Expat Life Quotes

Well, at least this is what I told myself every day as I fell asleep with the fire still burning and the moon shining high up in the sky and my head spinning comforting from two bottles of wine, and I smiled with tears in my eyes because it was beautiful and so god damn sad and I did not know how to be one of those without the other.

When someone says a song or a book or a poem saved their life, this is what they mean: • it took me out of my brain for the one second needed to get back onto the planet • it shot out a spark into the distance that I could then build a path toward • it opened something up in my imagination Because suicide is the result of the death of the imagination. You forget how to dream up other possible futures. You can’t picture new maneuvers, new ways around. Everything is just the catastrophic present and there will never be a time this is not so. That is what kills you. What saves you is a new story to tell yourself about how things could be.

Am I making something worth while? I’m not sure. I write and I sing and I hear words from time to time about my life and choices making ways, into other lives, other hearts, but am I making something worth while? I’m not sure. There was a boy last night who I never spoke to because I was too drunk and still shy, but mostly lonely, and I couldn’t find anything lightly to say, so I simply walked away but still wondered what he did with his life because he didn’t even speak to me or look at me but still made me wonder who he was and I walked away asking Am I making something worth while? I am not sure. I am a complicated person with a simple life and I am the reason for everything that ever happened to me.

It was a different sense of isolation from what he normally felt in Japan. And not such a bad feeling, he decided. Being alone in two senses of the word was maybe like a double negation of isolation. In other words, it made perfect sense for him, a foreigner, to feel isolated here. The thought calmed him. He was in exactly the right place.

Such is the nature of an expatriate life. Stripped of romance, perhaps that's what being an expat is all about: a sense of not wholly belonging. [...] The insider-outsider dichotomy gives life a degree of tension. Not of a needling, negative variety but rather a keep-on-your-toes sort of tension that can plunge or peak with sudden rushes of love or anger. Learning to recognise and interpret cultural behaviour is a vital step forward for expats anywhere, but it doesn't mean that you grow to appreciate all the differences.

Once you see some things, you can never forget them. If you don't want to have to see them for the rest of your life, it's better not to look in the first place.

The loneliness of the arab is a terrible thing; it is all consuming. It is already present like a little shadow under the heart when he lays his head on his mother's lap; it threatens to swallow him whole when he leaves his own country, even though he marries and travels and talks to friends twenty-four hours a day. That is the way Sirine suspects that Arabs feel everything - larger than life, feelings walking in the sky.

Oh, God”, he thought, “what a strenuous career it is that I’ve chosen! Travelling day in and day out. Doing business like this takes much more effort than doing your own business at home, and on top of that there’s the curse of travelling, worries about making train connections, bad and irregular food, contact with different people all the time so that you can never get to know anyone or become friendly with them. It can all go to Hell!

This is the expat life: you never know when someone you see every day is going to disappear forever, instantly transmogrifying into a phantom. Before long you won’t be able to remember her last name, the color of her eyes, the grades that her children were in. You can’t imagine not seeing her tomorrow. You can’t imagine you yourself being one of those people, someone who one day just vanishes. But you are.

...most seamen lead, if one may so express it, a sedentary life. Their minds are of the stay-at-home order.... In the immutability of their surroundings, the foreign shores, the foreign faces, the changing immensity of life glide past, veiled not by a sense of mystery but by a slightly disdainful ignorance; ... a casual stroll or a casual spree on shore suffices to unfold for him the secret of a whole continent, and generally he finds the secret not worth knowing.

After a year or two, the long term expats won’t see the beggars the same way. After a year or two, the cheeky young monks won’t make them smile. After a year or two, the newest restaurant opening won’t pull them in. To preserve they will withdraw and settle. They will come to accept the limits of it all. The hype won’t bother them. The promise won’t motivate them. They will have accepted their odd expat life, their awkward place in the chimera that is Myanmar today.

Minding his own business had been his motto living in a strange foreign country with a world-recognized social issue of failing morals.

