had a major identity crisis because I'd never stayed in one place for so long.

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.

It was such a culture shock for me, being plucked from this diverse neighborhood in London into Jamaica Queens. I'm in this new environment, and I had an English accent.

My dad looked like Errol Flynn, and I think my mom thought she was moving into a hacienda, but they lived on a dirt street in Tijuana, a house jammed with relatives, nobody speaking English. She didn't know a word of Spanish. She grew up well and was appalled and humiliated, terrified of anyone ethnic.

Everybody feels like an outsider at some point in their lives.

I left Jamaica to come to England, but one place became another place. I lived in Tulse Hill, in Brixton and Coldharbour Lane.

I've felt like an outcast most of my life, being in multiple high schools and being a military child.

So I went to New York City to be born again. It was and remains easy for most Americans to go somewhere else and start anew. I wasn't like my parents. I didn't have any supposedly sacred piece of land or shoals of friends to leave behind. Nowhere has the number zero been of more philisophical value than in the United States.... and when the [train] plunged into a tunnel under New York City, with it's lining of pipes and wires, I was out of the womb and into the birth canal.