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Immigrant Experience Quotes

Browse 83 quotes about Immigrant Experience.

Immigrant Experience Quotes

“Thank God for immigrants. They're the only ones who have any personality left. They still allow themselves emotions, judgments, and all those qualities that we are "evolving" past. I don't know what they're saying, but I can tell they're speaking honestly.”

AmericaLanguageDifferencesRaceUnited StatesHonestyCommunicationImmigrationImmigrantsNew York CityAmerican CultureNew YorkersEthnicityAmericansCultural DifferencesMelting PotImmigrant ExperienceChanging TimesShowing EmotionShowing The World Who You Are
Book:The Coloring Book: A Comedian Solves Race Relations in America
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“I began to look at them in a new light and finally understood that they had always wanted what was best for me, had always wished for my success, but lacked the tools and knowledge to help me. They did what they could, escaping poverty and persecution to bring my brothers and me to what they saw as this promised land. They could not have anticipated all the hardships we would face here. Faith was all they had.”

PovertyImmigrant ExperienceImmigrant
Book:House of Sticks
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“Does anyone ever want to leave their home? The fresh fruit that drops from their backyard? The neighbors who wiped their snot? Does anyone ever want to believe they won't come back? To the dog that sniffs their heel, to the bed that holds the echo of their body? Is there relief in pretending it is temporary, that one day it will be safe? That I will once again wave to the kind school bus driver; that I'll hold Carline's baby before he grows, having never known me? They have no palm trees in New York City, no leaves to shade me, to brush against my cheeks like my mother's hands. There is no one over there, alive or buried, who held me as a child, who cradled me close, who fed me from their table, who wiped my knees when I fell & scraped them. Here, despite the bad & ugly, is my home. & now I wish that I could stay. Does anyone ever want to leave the place they love?”

HomeImmigrationImmigrant ExperienceEmigrationEmigrant Experience
Book:Clap When You Land
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“On winter nights he, who had never slept beneath more than a sheet, lay beneath mountains of wool and felt like a figure in an ancient myth, condemned by the gods to have a boulder pressing down upon his chest; but never mind, he would be English, even if his classmates giggled at his voice and excluded him from their secrets, because these exclusions only increased his determination, and that was when he began to act, to find masks that these fellows would recognize, paleface masks, clown-masks, until he fooled them into thinking he was okay, he was people-like-us.”

SelfWinterAssimilationImmigrant Experience
Book:The Satanic Verses
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“Here is a secret Chang E knew, though her mother didn't. Past a certain point, you stop being able to go home. At this point, when you have got this far from where you were from, the thread snaps. The narrative breaks. And you are forced, pastless, motherless, selfless, to invent yourself anew. At a certain point, this stops being sad - but who knows if any human has ever reached that point?”

FamilyImmigrationImmigrant ExperienceDiaspora Quotes
Book:The Four Generations of Chang E
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“Bela had thought she knew what love felt like, but when she saw Sanjay at the airport after six long months, her heart gave a great, hurtful lurch, as though it were trying to leap out of her body to meet him. This, she thought. This is it. But it was only part of the truth. She would learn over the next years that love can feel a lot of different ways, and sometimes it can hurt a lot more.”

NovelIndiaMothers And DaughtersImmigrant ExperienceIndian FictionIndian AmericanDivakaruniBook Club Fiction
Book:Before We Visit the Goddess
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“My mother clutches at the collar of my shirt. I rub her back and feel her tears on my neck. It's been decades since our bodies have been this close. It's an odd sensation, like a torn ligament knitting itself back, lumpy and imperfect, usable as long as we know not to push it too hard.”

LoveNovelIndiaMothers And DaughtersContemporary FictionImmigrant ExperienceIndian AmericanDivakaruniWomen S BooksNovel In Stories
Book:Before We Visit the Goddess
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“Would you like to come in?" I said. My hands were sweaty. Inside my chest an ocean heaved and crashed and heaved again. "I would," he said. I saw his Adam's apple jerk as he swallowed. "Thank you." I was distracted by that thank you. We had moved past the language of formality long ago. It was strange to relearn it with each other.”

FictionNovelIndianWomen S FictionMothers And DaughtersIndian AuthorsImmigrant ExperienceImmigrant FictionDivakaruniBook Club BooksLove Mothers And Daughters
Book:Before We Visit the Goddess
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“At church, she told us they ate one cracker and took one swallow of red wine and the rest of the time there was a man talking. She did not know exactly what he said, but he said it for a long time. Sometimes, just to give her hands something to do, she would pick up the heavy book in front of her seat and open it. Even though she didn't understand everything they were singing, she moved her lips anyway. It was just like that at the citizenship ceremony. Whether or not you understood the oath you made, you had to move your lips. After a while, for some reason she seemed to lose interest in going. She didn't say why.”

