Top 36 Immigrant Experience Quotes
#1. my generation's screwed - we're not the immigrant experience, we're not the assimilation experience - we're the first nothing generation, we've got nothing to write about and no one to read it, everyone too busy getting technologized, too harried with degrees.
Joshua Cohen
#2. Their analysis clearly revealed the existence of a color line that effectively blocked black occupational, residential, and social mobility. They demonstrated that any assumption about urban blacks duplicating the immigrant experience had to confront the issue of race.
William Julius Wilson
#3. As writers, we don't just need to write about poverty or war or the immigrant experience.
Jennifer Gilmore
#4. The immigrant experience in 'Ilustrado' was only a small part of what I intended to be a broader look at the Filipino experience, even if that broader look was itself merely a specific perspective.
Miguel Syjuco
#5. The immigrant experience of all of us is what makes us Americans, because we value in our DNA liberty and opportunity above all else.
Ted Cruz
#6. I haven't written about an immigrant experience because I haven't experienced that before and am focused on existential themes.
Tao Lin
#7. I knew I had to write about Canada. I just could not find in literature any examples of the immigrant experience that I've had.
Shyam Selvadurai
#8. What is it about me that gets them all crying? It's not the end of the world.
Diane Samuels
#9. Take the things from America that speak to you, that excite you, that inspire you, and be the Americans we all want to know; then cook it up and sell it back to them for $28.99. Cue Funk Flex to drop bombs on this. All my peoples from the boat, let 'em know: WEOUTCHEA.
Eddie Huang
#11. Going out on a date was very cheap in those days [1962]. I borrowed my father's station wagon, put in a gallon of gas for 29 cents, went to the movies for 50 cents a ticket, bought a pack of cigarettes for 25 cents, and had a McDonald's hamburger for 19 cents apiece. It was very doable.
Aslan Ben Eliahou
#12. It's interesting to talk to Bernie [Sanders] about his life and growing up, you know, growing up in an immigrant neighborhood in Brooklyn. His mother died at a very early age. He was young then. And, you know, I think that experience really shaped him.
Tad Devine
#13. 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.
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
#14. The gaping hole in her heart is amplified when she catches a glimpse of the strands of silver hair framing her once young face in the mirror.
Raquel Cepeda
#15. We wanted a labour force, but human beings came.
Terry Hayes
#16. Fly you crows. My father was not a spectacle. He was the greatest man I ever knew. He was my everything.
Stacey Lee
#17. Foisting an identity on people rather than allowing them the freedom and space to create their own is shady.
Raquel Cepeda
#18. As many Chinas as there were, there were that many Charleses as well. Every immigrant is the person he might have been and the person he is, and his homeland is at once the place it would have been to him from the inside and the place it must be to him from the outside.
Jade Chang
#19. In the face of all his handicaps, Jurgis was obliged to make the price of a lodging, and of a drink every hour or two, under penalty of freezing to death.
Upton Sinclair
#20. Like other important immigrant communities, the Jewish experience in the United States represents the ideal of freedom and the promise and opportunity of America.
Jan Schakowsky
#21. When I think of my work, I'm aware that I'm American and African at all points and times. And without a doubt, my experience and understanding of America was shaped by having immigrant parents.
Dinaw Mengestu
#22. Ojiugo often asked, 'But are they treating you well? Are they treating you well?' as though the treatment was what mattered, rather than the blighted reality of it all, that he was in a holding center, about to be deported. Nobody behaved normally. They were all under the spell of his misfortune.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
#23. That's what you do in America: you smile at people you don't know and you smile at people you don't even like and you smile for no reason.
NoViolet Bulawayo
#24. Paradoxically, the more Michael kept me at a distance, the more I trusted him - perhaps because he was always willing to help me with tips and introductions even though he wanted absolutely nothing from me (and never reciprocated my nosiness with personal questions of his own with me).
Zack Love
#25. Ebb and flow, ebb and flow, our lives. Is that why we're fascinated by the steadfastness of stars? The water reaches my calves. I begin the story of the Pleiades, women transformed into birds so Swift and bright that no man could snare them.
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
#27. It's bewildering to me how you can just start chatting with a complete stranger on Facebook, and - next thing you know - it seems as if there's some intense connection with the person - or at least you feel that closeness and hope it's mutual
Zack Love
#28. I see the American experience as being defined by the immigrant paradigm of rupture and renewal: rupture with the old world, the old ways, and renewal of the self in a bright but difficult New World.
Ayad Akhtar
#29. I instinctively decided that I would prove that I wasn't different, that it should not be odd to hear me speaking English. From that day forward I lived with this double impulse:the urge to disappear and the desperate desire to be accepted
Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston
#31. Soon we could barely recognize them. They were taller than we were, and heavier. They were loud beyond belief. I feel like a duck that's hatched goose's eggs.
Julie Otsuka
#33. Margaret looked at the ring on her finger. "Gran gave me this before we boarded the ship. It's the most special thing in the world to me. I'll never take it off, Hanna. No matter how hungry I am.
Meredith Jaeger
#34. Fitting is a luxury rarely given to immigrants, or children of immigrants. We are stuck in emotional purgatory. Home, somehow, is always the last place you left, and never the place you're in.
Scaachi Koul
#35. America is a country formed by diverse communities from different countries. Overall, the country is very hospitable and gives opportunities to grow. Saying that, I'd also say I'm not a 'white' immigrant; a South Asian's experience is different than, say, a European immigrant's.
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
#36. I am in between. Trying to write to be understood by those who matter to me, yet also trying to push my mind with ideas beyond the everyday. It is another borderland I inhabit. Not quite here nor there. On good days I feel I am a bridge. On bad days I just feel alone.
Sergio Troncoso
