Latest Quotes

“Let your mind start a journey through a strange new world. Leave all thoughts of the world you knew before. Let your soul take you where you long to be…Close your eyes let your spirit start to soar, and you’ll live as you’ve never lived before.’”

— Erich Fromm, The Graduate's Handbook: Your No-Nonsense Guide for What Comes Next By Clark Gaither

“All you will have is the present. Waste no energy crying over yesterday or dreaming of tomorrow. Nostalgia is fatiguing and destructive, it is the vice of the expatriate. You must put down roots as if they were forever, you must have a sense of permanence.”

— Isabel Allende, Of Love And Shadows

“Sometimes I long to forget… It is painful to be conscious of two worlds.”

— Eva Hoffman, Lost in Translation: A Life in a New Language

“We leave something of ourselves behind when we leave a place, we stay there, even though we go away. And there are things in us that we can find again only by going back there.”

— Pascal Mercier, Night Train To Lisbon

“Home wasn't a set house, or a single town on a map. It was wherever the people who loved you were, whenever you were together. Not a place, but a moment, and then another, building on each other like bricks to create a solid shelter that you take with you for your entire life, wherever you may go.”

— Sarah Dessen, What Happened to Goodbye

“I think it all comes down to feeling lonely and unloved.”

— Anja Nillsson, Living In A Rich City And Being Poor

“All my moments which were not consumed with efforts to escape the cold were absorbed with morbid Poe-like fancies. One night, in a dream, I saw my own corpse, hair stiff with ice and eyes wide open.”

— Donna Tartt, The Secret History (Vintage Contemporaries)

“My whole life I had been 'Baba's son.' Now he was gone. Baba couldn't show me the way anymore; I'd have to find it on my own.”

— Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner

“You will never be completely at home again, because part of your heart always will be elsewhere. That is the price you pay for the richness of loving and knowing people in more than one place.”

— Miriam Adeney, Kingdom Without Borders

“Life might be difficult for a while, but I would tough it out because living in a foreign country is one of those things that everyone should try at least once. My understanding was that it completed a person, sanding down the rough provincial edges and transforming you into a citizen of the world.”

— David Sedaris, Me Talk Pretty One Day

“She lay there on a bed that inexorably became a bed of ashes and hot coals, while her imagination dwelt on every conceivable disaster, from his having forsaken her for another woman to his having, somehow, ended up in the morgue. And as the night faded from black to gray to daylight, the telephone b…”

— James Baldwin, Come Out the Wilderness (Kindle Single) (A Vintage Short)

“It is a bitter-sweet thing, knowing two cultures. Once you leave your birthplace nothing is ever the same”

— Sarah Turnbull, Almost French: Love and a New Life in Paris

“Gatsby, pale as death, with his hands plunged like weights in his coat pockets, was standing in a puddle of water glaring tragically into my eyes. With his hands still in his coat pockets he stalked by me into the hall, turned sharply as if he were on a wire, and disappeared into the living-room.”

— Francis Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

“What makes expat life so addictive is that every boring or mundane activity you experience at home (like grocery shopping, commuting to work or picking up the dry cleaning) is, when you move to a foreign country, suddenly transformed into an exciting adventure. Try finding peanut butter in a Japanes…”

— Reannon Muth, A Travel Blog

“’The loneliness of the expatriate is of an odd and complicated kind, for it is inseparable from the feeling of being free, of having escaped.”

— Adam Gopnik, Paris To The Moon

“Loving life is easy when you are abroad. Where no one knows you and you hold life in your hands all alone, you are more master of yourself than at any other time”

— Hannah Arendt, Rahel Varnhagen: The Life of a Jewess

“When I first moved to London, I felt very homesick and yearned after the countryside a lot. Because London's hard. It's a big place, and it's lonely. It takes a while to get into it. But once I got into the flow of it and started to grow up, I realised that my home is wherever I am.”

— Toby Kebbell, A quote by Toby Kebbell

“He had only an intolerable, chest-crushing anxiety.”

— Jonathan Franzen, Purity: A Novel

“Imagine there's no heaven”

— John Lennon, Imagine - John Lennon (Lyrics)

“I remember when I lost my mind, there was something so pleasant about that place”

— Gnarls Barkley, Gnarls Barkley - Crazy