ReligionAcceptanceShort StoriesImmigrant Experience
Book:How to Pronounce Knife: Stories
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“If I’d realised how much that pressure would build inside me, the slow descent into a dull existence, days blemished with concern for my dad and whether I’m looking after him properly — well, I would have stayed out late some nights, lost my virginity at sixteen instead of still having it, developed a fondness for alcohol, sat at bars, smoked weed, danced at clubs, and turned strangers into friends.”

LoveLossGriefDementiaImmigrant ExperienceGhana
Book:Maame
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“Borders, though, are rarely as definite as they appear on maps. The longer you spend living around them, the less sense these kinds of simplistic divisions make. Frontiers are places where identities take on absurdly definite forms, in barbed wire fences and vigilante patrols. At the same time, they're places where boundaries between different cultures break down. Sicilian history is white, Christian and Western, certainly, but it has also been, and still is, black, Arab, Muslim among other things. Such ambiguities are present everywhere, but they are particularly visible on the shores of the Mediterranean. This is what makes the region so exciting. It's also what makes it difficult and, for some, uncomfortable.”

ImmigrationBordersItalyImmigrant ExperienceSicilySicilianMediterranean
Book:The Invention of Sicily: A Mediterranean History
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“An immigrant? An immigrant feels like when you go to the movies and you get there late. You can’t see, and the people are not happy you’re there. The movie has already started, and you missed parts. You have a lot of catching up to do if you’re going to get it, and you need to find your place in the dark without stepping on people. Then, if you find your place, shut up and pay attention; you might get what the movie is all about.”

CultureSocietyFitting InImmigrant ExperienceImmigrant
Book:Cuban American Dancing On The Hyphen
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“With all this snow, with the sun not there, with the cold and dreariness, this place doesn't look like my America, doesn't even look real. It's like we are in a terrible story, like we're in the crazy parts of the Bible, there where God is busy punishing people for their sins and is making them miserable with all the weather. The sky, for example, has stayed white all this time I have been here, which tells you that something is not right. Even the stones know that a sky is supposed to be blue, like our sky back home, which is blue, so blue you can spray Clorox on it and wipe it with a paper towel and it wouldn't even come off.”

SkyWinterWeatherMidwestZimbabweImmigrant Experience
Book:We Need New Names
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“En gång i världen var USA det förlovade landet i världen för invandrare som vi. Vi har slitit som djur av tvång och av tacksamhet, och se hur de behandlar oss nu! Utlänningar blir behandlade som kriminella, om det ska vara vår tids Amerika åker jag hellre tillbaka till Indien.”

RacistAmerican DreamDiversity And InclusionRacism In AmericaRacial DiscriminationRacism And CultureImmigrant ExperienceUsa ImmigrationThe Promise Of A Better Life
Author:Marc Levy
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“From eating at El Pollo Loco salsa bar to the Golden Globes buffet, I managed to stumble through this journey with the perseverance of an immigrant and the mindset of an American. I learned to thrive on being uncomfortable to pursue what I loved. The English language was uncomfortable, so I studied BET until it became my natural tongue. Doing stand-up was uncomfortable, so I hung out at the Comedy Palace until it became my second home. Auditions were uncomfortable, so I spent six hundred bucks a month on acting classes while I slept in some dude's living room for three hundred bucks until acting became my profession. I never looked at these challenges as barriers; I saw them as opportunities to grow. I'd rather try to pursue my dream knowing that I might fail miserably than to have never tried at all. That is How to American.”

OpportunityChallengesPerseveranceAmerican DreamImmigrant Experience
Book:How to American: An Immigrant's Guide to Disappointing Your Parents
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“After 15 years in America, I learned just two things for sure about America. One, they give you three meals a day in jail, no exceptions. Two, the only real way to make a living in this place is to be a bullshit artist. After 20+ years in America including 8 years of AA meetings, I decided that I finally have an American Dream. My american dream is to drink beer all day and host overtalkers anonymous meetings. Please vote for Andrew Yang.”

PoliticsAmerican DreamSelf ActualizationImmigrant ExperienceGod Bless America12 StepsYang2020Freedom Dividend
Author:Dmitry Dyatlov
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“My parents were really into the whole “American Dream” thing when I was growing up. They didn’t know that by the time we could attain it, the American Dream had morphed into something else entirely, and no one could pinpoint what it was anymore. But maybe that was the whole point. In America, the dream is whatever you think it is.”

