Top 100 The Foreigner Quotes
#1. Constant comparisons are the stamp of the foreigner; one continually translates manners and customs of a new country into terms of his own, before he can fully comprehend them.
Willa Cather
#2. Let me soap you," he murmured.
"Thank you for your good intentions," she said, "but my two hands are quite enough."
"Even if it's just your back," the foreigner begged.
"That would be silly," she said. "People never soap their backs.
Gabriel Garcia Marquez
#3. Oh sons of Arabs and the Arab Gulf, rebel against the foreigner ... Take revenge for your dignity, holy places, security, interests and exalted values.
Saddam Hussein
#4. A logical analysis of reflexive usages in French shows, however, that this simplicity is an illusion and that, so far from helping the foreigner, it is more calculated to bother him.
Edward Sapir
#5. Americans are very friendly and very suspicious, that is what Americans are and that is what always upsets the foreigner, who deals with them, they are so friendly how can they be so suspicious they are so suspicious how can they be so friendly but they just are.
Gertrude Stein
#6. You think you're the foreigner here, and I'm the American, and I just look the other way while the President or somebody sends down this and that ... to torture people with. But nobody asked my permission, okay? Sometimes I feel like I'm a foreigner, too.
Barbara Kingsolver
#7. As the week's events on reality television demonstrate, there is an ugly underbelly in society only too ready to point the finger at the foreigner, or those who might not fit in. [on celeb big brother
John Sentamu
#8. People love to hear the brag of the local boy, because they want him to be great, but the foreigner must deny that he has any outstanding virtue - this is what will endear him to the locals.
Orson Scott Card
#10. There is nothing less to our credit than our neglect of the foreigner and his children, unless it be the arrogance most of us betray when we set out to 'Americanize' him.
Charles Horton Cooley
#11. The Church in the colonies is the white people's Church, the foreigner's Church. She does not call the native to God's ways but to the ways of the white man, of the master, of the oppressor.
Frantz Fanon
#12. Japan functions on the basis of everyone sharing certain assumptions, where each person knows his part in a larger whole. The foreigner sits outside and is threatening. If he comes in, that's the most threatening of all.
Pico Iyer
#13. I've moved around so much my whole life, and I've gotten so used to being the Other in situations - the foreigner, the outsider. The first time I've ever felt like there was no separation between me and the other elements was in music.
Abigail Washburn
#14. Quin stopped halfway across the room, his head cocked to the side. He stared at Mattheus like an explorer who couldn't figure out if he'd discovered a fascinating new subculture or a bunch of locals playing What Can We Get the Foreigner (sic) Eat?
Amy Fecteau
#15. Where the foreigner hesitating between two women always encounters a third,
Italo Calvino
#16. Cursed is anyone who withholds justice from the foreigner, the fatherless or the widow.
Anonymous
#17. The foreigner's friends, aside from bleeding hearts who feel obliged to do good, could only be those who feel foreign to themselves.
Julia Kristeva
#18. The Philippine races, like all the Malays, do not succumb before the foreigner, like the Australians, the Polynesians and the Indians of the New World.
Jose Rizal
#19. A foreigner is an individual who is considered either comic or sinister. When the victim of a disaster - preferably natural but sometimes political -the foreigner may also be pitied from a distance for a short period of time.
John Ralston Saul
#20. There's been this argument about Coldplay stealing this melody from Joe Satriani, but, if you listen to it, it's mine! It's the 'Foreigner Suite,' it is!
Cat Stevens
#21. It must be added that from his first words the foreigner made a repellent impression on the poet, but Berlioz rather liked him - that is, not liked but ... how to put it ... was interested, or whatever.
Mikhail Bulgakov
#22. How funny to see the foreigner in a farmer's work hat, like a fish that has put on clothes. Around
Amy Tan
#23. One of the marked superiorities the English enjoy over other peoples is their ability to imbue the foreigner with a crippling inferiority complex the moment he sets foot on British soil.
Pierre Daninos
#24. In Britain, you never get away from the fact that you're a foreigner. In the U.S., the view is it doesn't matter where you come from.
Aasif Mandvi
#25. If only I could visit you as a foreigner goes into a new country, learn the language of you, wander past all borders into every private and secret place, I would stay forever. I would become a citizen of you.
Lisa Kleypas
#26. In the world of the Machiguenga, sadness could be equated with anger, and anger was a perilous emotion, by which a foreigner could lose his life.
