Let someone else be the most powerful country, make ours the most peaceful country.

Foreign to knowledge, mystery to senses, alien to emotion: LOVE.

While America will always, I think, feel foreign to me, New York City is my home. This is where I can construct my own identity freely and reject labels imposed on me.

The auto immune disease is like politics in an organization, attacking own cells thinking it's foreign!

Like most arts, the link between the mind and the pen can chain you like an enslaved workaholic. Even on an intended vacation you suddenly have this killer urge to record whatever the vacation may teach.

If what you create seems to turn out much stranger than who you are as a person, it's probably because your heart is talking.

I saw cities, and roads of marvelous construction. I saw cruelty and greed, but I've seen them here too. I saw a people live a life that was strange in many ways, but also much the same as anywhere else.""Then why are they so cruel?" There was an earnestness to the girl's face, an honest desire to know. "Cruelty is in all of us," he said. "But they made it a virtue.

Lingering, bottled-up anger never reveals the 'true colors' of an individual. It, on the contrary, becomes all mixed up, rotten, confused, forms a highly combustible, chemical compound then explodes as something foreign, something very different than one's natural self.

Reality. It is sometimes brought through foreign eyes; because if you do not know any better, you cannot see the worse (and vice versa).

The joy of knowing a foreign language is inexpressible. I find it really difficult to express such joy in my mother tongue.

They were both lost in cities that would not pause even to shrug

The misfortune of a young man who returns to his native land after years away is that he finds his native land foreign; whereas the lands he left behind remain for ever like a mirage in his mind.However, misfortune can itself sow seeds of creativity.---- Afterword to "Hothouse" Brian Aldiss

Facing a language you don't know is like returning to your infancy when your mother tongue used to be a foreign language to you

It was a very ordinary day, the day I realised that my becoming is my life and my home and that I don't have to do anything but trust the process, trust my story and enjoy the journey. It doesn't really matter who I've become by the finish line, the important things are the changes from this morning to when I fall asleep again, and how they happened, and who they happened with. An hour watching the stars, a coffee in the morning with someone beautiful, intelligent conversations at 5am while sharing the last cigarette. Taking trains to nowhere, walking hand in hand through foreign cities with someone you love. Oceans and poetry. It was all very ordinary until my identity appeared, until my body and mind became one being. The day I saw the flowers and learned how to turn my daily struggles into the most extraordinary moments. Moments worth writing about. For so long I let my life slip through my fingers, like water. I'm holding on to it now,and I'm not letting go.

For the first time in years, he felt the deep sadness of exile, knowing that he was alone here, an outsider, and too alert to the ironies, the niceties, the manners, and indeed, the morals to be able to participate.

The first and last weakness of his life, before him again. For a moment he felt himself blinded by his own memories; his own remembrances of the wits and wiles of Marian Halcombe that would steal into his thoughts; the sound of her laughter at his outrageous tales, the shadowed glance of distrust, the way her eyebrows would raise ever so slightly despite her resolution to seem disinterested in his foreign insights. She was the first woman he ventured to have complete equality in matching his tremendous cleverness.

Whenever you go on a trip to visit foreign lands or distant places, remember that they are all someone's home and backyard.

To walk through unknown streets in cities where you are merely learning the language is to force yourself into a new state of hypervigilance. You are a traveler, and hopefully not just a tourist, and must appear calm, but maintain your bearings. Not to get too lost, too off course and without alternatives, without an escape plan in the event of a dangerous situation.

We who are residing in a foreign country, away from the immediate scene of action, perhaps can feel more deeply than those at home the evil effects of the present distracted condition of our country.

If you think it's bad now, my friend, wait till we reach a town!' He shook his head and brushed at his tattered, dirty shirtsleeve. 'Do try to remember we're visitors-and not welcome ones-if you should feel moved to reason with anyone.

How I wished during those sleepless hours that I belonged to a different nation, or better still, to none at all.

Here march the eaters of earth, the swallowers of rain.

She wanted to hold foreign syllables like mints on her tongue until they dissolved into fluency.

All foreign food is doomed to be consumed in India not so much by Indians as by a voracious Indian sensibility, which demands infinite versions of Indian food, and is unmoved by difference.

A block of blood should not have the word "cake" after it...they might as well say "shite gateau

Spiritual love is when you see new faces as the oldest.

Will: 'Singing the praises of our fair city? We treat you well here, don't we, James? I doubt I'd have that kind of luck in Shanghai. What do you call us there again?'Jem: 'Yang guizi ... foreign devils.

Of course no one accused the old woman of being a witch. But she was foreign. Her words percolated up the tunnel of her throat , espresso-thick and strong. Bad weather had eroded her face. Some believed that the sun had crisped her skin into coriaceous pleats. Others blamed the chaw of a wintry climate. No one knew where she came from, though lots of people privately thought that perhaps she ought to go back.