Expat life quotes

“You hang around cafés”

Ernest Hemingway, the famous expatriate writer, wrote the following in ‘The Sun also Rises‘ in 1926.

You’re an expatriate. You’ve lost touch with the soil. You get precious. Fake European standards have ruined you. You drink yourself to death. You become obsessed with sex. You spend all your time talking, not working. You are an expatriate, see? You hang around cafés.

Ouch! Many non-expats think those sentiments are still the case…

More quotes on expat life:

The loneliness of the expatriate is of an odd and complicated kind, for it is inseparable from the feeling of being free, of having escaped.
~ Adam Gopnik

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.
~ Sarah Turnbull

Everything flows and nothing abides, everything gives way and nothing stays fixed.
~ Hereclitus

You measure the size of the accomplishment by the obstacles you have to overcome to reach your goals.
~ Booker T. Washington

‘Expat Syndrome’ is a condition whereby many expatriates see mostly either the best of their own nationality and the worst of the locals, or see the opposite.
~ T Crossley