What tethers me to my parents is the unspoken dialogue we share about how much of my character is built on the connection I feel to the world they were raised in but that I've only experienced through photos, visits, food. It's not mine and yet, I get it. First-generation kids, I've always thought, are the personification of déjà vu.

~ Durga Chew-Bose

Durga Chew-Bose Assimilation Children Culture Diaspora Family First Generation Identity Immigrants Immigration Parents

It is psychotic to draw a line between two places.It is psychotic to go.It is psychotic to look.Psychotic to live in a different country forever.Psychotic to lose something forever.The compelling conviction that something has been lost is psychotic.Even the aeroplane's dotted line on the monitor as it descends to Heathrow is purely weird ambient energy.It is psychotic to submit to violence in a time of great violence and yet it is psychotic to leave that home or country, the place where you submitted again and again, forever. Indeed, it makes the subsequent involuntary arrival a stressor for psychosis.

~ Bhanu Kapil

Bhanu Kapil Diaspora Immigration Loss Mental Illness Psychosis Schizophrenia Travel Violence War

You scour these Chinatowns of the mind, translating themlike sutras Xuan Zhang fetched from India, testing waysreturn might be possible against these homesick inventions, trace the traveller's alien steps across borders, and in between discover how transit has a way of lasting, the way these Chinatowns grew out of not knowing whether to return or to stay, and then became home.

~ Boey Kim Cheng

Boey Kim Cheng Chinatown Diaspora History Memory Nostalgia Poetry Singapore

Inevitably, though, there will always be a significant part of the past which can neither be burnt nor banished to the soothing limbo of forgetfulness— myself. I was and still am that same ship which carried me to the new shore, the same vessel containing all the memories and dreams of the child in the brick house with the toy tea set. I am the shore I left behind as well as the home I return to every evening. The voyage cannot proceed without me.

~ Luisa A. Igloria

Luisa A. Igloria Diaspora Filipino Flipinox Houseless Immigration Landless Migrant Philippines Self Ship Vessel Voyage

Africa! Africa! Africa! Africa my motherland!Africa, your people cries for you!Africans must educate their citizens.Africans must reach out to it's people and empower them to build the nation.Africans you are the only people who can liberated your citizens from poverty through education. Africans must pay the price to rebuild the continent.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

Lailah Gifty Akita Africa Africa Continent Africa People Africa Quotes African American Authors African Authors African Believes African Citizens African Leaders African Literature African My Motherland Africans Afro American Afro American Relations Afro Caribbean Continent Of Africa Diaspora Diaspora Aesthetics Education Life Quotes Lifelong Education Lifelong Experience Lifelong Learner Lifelong Learning Political Political Philosophy Politicians Politics Politics Of Africa Politics Of The United States Poverty Poverty Alleviation Poverty And Politics Quotes Of Africa

Sometimes we feel we straddle two cultures; at other times, that we fall between two stools.

~ Salman Rushdie

Salman Rushdie Culture Diaspora

‎I was born in the US and l have lived in Mexico since 1946. I believe that all these states of being have influenced my work and made it what you see today. I am inspired by Black people and Mexican people, my two peoples. My art speaks for both my peoples ~ Elizabeth Catlett

~ Melanie Anne Herzog

Melanie Anne Herzog Art History Diaspora Identity

And the further they go, the more they'll remember, they can take it from me.

~ Rohinton Mistry

Rohinton Mistry Diaspora Immigration Experience Minority Nostalgia

It may be that writers in my position,exiles, or emigrants or expatriates, are haunted by some sense of loss, some urge to reclaim, to look back, even at the risk of being mutilated into pillars of salt. But if we do look back, we must do in the knowledge - which gives rise to profound uncertainties- that our physical alienation from India almost inevitably means that we will not be capable of reclaiming precisely the thing that was lost, that we will, in short, create fictions, not actual cities or villages, but invisible ones, imaginary homelands, Indias of the mind.

~ Salman Rushdie

Salman Rushdie Diaspora Immigrants Nostalgia