Jhumpa Lahiri Quotes

I not only lived physically away from my native land, but the values and critical judgments of those closest to me became stranger and stranger.

I've always been an outsider. Even in London. If I returned to Scotland, I'd feel a complete foreigner.

I'm stuck somewhere a small island in the middle of the Atlantic where I'm alone. Because in France, they're like, 'No, you're not like us, you're not a French guy.' And in America, they're like, 'You're not like us.' I'm really alone in my little thing.

I'd always somehow felt slightly as if I'd been born in the wrong country.

When you come back to a country that you've left, you're in a very peculiar situation because, in a way, you don't belong to that country any more, even though when I'm in America I feel I don't belong there either.

In Geneva, I was seen as an outsider. In the U.S., I was considered Eurotrash. And in London, I'm seen as an American.

I always feel like a foreigner in America.

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

I first visited the Philippines when I was 29. I thought I would feel at home there, but I felt more out of place than I did in the U.S. I discovered I was more American than Filipino. It was shattering because I never felt quite at home in the U.S., either.

Writing in English made me become a foreigner in my own country. It helped me create the necessary distance to my homeland.

Half of the time I don't know what they're talking about; their jokes seem to relate to a past that everyone but me has shared. I'm a foreigner in the world and I don't understand the language.

No one in this country has any root anywhere; we don't live in America, we board here, we are like spiders that run over the surface of the water.

I'll always be a foreigner.

Bearing an eternal longing for Jewishness, I threw myself in all directions and left to work for another people. I am not one of those lucky ones raised in their own environment, whose work is normal.

I never really had any close friends in India, and I felt a terrible loneliness and isolation for many years. Westernized Indians don't like my books and I tend not to like westernized Indians - so we're quits.

New York - that unnatural city where every one is an exile, none more so than the American.

I don't feel alienated from American culture, but I understand people who do.

Exile is more than a geographical concept. You can be an exile in your homeland, in your own house, in a room.

When I'd go to Israel, I felt like a tourist. My social and professional ties had started to dissolve, and it confused me. I didn't know whether I should stay here in Paris or go back to Israel, or even cut off all my ties with Israel so I could really plant roots here. Or maybe go somewhere else altogether.

I don't know if I'm truly at home in any language.

I've always felt like a foreigner wherever I've lived. I don't feel much towards my Italian or Scottish roots, although I do cook the pasta at home.

Lots of times you can feel as an exile in a country that you were born in.

I belong nowhere and to no one.

In New York City, everyone is an exile, none more so than the Americans.

I came to Washington where I knew I would be farther away from America than I could be on some foreign shore.