The ex-pat's life with all its homesickness and loneliness and privileges and perks, with its dizzy ups and miserable downs, was certainly not ordinary.

She needed friends, and a life, and this is how you acquired those things: by talking to strangers. Everyone was a stranger, all on equal footing in strangerhood.

She was not in a position to complain about this life, not yet. Probably not ever.

She began to sacrifice that old identity to live in her new one. It was the new life, after all, that everyone wanted.

They are permanent tourists, in Paris. Their life is a certain type of dream come true.

It wasn’t hard to understand. Mexican women are something special. They learn early on that men are subservient to them. They are trained by their mothers in the use of this power over these lowly creatures.

American men,” said Nancy gravely, “don’t know how to drink.” “What?” Jim was startled. “In fact,” she went on carelessly, “they don’t know how to do anything very well. The one thing I regret in my life is that I wasn’t born in England.” “In England?” “Yes. It’s the one regret of my life that I wasn’t.

Plus she had to admit that a small part of her secrecy was that she was holding something back, for herself. If she never told Dexter the truth, she was still reserving the right to return to her old life. To one day be a covert operative again. To be a person who could keep the largest secrets from everyone, including her husband, forever.

If you are gone [from your homeland] for fifteen years, you will not return. Even if you return, you will not return.

It would make a lot more sense if she had imagined this whole thing, her whole life. Now would just be now, attached to some other, more straightforward past.

She spent so much of her new life wanting to get a break from the kids, then the rest of her time impatient to get back to them.

Back before her life had begun to unravel. Or before she knew it was unraveling.

Would they have a life together anymore, after tonight? Or was this it? The end?

What if we are all simply lost souls blown off course, just trying to get home?

Dexter was too legit,” Julia continued. “His life was too verifiable, too aboveboard. He was nobody’s spy, nobody’s mole, nobody’s rat. He was who he is. And he didn’t know that you weren’t.

They were ticking off items on a to-do list that was magnet-attached to the fridge. There were nineteen items on the list. They'd crossed off fifteen. The final item was underlined: Make a life.

But when Kate returned home he was gone. Back to the video camera that had recorded her. Back to his unexplainable office. Back to his secret phone, his unfamiliar contacts, his fifty million stolen euros. Back to his other life.

It hasn't taken long to find herself thinking that people are watching. And that they always have been, all the time. It was only a few months ago that Kate had finally been able to imagine she was living a totally surveillance-free life.

Now that it was finally here, she wasn’t surprised to find herself still reluctant to start it. Reluctant to end the part of her life when this conversation hadn’t happened yet. Reluctant to find out what her life would look like after it.

Maybe he was wondering if they could make it, such liars, together. A marriage based on so many things that were not true. A life lived so falsely, for so long. Kate didn’t know that Dexter hadn’t admitted all his lies. Just as she hadn’t revealed every one of her secrets.

This is the Hong Kong curse that expat housewives talk about in hushed voices: the man who takes to Hong Kong the wrong way. He moves from an egalitarian American society, where he’s supposed to take out the trash every day and help with the dinner dishes, to a place where women cater to his every desire—a secretary who anticipates his needs before he does, a servant in the house who brings him his espresso just the way he likes it and irons his boxers and his socks—and the local population is not as sassy with the comebacks as where he came from, so, of course, he then looks for that in every corner of his life.

One day, in a grocery store, I swept clean a shelf of microbrew beer for my husband and three giant jars of mustard, leaving none for future shoppers. It was victory tinged with guilt. What would the next expat shopper think, when looking for beer or mustard? I couldn't afford to think about them. Every man for himself, in modern China!

We depend on this give-and-take when living abroad. You can’t exile yourself from your homeland and not always feel that tidal pull of return. Those minor details, the commercial jingles and pop songs, the chain restaurants and decade-defining shades of our blue jeans, are details you don’t even think about until you are face-to-face with a society that has very little to do with your own. Suddenly those one-hit wonders become a secret language, the very vestige of American culture.