Tahir Shah
#27. Americans are the most generous country on the planet. I've worked in Europe, I've worked in Australia. There is no where else where you get absolutely no attitude for being a foreigner. If you do your job well, they embrace you.
Hugh Jackman
#28. ...the intranslatable intonations of a foreigner, the inevitable cross-cultural misunderstandings lurking in tones and glances and assumptions.
Arthur Phillips
#29. In Paris, one is always reminded of being a foreigner. If you park your car wrong, it is not the fact that it's on the sidewalk that matters, but the fact that you speak with an accent.
Roman Polanski
#30. I am not a foreigner, because we are all traveling, we are all full of the same questions, the same tiredness, the same fears, the same selfishness and the same generosity.
I am not a foreigner, because when I asked, I received.
When I knocked, the door opened.
When I looked, I found.
Paulo Coelho
#31. A lot of people are now criticizing Attorney General John Ashcroft for his policy on detaining what he considers suspicious people. I think he's going a little overboard. Today, he arrested the entire band Foreigner.
Jay Leno
#32. In far-off lands stand the great stones
on which my thoughts rest.
It was a foreigner who wrote the strange words
on the hard board that is called my soul.
Days and nights I lie and think
about things that never happened:
my thirsty soul was once given a drink.
Edith Sodergran
#33. He simply wanted more money without additional responsibility. A sound investment. That is the sort of fellow that makes other people's Empire possible. Sells his birthright to a foreigner.
James Aldridge
#34. A foreigner coming here and reading the Congressional Record would say that the President of the United States was elected solely for the purpose of giving Senators somebody to call a horse thief.
Will Rogers
#35. Basketball, in America, is like a culture. It is like a foreigner learning a new language. It is difficult to learn foreign languages and it will also be difficult for me to learn the culture for basketball here.
Yao Ming
#36. The Czechs are downright crazy about mushrooms! In late summer and autumn, a foreigner might even get the impression that the number of sponge-hunting Czechs roaming about in the forests with a punnet largely exceeds the possible number of mushrooms.
Terje B. Englund
#37. Krakow the city of Kings, was no longer mine. I had become a foreigner in the place i had always called home
Pam Jenoff
#38. I was sometimes irritated by the unrelenting inquisitiveness and criticism, but there was no shortage of help or advice or just someone to talk to if I needed it. It was hard to imagine a foreigner descending on an English community and being welcomed with such immediate acceptance and hospitality.
John Mole
#39. Stranger: Do you believe in Jesus, my friend?
Foreigner: O yes, I do but who the hell are you?
Toba Beta
#40. Above all, translators must be native speakers. It's not because they speak the language better
I understand that sometimes a foreigner can learn a language better than native speakers. It has more to do with having an intimate knowledge of the society for which the book is being translated.
Sergei Lukyanenko
#41. Traveling in other countries is especially fun because others often attribute your differences to the less-stigmatizing idea that you're like this only because you're a foreigner.
Michael John Carley
#42. So in the streets of Calcutta I sometimes imagine myself a foreigner, and only then do I discover how much is to be seen, which is lost so long as its full value in attention is not paid. It is the hunger to really see which drives people to travel to strange places.
Rabindranath Tagore
#43. I loved this idea of always being a foreigner. There's this thing where people bring cultures, bring the music together. I love it when the music, when the cultures collide and something sort of new comes out of it.
Hans Zimmer
#44. I've been a foreigner for the past twenty years. I don't have roots anymore. My roots are in my memory and my writing. That's why memory is so important. Who are you but what you can remember?
Isabel Allende
#45. The Korean man nodded, the way you do when you're a foreigner and understand that someone has finished a sentence.
David Sedaris
#46. So how would you define a Londoner, then?" Lady Penny asked curiously. "Someone who lives here. It's like the old definition of a cockney: someone who's born within hearing distance of Bow bells. And a foreigner," he added with a grin, "is anyone, Anglo-Saxon or not, who lives outside.
Edward Rutherfurd
#47. One thing everyone understood, however, was that when they sprayed him with snow during a stoppage in play and he responded by throwing his blocker up into one of their guys' nose, he meant business. To be fair, he was not the first foreigner in China to lash out when frustrated by this culture.
Tom Carter
#48. It sometimes takes a foreigner to come and see a place and paint it. I remember someone saying they had never really noticed the palm trees here until I painted them.
