A collection of quotes related to the third culture kids experience. Please share your favorite TCK related quotes here.

“You can’t leave home, you can go other places, all right- you can live on the other side of the world, but you can’t ever leave home.” Sue Monk Kidd (from The Mermaid Chair novel)

“In every generation there are a few souls, call them lucky or cursed, who are simply born not belonging, who come into the world without strong affiliation to family or location or nation or race. Those who value stability, who fear transience, uncertainty, change, have erected a powerful system of stigmas and taboos against rootlessness so that we mostly conform, we hide our secret identities beneath false skins of those identities which bear the belongers’ seal of approval. But the truth leaks out in our dreams; alone in our beds—because we are alone at night, even if we do not sleep by ourselves—we soar, we fly, we flee.” -Salman Rushdie

‘The Ground Beneath Her Feet’”You get a strange feeling when you’re about to leave a place . . . like you’ll not only miss the people you love but you’ll miss the person you are now at this time and this place, because you’ll never be this way ever again.”
- Azar Nafisi, “Reading Lolita in Tehran”

“You know that point in your life when you realize that the house that you grew up in isn’t really your home anymore? All of a sudden, even though you have some place where you can put your shit, that idea of home is gone.

You’ll see when you move out, it just sort of happens one day, it’s just gone. And you can never get it back. It’s like you feel homesick for a place that doesn’t exist. And maybe it’s like this rite of passage, you know. You won’t have this feeling again until you create a new idea of home for yourself, you know, for your kids, for the family you start, it’s like a cycle or something. I dunno, but I miss the idea of it. Maybe that’s all family really is. A group of people who miss the same imaginary place. ”
- Andrew Largeman, “Garden State”

“To be rendered homeless—whether by hurricane, poverty, or choice—is to be deprived of not simply physical shelter but emotional refuge. Home is where we return to, where we stop and rest and think, where we piece together the new pictures in our minds and try to make sense of our planet. Without home, we are unmoored.

And it’s a literary lie that you can never go home again. Somehow, like a boomerang, most of us do. It may take a lot of trying and time before we get there. It may be a different home, it may be a home we build or rebuild, but it is home nonetheless: a physical place, a family or friends or both, a community.”
- Mark Jenkins, Outside Magazine, January 2006

“All who wander are not lost” J.R.R. Tolkien

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