But there’s this giant deception at the foundation of their relationship, their happiness. This impure motive. There was that small mistake that the woman made, uttering the wrong number. And then the man reconstructed an entire intrigue, a big thick plot— a seduction and affair and relationship and marriage proposal, a whole life— around her error and his notice of it. Taking advantage of her lie. But does that make their relationship less real? Does that make it impossible that they genuinely love each other?

I recognised just how different Alexander was from children raised in Britain. The most obvious distinctions were his maturity and broadness of view. He hadn't lost his innocence or childish ability to play, but he enjoyed conversations with adults, and he saw no problem in playing with any child of any age. He was wonderfully gentle with the little ones. He was never fazed by differences, and cultural diversity was of interest rather than a reason for prejudice, though, - like our Nepali friends - he liked to classify people.

A funny thing about living abroad is that what might separate us expats back home brought us closer together in China. We'd listen to their complaints about the food, their legs swelling up with the MSG, and instead of rolling our eyes as we might've thought we would at Americans complaining abroad, we listened and offered advice on where to find more palatable, familiar food. For their part, they seemed to conveniently ignore the fact that we were living together unwed, and when they'd pass by our room, door open, there was no strong feeling of judgment.

Life down here is kind of a permanent Halloween where you choose a costume more fitting for your self-image than reality could ever offer. Do you want to be a captain or a cowboy? No problem. People will call you by whatever title or name you choose. You say you’re a reincarnated pirate queen or the abandoned love child of a famous entertainer? That’s fine with me. We believe each other’s stories about who we were and who we are. Being an expat means you can have a whole new life. It’s a little like being in the Witness Relocation Program only with flip flops and margaritas.

She didn’t want to give the murder-pornography frame by frame. Didn’t want to recite her route across Manhattan, the length of the knife blade and the number of times she pulled the trigger, the color of the blood-splattered wallpaper in the hotel room, the man falling to the floor, the baby crying in the next room, the woman emerging and dropping the bottle, its nipple popping off and the milk spilling onto the carpet, the woman pleading “Por favor,” her hands up, shaking her head, asking— begging— for her life to be spared, her big black eyes wide, deep sinkholes of dark terror, while Kate trained the Glock on her, a seemingly eternal internal debate, while the baby sounded like he was the same age as Jake, late infancy, and this poor woman the same age as Kate, a different version of herself, an unlucky woman who didn’t deserve to die.

from, The Siamese Collectors: He needed a jolt. A drastic change. An explosion of old habits. He wanted to drop a hot grenade into his broken life. So he cooked up Barcelona and Madrid, Paris, Hong Kong and sent flurries of e-mails with resumes. And finally, when the only offer arrived in a beaten yellow envelope bearing exotic stamps, his father insisted he take it. At first he refused. Thailand to him was third rate, tainted by ideas of the Golden Triangle, white slavery, sleazy tourists and terrorism. But he only had two choices and neither he nor his father lingered when action was needed. So they said a quick goodbye on the porch, blinking at the crisp noon sun and sweating as the taxi idled. His father said, “Don’t worry. I won’t tell them anything.” His plane arrived sometime in the middle of the night. A lone policeman dipped in leather boots and wearing a motorcycle helmet with a loose chinstrap stood guard in the Bangkok airport. Treece slipped his passport into a pocket and watched a dark-eyed Thai girl half-asleep on her arm inside a little glass money exchange booth. A moment later in the open lobby, he nodded to a man behind a walrus tooth moustache holding a piece of cardboard that said: Mike Treece.

That's the shock, and the surprise, to a lot of repatriates: No one back home cares. There's an initial, shallow interest in what life is like abroad, but most Americans aren't actually interested, at all.

