Brandon Stanton Quotes

I left Cambodia when I was 12 or 13. I didn't really escape, but I needed to go away.

I have been a foreigner all my life, first as a daughter of diplomats, then as a political refugee and now as an immigrant in the U.S. I have had to leave everything behind and start anew several times, and I have lost most of my extended family.

My family and I survived Hurricane Katrina in 2005; we left my grandmother's flooding house, were refused shelter by a white family, and took refuge in trucks in an open field during a Category Five hurricane. I saw an entire town demolished, people fighting over water, breaking open caskets searching for something that could help them survive.

If anyone has to leave their homeland by boat, they all have difficult stories. But my parents had a difficult journey, and their story always seems like a movie to me.

I arrived in this country as a refugee child with my sister and my mother.

Having been raised during the war, I know very well how childhood hampered by displacement, poverty, violence, and fear looks like.

Educate yourself, learn about what refugees face when they don't have homes, after they have lost everything.

I brought Hassan’s son from Afghanistan to America, lifting him from the certainty of turmoil and dropping him in a turmoil of uncertainty

Emigration, forced or chosen, across national frontiers or from village to metropolis, is the quintessential experience of our time.

The stories my pupils told me were astonishing. One told how he had witnessed his cousin being shot in the back five times; another how his parents had died of AIDS. Another said that he'd probably been to more funerals than parties in his young life. For me - someone who had had an idyllic, happy childhood - this was staggering.

We're a migrant nation made up of people who've been torn out of other worlds, and you'd think we would have some compassion.

When men talk about war, the stories and terminology vary - it's this battle, these weapons, this terrain. But no matter where you go in the world, women use the same language to speak of war. They speak of fire, they speak of death, and they speak of starvation.

When I was in Paris, all of the German refugees began to flow in and it was a very sad time.

The funny thing about war is that people feel you need to be morally outraged. I feel morally outraged about it, and I've been doing it for long enough to feel morally outraged, because I have been in massacre scenes in West Africa, and I've been doing this for a long time now.

When I go to Afghanistan, I realize I've been spared, due to a random genetic lottery, by being born to people who had the means to get out. Every time I go to Afghanistan I am haunted by that.

Ours is the century of enforced travel of disappearances. The century of people helplessly seeing others, who were close to them, disappear over the horizon.

I grew up acutely aware of the exile and distance caused by war.

'The Lucky One' features a young concentration camp survivor named Peter Rashkin - who's about the age my dad was when he started at CBS - working at the Oyster Bar, trying to acclimate to his new country and outrun the memories of the daily he left behind.

You know, those of us who leave our homes in the morning and expect to find them there when we go back - it's hard for us to understand what the experience of a refugee might be like.

For people who are displaced, you can reconstruct the story of your life from the objects you have access to, but if you don't have the objects then there are holes in your life. This is why people in Bosnia - if anyone was running back into a burning house, it was to salvage photos.

Towns and cities throughout the United States have opened their hearts and homes to thousands of families displaced from their homes as a result of this horrific storm.

I don't really remember much about Kosovo. I only remember growing up in London, where my parents had to basically start from scratch.

A well-off plastic surgeon can suffer just as much as an Irish lad who has been abused or whatever.

I had seen people who had lost everything and everyone they loved to war, famine, and natural disasters.

Oppressed strangers in our land…