Geographic Displacement Quotes

We moved around so much when I was a kid, the place I call home is New Orleans because at least I can remember the names of some of the streets there.

Writing about where I was from and the people I knew was not something that would have occurred to me early on, because like so many Southerners of that period - the Sixties - I rejected those things when I went north.

It is typical, in America, that a person's hometown is not the place where he is living now but is the place he left behind.

I didn't grow up with my Kenyan family. I grew up in a small, conservative suburb of Chicago.

Man developed in Africa. He has not continued to do so there.

A nation is not a territorial unit. There are probably more Irishmen outside Ireland, more Norwegians outside Norway, more Jews outside Palestine, perhaps also more Scotsmen, Slovaks and Letts outside Scotland, Slovakia and Latvia than in the compact area of territory with which their national sentiments are related.

I see now that this has been a story of the West, after all--Tom and Gatsby, Daisy and Jordan and I, were all Westerners, and perhaps we possessed some deficiency in common which made us subtly unadaptable to Eastern life.

When I was able to go to school in my early years, my third grade teacher, Ms. Harris, convinced me that one day I would be a writer. I heard her, but I knew that I had to leave Georgia, and unlike my friend Ray Charles, I did not go around with 'Georgia on My Mind.'

I went to an international school in Holland, and I didn't have any memories of growing up in the United States or England or any of these places which other novelists are able to write about in relation to their childhoods.

I never thought I'd end up living in Los Angeles while my children grew up in Britain, but here I am, and we are all making the best of it.

Growing up north of San Francisco, I immersed myself in the local landscape and in books about Native Americans, cowboys, and pioneers that seemed to ground me in it, but to pursue culture in those days meant being spun around until dizzy and then pushed east.

The hardest thing about moving to California from Connecticut was just missing my family. If I went back, it would be just because I was homesick.

I left the Midwest thinking I didn't fit in. But when I got to New York, I realized how truly Midwestern I was.

Malibu history is interesting to me. My mom's family was one of the early families in California, so there's history going back to the 1840s or '50s. They came over in the Gold Rush, actually. I have all this guilt about raising my daughter in the East. Coco's very anti-California. It's her way of rebelling.

Going to Cambridge was a bit of a culture shock, I was a working class lass from Batley who hadn't been anywhere apart from the odd holiday on the Costa Del Sol.

I was the first member of my family to cross into Pakistan and find his ancestral village.