As a child, she believed he was the kindest man she knew. But slowly over the years, Baba became a stranger and she feels nothing but a dull ache for the energetic, gleeful father she once knew. People change. Everyone. And all love ends. She knows this now. Only hardened exiles refuse to change; they dig their feet in and try to root everywhere they land, even if the soil poisons them. They hang on and on, afraid to move forward. They don't let go of dead things. They don't toss the lime juice. They hoard trinkets in ragged suitcases. They pile up photographs of long-ago days, begging their children for doubles. They build a fortress in the corner of a closet. Maybe Gui was right. You're still waiting, he said - it's true. She's so terrified of losing her every small advantage that now her own Baba poses a threat. If she had accepted Gui as her home, would she shield herself so zealously? Would she be a secure kind of woman with a dozen purses strewn everywhere, each containing an old ID or a document she once thought important - none of it vital enough to save, because her entitlement to her life isn't granted by these things, but intrinsic? No one can snatch it away. Maybe that's the difference between refugees and expats. The difference isn't Yale or naturalization papers, a fat bank account or invitations to native homes. In that way, she is the same as Mam'mad and Karim. When you learn to release that first great windfall after the long migration, when you trust that you'll still be you in a year or a decade, even without the treasures you've picked up along the way, always capable of more - when you stop carrying it all on your back - maybe that's when the refugee years end.

Gostaria de correr. Brincar com outros filhotes. Ter uma mãe. Fundir-se à savana. Mas a savana está distante, muito longe. Para ele, é uma terra proibida. Encontra-se em perpétuo exílio, uma criança nascida sozinha. Nem sabe se um dia voltará para a África. Nem sabe se já esteve lá. [...] O elefantinho do Bernini da Piazza della Minerva é um dos melhores amigos que tenho em Roma. Para mim, aquele elefantinho é somali. Tem o mesmo olhar dos exilados. E também a mesma irreverência. [...] Com o tempo, descobri que aquele elefantinho tem o mesmo olhar da minha mãe. Não pode voltar, não pode saciar a sede da sua angústia. O exilado é uma criatura dividida. As raízes foram arrancadas, a vida foi mutilada, a esperança eviscerada, o princípio separado, a identidade despida. Parece não ter sobrado nada. Ameaças, dentes crispados, maldade. [...] Minha mãe viveu muitos lampejos. Antes de ser arrancada da Somália, alguém a havia arrancado da mata. De nômade foi forçada a se tornar sedentária. E todas as vezes teve que reinventar-se, teve que redesenhar o seu mapa. Aquele lampejo que vejo em minha mãe e no elefantinho do Bernini são as histórias que nadam em seus ventres. Afinal de contas, se vocês se aproximarem de uma somali ou de um somali, é isso que vão receber: histórias. Histórias para o dia e histórias para a noite. Para vigília, para o sono... para os sonhos.

One part of me is happy only in America, the other only in Europe. Without Americans, I would be very much at home in my country.

Excluding the language barrier, the worst thing in Brazil is being a woman in a very male dominated, looks obsessed culture. I thought the United States was bad when it came to presenting girls with unrealistic body expectations. Brazil is so much worse. Now that I’m raising a daughter, I realize just how bad it is. All girls are called princessa and told not to cry because it’s ugly (Não chora! Vai ficar feia!). I could not find baby girls clothes in any other colour than pink. Toddlers go with their moms to the salons and get mani-pedis. On billboards, in magazines, everywhere you see advertisements for plastic surgery that you can pay for in 20 instalments! Brazil has more plastic surgeries per capita than any country in the world. It will be an uphill battle to raise a girl who does not think makeup is necessary for the gym.

Still he considered playing Pachinko the best investment of his free time, soaking in the local stench and bad breathe of other lonely Japanese people as an alternative way of blending into the colorful local scenes which he yearned to be a part of.

She used to be a person who did things. Not just run-of-the-mill normal-job things, but life-and-death things. Illegally crossing international borders. Eluding police. Hiring assassins, for God’s sake. Now she was folding laundry. Could her life really have become this?

