Three characteristics mark all confirmed expatriates: (1) slowness on the up-take, (2) the tendency to personalize the impersonal-...-interpreting in terms of politeness or of policy what should be kept clearly in terms of ideas, (3) the tendency to orientalize one's attitude toward women.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
All my life I have lived and behaved very much like [the] sandpiper--just running down the edges of different countries and contin...ents, "looking for something" ... having spent most of my life timorously seeking for subsistence along the coastlines of the world.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Even people whose lives have been made various by learning, sometimes find it hard to keep a fast hold on their habitual views of ...life, on their faith in the Invisible--nay, on the sense that their past joys and sorrows are a real experience, when they are suddenly transported to a new land, where by beings around them know nothing of their history, and share none of their ideas--where their mother earth shows another lap, and human life has other forms than those on which their souls have been nourished. Minds that have been unhinged from their old faith and love, have perhaps sought this Lethean influence of exile, in which the past becomes dreamy because its symbols have all vanished, and the present too is dreamy because it is linked with no memories.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
...expatriated Americans, even Henry James himself, have always seemed to me somewhat anchorless, rudderless, drifting before the ...wind.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I had got away. That was my victory. The real quarrel with Ireland began to burgeon in me then; I thought of how it had warped me,... and those around me, and their parents before them, all stooped by a variety of fears--fear of church, fear of gombeenism, fear of phantoms, fear of ridicule, fear of hunger, fear of annihilation, and fear of their own deeply ingrained agression [sic] that can only strike a blow at each other, not having the innate authority to strike at those who are higher. Pity arose too, pity for a land so often denuded, pity for a people reluctant to admit that there is anything wrong. That is why we leave. Because we beg to differ. Because we dread the psychological choke. But leaving is only conditional. The person you are is anathema to the person you would like to be.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
... living in England does not free the American the way living in France frees him because the french [sic] and the American do n...ot have the sense of going on together, from the beginning they know that there is no going on together no past present and future ...LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
There is something in this native land business and you cannot get away from it, in peace time you do not seem to notice it much p...articularly when you live in foreign parts but when there is a war and you are all alone and completely cut off from knowing about your country well then there it is, your native land is your native land, it certainly is.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »