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Quote by Ijen Kim

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The Sunset Emperor

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Ijen Kim

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“So, why do we do it?” I decided at least to try and give the appearance of being in control. “I don’t know, I swear some of you English men use it to seek me out and be obsessive on my front doorstep. What do you think? Are you going to come knocking on my door?” “Well, I don’t know. I mean about the assumptions and the bullshit, not the door.” I thought it needed stressing, but immediately realised it was part of her game. “Perhaps it’s some kind of safety thing. If a stranger starts talking to you in the street, you have little by which to judge your safety. Here in a hotel lobby you have some sanctuary, but that doesn’t mean it’s safe. Not every hotel guest is in a foreign land, and I am sure not every Colombian is going to rob you, but I don’t know.” “It is prejudice, if you ask me,” she spat distastefully.”

LoveRomanceForeignersChance MeetingHotel Lobby
Book:The Heart Worm
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“Thomas says he doesn't know Vilalba very well because they usually just stay at the house for endless conversations, punctuated by laughter and complaints, long lunches and drawn-out dinners. He says for him Spain is just people in his family who love each other, who eat and drink and cut each other off in conversation until night falls. I say: Is that the reason you said something of the foreigner? He says: Yes, dark eyes, olive skin. And the feeling of never quite belonging, of being a person uprooted, as if, maybe, who knows, a sense of belonging is something one inherits.”

ImmigrationBelongingForeigners
Book:Lie With Me
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“Perhaps finding some new response to these experiences was out of the question when the sheer proliferation of travelers' tales had all but exhausted the lexicon of discovery. But it nevertheless irritated Gentle to hear himself responding in clichés. The traveler moved by unspoilt beauty or appalled by native barbarism. The traveler touched by primitive wisdom or caught breathless by undreamt-of-modernities. The traveler condescending; the traveler humbled; the traveler hungry for the next horizon or pining miserably for home.”

JourneyForeignersTravelingEpic JourneyStrange LandAmericanismsAmericans Abroad
Book:Imajica
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“But the silent stranger could hardly have understood what was passing: she was a German who had not long been in Russia and knew not a word of Russian, and she seemed to be as stupid as she was handsome. She was a novelty and it had become a fashion to invite her to certain parties, sumptuously attired, with her hair dressed as though for a show, and to seat her in the drawing-room as a charming decoration, just as people sometimes borrow from their friends for a special occasion a picture, a statue, a vase, or a fire-screen.”

ForeignersBad TasteObjectificationObjectification Of WomenBourgeois Society1869
Book:The Idiot
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“She swallows and swallows the water. And as she swallows she swallows the possibility she will always be alone. Swallows the river that will flow into the sea that is made from other waters that have flowed from mountains and hills, that will leak into oceans. She swallows geography, learns to swim in changing tides and temperatures, learns different strokes of the arms and legs, learns to speak in many tongues. She does this because she has no choice but to do so, and she comes out of the river to find him there, holding her earrings in his hand, and he says, ‘But they don’t fit. Who are you?’" (from "Swallowing Geography" by Deborah Levy)”

ForeignersMigration
Book:Swallowing Geography
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