Third Culture Kids Quotes | TCKID 2.0

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Third Culture Kids Quotes

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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  • Alina
    "Now...they resolved to go back to their own land; because the years have a kind of emptiness when we spend too many of them on a foreign shore. But...if we do return, we find that the native air has lost its invigorating quality, and that life has shifted its reality to the spot where we have deemed ourselves only temporary residents.

    Thus, between two countries, we have none at all..."
    -Nathaniel Hawthorne's 'The Marble Faun'
  • "Kip and I are both international bastards -- born in one place and choosing to live elsewhere. Fighting to get back to or get away from our homelands all our lives."
    - The English Patient (Michael Ondaatje)

    I found the last part to be especially true. Funny how we all look for it, but we fight against it at the same time.
  • Hazel
    I guess that explains why after living in a 'new' place for nine years I still got pangs of 'homesickness.' It felt odd.
  • Here's a phrase that I took from my mandatory Catholic Tradition class I just completed:

    "Church is the people, not the building"

    When asked personally why I don't care to work on Sundays or Wednesdays, I tell them that my spirituality does not require a building to reinforce itself. If you can't eat, breath, live your beliefs, then you need to rethink them.
  • Caitlin
    "But the soul has no culture. The soul has no nations. The soul has no colour or accent or way of life. The soul is forever. The soul is one."
    - Gregory David Roberts
  • Becks
    I guess this is really what we all strive for.
  • Aisyah
    An anonymous quote
    "When you're at peace with yourself, any place is home."
  • Kristina J. Adams
    I love quotes...and I found a cool site called www.Thinkexist.com. These are a few "travel quotes" I identified with.

    "The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes."
    Marcel Proust

    "Perhaps travel cannot prevent bigotry, but by demonstrating that all peoples cry, laugh, eat, worry, and die, it can introduce the idea that if we try and understand each other, we may even become friends."
    Maya Angelou

    "Americans who travel abroad for the first time are often shocked to discover that, despite all the progress that has been made in the last 30 years, many foreign people still speak in foreign languages"
    Dave Barry

    "My travels led me to where I am today. Sometimes these steps have felt painful, difficult, but led me to greater happiness and opportunities."
    Diana Ross
    (ok, so I'm not quite sure of the Diana's relationship to TCKs, but the actual quote is fitting...)

    "Certainly, travel is more than the seeing of sights; it is a change that goes on, deep and permanent, in the ideas of living."
    Miriam Beard
  • Isa
    "Where is the easy land of ice-cream cones and new Keds sneakers and We Like Ike, the country where i thought i knew the rules. Where is the place i can go home to?"

    Leah, the Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingslover.
  • anonymoustck
    "The real voyage of discovery is not in discovering new lands but in seeing with new eyes." Marcel Proust

    "Be strong and courageous. Do not be terrified; do not be discouraged, for the LORD your God will be with you wherever you go." Joshua 1:9

    "Traveling in the company of those we love is home in motion." -James Henry Leigh Hunt

    "Since life is short, and the world is wide, the sooner you start exploring the better." -Simon Raven

    "If you look anything like your passport photo, you're not well enough to travel." -Jill Briscoe

    "For my part, I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel's sake. The great affair is to move." -Robert Louis Stevenson

    "We travel to learn, and I have never been in any country where they did not do something better than we do it, think some thoughts better than we think, catch some inspiration from heights above our own." -Maria Mitchell

    "I have wandered all my life, and I have traveled; the difference between the two is this, that we wander for distraction, but we travel for fulfilment." -Hilaire Belloc

    "All travel has its advantages. If a traveler visits better countries, he may learn to improve his own; and if fortune carries him to worse, he may learn to enjoy his own." -Samuel Johnson

    "The higher the mountains, the more understandable is the glory of Him who made them and who holds them in his hand." -Francis Schaeffer

    "If I rise on the wings of the dawn, if I settle on the far side of the sea, even there Your hand will guide me, Your right hand will hold me fast." Psalm 139:9-10

    "The traveler sees what he sees. The tourist sees what he has come to see." -G.K. Chesterton

    "When a traveler returneth home, let him not leave the countries where he hath traveled altogether behind him." -Francis Bacon

    "Like all great travelers, I have seen more than I remember, and remember more than I have seen." -Benjamin Disraeli

    "The world is a book, and those who do not travel read only a page." -St. Augustine

    "Certainly, travel is more than the seeing of sights; it is a change that goes on, deep and permanent, in the ideas of living." -Miriam Beard
  • Brice
    "A journey is best measured in friends rather than miles." - Tim Cahill
  • Manda-Panda
    this is how I explain why I have to move

    "It sucks, but I figure every time I move a few lives are saved, because I moved and my father was there to save them" (my Dad is in the coast guard)
  • Caitlin
    "Two languages in one head? No one can live at that speed!"
    "But the Dutch speak four languages and smoke marijuana..."
    "Yes, but they're cheating! Everyone knows marijuana is a drug enhancement..."
  • Brice
    "We stole countries. We stole countries with the cunning use of flags. Just sail around the world and stick a flag in." Eddie Izzard on the British Empire.


    British Imperialist: I claim India for Britain.

    Indian: You can't claim us. We live here. There are five hundred million of us.

    British Imperialist: Do you have a flag?
  • Aisyah
    The World is a book, and those who do not travel read only a page. - St. Augustine

    The whole object of travel is not to set foot on foreign land; it is at last to set foot on one's own country as a foreign land. - G.K. Chesterton
  • Brice
    Too often travel, instead of broadening the mind, merely lengthens the conversation. ~Elizabeth Drew
  • kristine
    I like the last one:
    "All who wander are not lost" J.R.R. Tolkien

    I think that's absofreakinglutely true.

    Haha, I actually like that so much, I'll put it on my nex page.
  • Julie
    "All that is gold does not glitter, not all those who wander are lost; the old that is strong does not wither, deep roots are not reached by the frost. From the ashes a fire shall be woken, a light from the shadows shall spring; renenwed shall be blade that was broken, the crownless again shall be king."
    I like the whole quote. Tolken was also a TCK did you know. He lived in South Afica and England.

    "not all those who wander are lost" I like wandering... "the old that is strong does not wither, deep roots are not reached by the frost"
    The parts of me that i have built from around the world are not jsut going to dissapear they are forever a part of me they are my roots. i don't really wnat to lose them and sometimes fear I will but I don't really think so.
    No matter how much I change or the hard this i go through i know i will be able to pick up the peices again cange and addapt and move on.
  • Julie
    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"

    I feel this a lot nothing is ever the same after you have left a place...you can never really go back.
  • alainedances
    I was just on myspace browsing the freshmen 15 movie they have up on there and stumbled upon "Jenny". She's a Aussie born Chinese who grew up in Hong Kong and now attending Syracuse University. http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction...
    The "movie" is basically a documentary of the lives of 15 freshmen girls who go away to college for the first time.
  • Brice
    "We shall not cease from exploration
    And the end of all our exploring
    Will be to arrive where we started
    And know the place for the first time." -- T.S.Eliot
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