Expat Quotes

I woke up early and took the first train to take me away from the city. The noise and all its people. I was alone on the train and had no idea where I was going, and that’s why I went there. Two hours later we arrived in a small town, one of those towns with one single coffee shop and where everyone knows each other’s name. I walked for a while until I found the water, the most peaceful place I know. There I sat and stayed the whole day, with nothing and everything on my mind, cleaning my head. Silence, I learned, is some times the most beautiful sound.

~ Charlotte Eriksson

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 awaybut still wondered what he did with his lifebecause he didn’t even speak to meor look at mebut still made me wonder who he wasand I walked away askingAm I making something worth while?I am not sure.I am a complicated person with a simple lifeand I am the reason for everything that ever happened to me.

~ Charlotte Eriksson

I had chosen to leave, and live alone in a foreign country. And in fleeing thousands of miles across the Pacific, I chose myself, and a chance at a different future.

~ Alison Singh Gee

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.

~ Charlotte Eriksson

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

~ Vann Chow

I am running and singing and when it’s raining I’m the only one left on the open street, smiling with my eyes fixed on the sky because it’s cleaning me. I’m the one on the other side of the party, hearing laughter and the emptying of bottles while I peacefully make my way to the river, a lonely road, following the smell of the ocean. I’m the one waking up at 4am to witness the sunrise, where the sky touches the sea, and I hold my elbows, grasping tight to whatever I’ve made of myself.

~ Charlotte Eriksson