David Hockney
#49. The basic tenet of black consciousness is that the black man must reject all value systems that seek to make him a foreigner in the country of his birth and reduce his basic human dignity.
Steven Biko
#50. And the usual course of affairs is that, as soon as a powerful foreigner enters a country, all the subject states are drawn to him, moved by the hatred that they feel against the ruling power.
Niccolo Machiavelli
#51. What was a foreigner, anyway? Is the place you're born the only place you really belong? At what point do you stop being from "away" and start being from "here"?
Blue Balliett
#52. I have been a foreigner all my life, first as a daughter of diplomats, then as a political refugee and now as an immigrant in the U.S. I have had to leave everything behind and start anew several times, and I have lost most of my extended family.
Isabel Allende
#53. Refuse to feel like a foreigner on your own planet. The country you live in is simply another physical location of your own home.
Ben Tolosa
#54. I've always felt like a foreigner wherever I've lived. I don't feel much towards my Italian or Scottish roots, although I do cook the pasta at home.
Tom Conti
#55. In China, I realized that if you visit often enough and learn the language, you will be assimilated, but you'll still be kept at arm's length; you'll always be looked on as a foreigner.
Abigail Washburn
#56. The thought that my mother would suddenly be a foreigner would upset me very much.
Tony Benn
#57. Frankly, I was surprised at how generous the Japanese press has been to the idea of a foreigner running Sony.
Howard Stringer
#58. When I was little, I didn't really travel - from the suburbs to Paris was already a journey. I had a foreigner's eye on the city, and I still enjoy that point of view. Then there's the fact that one of the things that touches me most is injustice.
JR
#59. Are Singaporeans so easily offended? Please. Have more of a backbone and thick-skin. Are you going to go on a frenzied witch hunt just because some foreigner called you a loser on the Internet?
Calvin Cheng
#60. I'm not the only foreigner who took up golf while living in Jakarta.
Raymond Bonner
#61. Paris is great. I stay at the Ritz Paris - I'm good friends with the Director, Frank Klein, and the owner. I lived there 3 years; I was the only foreigner working at Maxim's. They only took French, which was a mistake.
Sirio Maccioni
#62. It makes me feel good. Being a foreigner, (the American fans) they make me feel like I'm a citizen of this country.
Sergio Martinez
#63. One curiosity of being a foreigner everywhere is that one finds oneself discerning Edens where the locals see only Purgatory.
Pico Iyer
#64. People don't talk to you properly. It's the way they talk to you; they dismiss you. I think it's a combination of me being a woman and a foreigner.
Zaha Hadid
#65. In the Afghan people, I found the most resilient, welcoming people who, for the first time in my career, never judged me over my right to tell this story - as a woman or a foreigner. A people who cherish their culture and history and the films that have captured that culture.
Pietra Brettkelly
#66. Half of the time I don't know what they're talking about; their jokes seem to relate to a past that everyone but me has shared. I'm a foreigner in the world and I don't understand the language.
Jean Webster
#67. I'm a foreigner in the world and I don't understand the language. It's a miserable feeling. I've had it all my life. At the high school the girls would stand in groups and just look at me. I was queer and different and everybody knew it.
Jean Webster
#68. The intellectual is called on the carpet ... Don't you conceal something? You talk a language which is suspect. You don't talk like the rest of us, like the man in the street, but rather like a foreigner who does not belong here. We have to cut you down to size, expose your tricks, purge you.
Herbert Marcuse
#69. I love the Twins, ... I bleed the Twins. That's all I know. If I go anywhere else, I'd be a foreigner.
Torii Hunter
#70. When the child has reached manhood he is thoroughly saturated with the belief that he is chosen by the Lord himself to defend his country against the attack or invasion of any foreigner. It is for that purpose that we are clamoring for a greater army and navy, more battleships and ammunition ...
Emma Goldman
#71. He looked to be a little over forty. Mouth somehow twisted. Clean-shaven. Dark-haired. Right eye black, left -for some reason- green. Dark eyebrows, but one higher than the other. In short, a foreigner.
Mikhail Bulgakov
#72. When we finish this tour we are going to begin writing and go into the studio to hopefully have a brand new Foreigner album out in early spring next year. This will be the first Foreigner album out in about ten years.
Lou Gramm
#73. Do not expect me to fall in with the evil customs and ways of the world. I am in Rome, but I will not do as Rome does. I am an alien, a stranger, and a foreigner. My citizenship is in heaven.