RussiaAmerican DreamSoviet UnionImmigrant Experience
Book:At the End of the World, Turn Left
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“The expectation of justice is not a privilege with which I had been raised, and staring at the piece of paper, it occurs to me how black and white I have made my entire life out to be. I was going to get my justice; it was rightfully mine. How American of me.”

Self AwarenessChinaMemoirSelf RealizationAmerican PoliticsAmerican CultureAsian AmericanImmigrant ExperienceSecond Generation
Book:Made in China: A Memoir of Love and Labor
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“Hero had the sense that Pol's Ilocano was stuck in time, that he only wanted to speak it with the people he'd always spoken it to, but even when Hero and Pol spoke in Ilocano with each other in California, there was a playacting stiffness in their voices that hadn't been there back in Vigan, when Hero used to hang on every word.”

LanguageImmigrationFilipinoImmigrant ExperienceFamily DynamicsFilipino AuthorsFilipino CultureIntergenerational Relations
Book:America Is Not the Heart
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“Being an immigrant is not a status but a state of mind. It doesn’t stop when you “assimilate” or “integrate” or when you go from being an “outsider” to an “insider.” It is what you think of yourself. You only really stop being an immigrant when you reject other immigrants and try to slam the door in their faces when they try to emulate you.”

ImmigrantsState Of MindOutsidersIntegrationAssimilationRefugeesInsidersImmigrant ExperienceImmigrantImmigrant State Of Mind
Author:Stewart Stafford
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“We must remember that refugees are almost always people whose homes, family members, and everything they once loved and held dear are either destroyed or seriously at stake…They are simply trapped in a zone in which staying under such circumstances and swallowing humiliation in the “host” countries is unbearable; going home is impossible, because often there is no 'home' to go to anymore; and going elsewhere is rarely an option either. This is precisely what “trapped” feels like.”

WarViolenceImmigrationRefugeesDisplacementRefugee CrisisImmigrant Experience
Author:Louis Yako
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“The first problem with the “how can we help the refugees” question is the question itself. The premise of the question is flawed and problematic at two levels: first, it draws a clear boundary in power relations by assuming more power to the ‘we’, the Western people doing the ‘helping’, and therefore simultaneously grants them the power of choosing to deny refugees this ‘help’, if so they choose.”

WarDevelopmentImmigrationHumanitarianismRefugeesDisplacementRefugee CrisisImmigrant Experience
Author:Louis Yako
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“Should we then be surprised that when Western powers destroy a certain country that there will be an influx of refugees? Do we expect these wars to happen and for their effects to simply stay 'over there'? How can we really expect all this to happen while people here carry on doing business as usual? Do Westerners expect to just relax and enjoy a cold crisp beer on their porches on a warm summer night and see no refugees before their eyes after all these wars waged by their governments?”

WarViolenceImmigrationPropagandaRefugeesWar CrimesDisplacementRefugee CrisisImmigrant Experience
Author:Louis Yako
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“When we talked about "A Modest Proposal" I felt like I was running circles around everybody. I understood that shit better than the professor 'cause he was just a fan. I wasn't an Irishman, but I knew how it felt to have someone standing over you, controlling your life and wanting to call it something else. From the people at the Christian Fellowship to First Academy to my parents to Confucius to thousands of years of ass-backwards Chinese thinking, I knew how it felt. Everything my parents did to me and their parents did to them was justified under the banner of Tradition, Family, and Culture. And when it wasn't them it was someone impressing Christianity onto me and when it wasn't Christianity it was whiteness.”

ChineseWhitenessImmigrant ExperiencePocFirst Generation
Book:Fresh Off the Boat
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“I hated seeing these spasmodic upside-down chicken heads stretching to puncture my flesh. I imagined once that they reached my groin and pecked out my penis and my huevos and kept pecking until they got to my gut and my eyes and my brain, until I was just a pecked-out piece of human meat surrounded by thousands of nervous, dirty white chickens. I think that was about the time I fucked up a pair of chicken heads against a warehouse wall when no one was looking. Well, almost no one. Rueben was right behind me, and that's when he grinned his stupid grin. Maybe he hated the chickens as much as I did. Maybe he just knew que ya me iba también a la chingada. Maybe I was going on my first joy ride to hell and back, and it was fun to watch.”

StoriesImmigrantsTexasFamily RelationshipsLatinoShort StoriesImmigrant ExperienceShort Story CollectionChicanoSergio TroncosoHispanic AmericanImmigrant FictionEl Paso TexasHispanic Identity
Book:The Last Tortilla & Other Stories
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