88 Quotes About Immigrant-experience

I don't care what baggage they dragged over the ocean. They have no right to make me carry it the rest of my life.

When you were the child of immigrants, you weren't just you; your success was also your parents' your cousins', your relatives' still struggling for life in Haiti or India, wishing they were you. It was your job, your preordained celestial existence or whatever, to make the most of it.

It is a curious thing to realize, the in-betweenness one feels being African American in Africa. It gave me a hard-to-explain feeling of sadness, a sense of being unrooted in both lands.

Is it true that you have an internalized sense of inferiority? What? That because on the one hand you, for obvious reasons, have not been and can never be fully assimilated into mainstream,

Unofficially, we understood. There was a ceiling. Always had been, always would be. Even for him. Even for our hero, there were limits to the dream of assimilation, to how far any of you could make your way into the world of Black and White.

I don't know if I can continue suffering like this just because I want to live in America.

Immigrants were supposed to own things quietly. Proclaiming themselves invited the wrong kind of attention, from the evil eye to more immediate retribution. The surest sign of an immigrant business was an American flag on the door.

I think of my country, far away, and my eyes open beyond space.

In some ways, I think that part of what of what I'm trying to accomplish, whether Amá really understands it or not, is to live for her Apá, and Olga. It's not that I'm living life for them, exactly, but I have so many choices they've never had. And I feel like I can do so much with what I've been given. What a waste their journey would be if I just settled for a dull mediocre life.