Billy Graham
#74. None of them seemed to mind sliding around in the faeces and choking in the smoke. They were determined not to miss the opportunity of watching a foreigner make a fool of himself.
Tahir Shah
#75. Life on the open road is liberty ... to be alone, to have few needs, to be unknown, everywhere a foreigner and at home, and to walk grandly and solitarily in conquest of the world.
Isabelle Eberhardt
#76. Eternal is the fact that the human creature born in Ireland and brought up in its air is Irish. I have lived for twenty years in Ireland and for seventy-two in England; but the twenty came first and in Britain I am still a foreigner and shall die one.
George Bernard Shaw
#77. To be fair, English is full of booby traps for the unwary foreigner. Any language where the unassuming word fly signifies an annoying insect, a means of travel, and a critical part of a gentleman's apparel is clearly asking to be mangled.
Bill Bryson
#78. I'll disappear in the fog as a foreigner to all life, as a human island detached from the dream of the sea, as a uselessly existing ship that floats on the surface of everything.
Fernando Pessoa
#79. It is easier for a cannibal to enter the Kingdom of Heaven through the eye of a rich man's needle that it is for any other foreigner to read the terrible German script.
Mark Twain
#80. His theatre was the clouds, where no spectacle repeated itself. On land he was a foreigner. Land for him was stasis, and it pulled him into immobility, which was his image of death.
- ,
Anais Nin
#81. A modern gentleman [rich person] is necessarily the enemy of his country. Even in war he does not fight to defend it, but to prevent his power of preying on it from passing to a foreigner.
George Bernard Shaw
#82. Why is she afraid?" he asked. "She's not Anjin-san. Just a little nervous. Please excuse her. She's never seen a foreigner close to before." "Tell her when the moon's full, barbarians sprout horns and fire comes out of our mouths like dragons.
James Clavell
#83. You may be a foreigner, but you have the heart of a Frenchman.
Joanne Harris
#84. I like being a foreigner. For me, to live in California is very pleasant - I'm more comfortable not feeling a part of everything, not feeling responsible for the government or the roads or the health system.
Eric Idle
#85. The only reason I think I would marry a foreigner would be to have kids with weird accents.
Chelsea Handler
#86. I was not happy as a traveller, I did not feel really at home anywhere I went, even in Spain which was the most I felt at home, I still was a foreigner. I missed Australia, and I can't tell why. It's just this is what I grew up with and this is the things I wanted to make meaning of in my life.
Richard Meale
#88. We still play Foreigner songs. I play the songs that I was involved in writing.
Lou Gramm
#89. He is a foreigner, he is from nowhere, from everywhere, citizen of the world, cosmopolitan. Do not send him back to his origins.
Julia Kristeva
#90. I'm very happy to be a foreigner in Japan, and I can't think of a more wonderful place to live, but at the same time, I would never want to be Japanese, because they are subject to stresses that I am not.
Pico Iyer
#91. New York City is home to so many people from so many places and the uniqueness of it is that you never feel a foreigner. English is almost hardly ever heard in the subway. In fact, it's weird.
Mira Nair
#92. The ideal place for me is the one in which it is most natural to live as a foreigner.
Italo Calvino
#93. Nothing is more annoying in the ordinary intercourse of life than this irritable patriotism of the Americans. A foreigner will gladly agree to praise much in their country, but he would like to be allowed to criticize something, and that he is absolutely refused.
Alexis De Tocqueville
#94. The moment there's a foreigner in a film it gives a novelty to the script. We make regional films and we need to hype our films.
Arin Paul
#95. Although I've lived in England for more than twenty years, I still have a foreigner's passion for all the details of English history and rural life.
Meg Rosoff
#96. You have to be outside the establishment - a foreigner new to the game
Malcolm Gladwell
#97. We are all 'foreigners' to [the remainder of: the human race minus our countrymen].
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
#98. Foreigner is a word created by guilt and the fears, ignorance, and weaknesses of your own ego.
Ben Tolosa
#99. Next time you meet a 'foreigner', remember it's only like a window with a different shape to it and the person who's sitting inside is you.
Yoko Ono
#100. Love is a country, with closed borders and a language no foreigner can speak. The only people who can understand its customs, traditions, and history are its citizens. A relationship doesn't have to make sense to all people. It only has to make sense to two people.
Jillian Keenan
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top