Ah, mon Dieu!", pensa-t-il, "quel métier exténuant j'ai donc choisi ! Jour après jour un voyage. Les ennuis professionnels sont bien plus grands que ceux qu'on aurait en restant au magasin et j'ai par-dessus le marché la corvée des voyages, le souci des changements de trains, la nourriture irrégulière et médiocre, des têtes toujours nouvelles, jamais de relations durables ni cordiales avec personne. Le diable emporte ce métier !

To be truly challenging, a voyage, like a life, must rest on a firm foundation of financial unrest. Otherwise, you are doomed to a routine traverse, the kind known to yachtsmen who play with their boats at sea... cruising, it is called. Voyaging belongs to seamen, and to the wanderers of the world who cannot, or will not, fit in. If you are contemplating a voyage and you have the means, abandon the venture until your fortunes change. Only then will you know what the sea is all about.

She turned to the second half of her question: ‘Why did you come back?’ ‘I wanted to be part of the new South Africa.’ Glib but true. In all the years I was away, I felt interrupted. Despite my resolve to look in the other direction, the life I might have been leading flickered in the corner of my eye. In another place, unfazed, a potential me was going about his business as if I’d never cut him short. Once apartheid fell – or sat down, as Leora likes to say – I could finally look squarely at this phantom who was living under my name. And then I got used to the idea that we could change places. A clean swap: your elsewhere for mine." (from "Double Negative" by Ivan Vladislavic, Teju Cole)

Our lives are a catalogue of random occurrences that hew us into who we are. We drift from circumstance to circumstance, pointing to the attributes that result from our adaptations and say: This is who I am.

The time to repair the roof is when the sun is shining. John F. Kennedy, former U.S. President.

I’ve heard that you’re in the pain business. I don’t like doing work for that kind of man,” said Vincent Calvino. Casey rolled his neck and a small cracking noise echoed from the bones inside. “If you worked only for people you liked, you wouldn’t cover your rent.

The Bangkok Comfort Zone - that strip running between Patpong, Soi Cowboy and Nana - was a huge bank of ice, thick as a glacier. Only you had to be around years and years to see and feel the deep chill, and by the time you had it was too late, the glacier had already dragged you under.

Let me share what I’ve learned about Thai politics. Keep a distance from those doing a victory dance in the end zone unless you understand their game, how it’s scored and how many players each side has. If you can’t figure out the rules of the game, you won’t know when the game has started and when it’s over. Don’t put a bet on a game you don’t understand.

RENAULT I have often speculated on why you do not return to America. Did you abscond with the church funds? Did you run off with the President's wife? I should like to think you killed a man. It is the romantic in me. RICK It was a combination of all three. RENAULT And what in Heaven's name brought you to Casablanca? RICK My health. I came to Casablanca for the waters. RENAULT Waters? What waters? We are in the desert. RICK I was misinformed.

We live here as if we were never leaving.

The women who had passed transiently through his life would have likely all agreed that the sunburned Scottish expat possessed the kind of rugged features that promised exotic adventure—the inviting raffishness of a prom date who shows up wearing a scuffed leather jacket, riding a motorcycle with a strategically defective exhaust pipe. In reality, he had just the unkempt, haggard visage of a man who smoked too many unfiltered Dunhill cigarettes, wore too little sunblock, and long suffered from a malaise of which the only palliation seemed to come from roaming about the wilds of Africa in search of something tenacious enough to kill him.

Many expats I know love so-called Third World countries. Many do not mind settling and getting married there while the locals in those countries are escaping in all directions. The reason is simple: expats are treated better than local citizens in such countries, and even better than in their own so-called industrialized countries in the 'developed' world.

In Driftwood: Stories from the Margarita Road, Joseph Conrad collides with Jimmy Buffett in a journey through the dark heart of Mexico's Riviera Maya. Weaving together the tales of American expats fleeing their mundane lives in the States for crystal-blue Caribbean water--and far too many pitchers of margaritas--author Anthony Lee Head makes it all so real because he has lived that life.

Oh sure, there was a gringo gulch where the sunbirds lived in the winter months. But if you avoided them, you might hook up with the small community of Margarita Road refugees: a group of wanderers from up north; a crazy Irish sailor; a few Italians; some young, fast-living kids from Mexico City; and one beautiful girl from Brazil. All in all, it was a nice place to stay—or hide, if that’s what you needed.

The Margarita Road isn’t just about flip flops and late-night beach parties. Running away can be hard work.

He kept ordering beers and making what he thought were humorous jokes about how Mexicans sleep all day, all the while telling me how great my life was without a ‘real job.’ After an hour or so of this, I was ready to pour the next drink over his head.

This wasn't the France I knew, which had always been as much about swimming in the sea as about anything else, about languorous holiday sunshine and whole days spent drinking wine and staring up at the clouds. No, this country seemed to be offering something dark and strange and new to me, in an entirely different language. If only I could learn to understand it.

Those who have lived abroad know exactly what I mean. Our status as Americans creates an instantaneous, rarified friendship. You are in a fast food restaurant where they have odd things on the menu, makluba, zaatar, soojouk, and you are scrambling for something you recognize, pizza, or even pita, and then you hear that perfect Hello or How you doing? You gravitate toward that table of strangers, desperate, dear God, speak to me, fellow outsiders in in appropriate revealing clothing, seak to me American sweet nothings of sports and reality T.V. It’s the same anywhere. You reach for the known in an unknown place. You become friends with someone you wouldn’t be able to stand if you actually had options. Our history of Super Bowl commercials and expectations of flushable toilet paper seal us together.

expatSure, people stare… I think it’s curiosity. Most of the time if I give a big smile, the person looks totally shocked to have been caught and will smile back. They go from a sort of blankness to this welling gladness. Women especially blossom into joy and will give really lovely, open smiles in return, with a ilhamdallah or masha’allah and a pat on the head or a pinched cheek for Mather, maybe a few words for me, Welcome to Jordan! They’re so surprised and grateful I’m smiling at them! Even women who are fully covered, just a tiny window for their eyes peeking from a veil. You can see the uplift in the corners of their eyelids, feel their genuine warmth.

Sure, people stare… I think it’s curiosity. Most of the time if I give a big smile, the person looks totally shocked to have been caught and will smile back. They go from a sort of blankness to this welling gladness. Women especially blossom into joy and will give really lovely, open smiles in return, with a ilhamdallah or masha’allah and a pat on the head or a pinched cheek for Mather, maybe a few words for me, Welcome to Jordan! They’re so surprised and grateful I’m smiling at them! Even women who are fully covered, just a tiny window for their eyes peeking from a veil. You can see the uplift in the corners of their eyelids, feel their genuine warmth

De aici incolo incepe un alt capitol. Transparenta insa e inca prezenta. Ce inveti, ca imigrant, e sa traiesti cu ea. Bucati din tine traiesc inca acolo de unde ai plecat. Niciun job, nicio relatie, nicio poezie in cafenea nu te va reumple destul cat sa fii plin. Iar asta nu e deloc rau. Mereu trebuie sa lasi loc de necunoscut, sa ai un grad de fragilitate care sa te faca real, puternic, prezent. Un cub cu un colt sfaramat, cum zicea Nichita. Dar s-a scris vreodata o poezie despre un cub perfect? Imperfectiunea, lipsa, nevoia e necesara sa te impinga mereu, singur, mai departe, in vreme ce te bucuri de necunoscut ca un copil pe-un balansoar scartaind.

But she loves the job at the newspaper. She is relieved to be writing again, shaping ideas into words. Most of the articles deal with expat life—navigating the housing market, finding a doctor, the best hair salons and masseuses and gringo cafés. She discovers a tiny bodega owned by a Chinese man. Mr. Lo stocks chili oil, oyster sauce, glutinous rice, even chicken feet, chicken necks and heads