I have seen them stagger out of their movie palaces and blink their empty eyes in the face of reality once more, and stagger home, to read the Times, to find out what's going on in the world. I have vomited at their newspapers, read their literature, observed their customs, eaten their food, desired their women, gaped at their art. But I am poor, and my name ends with a soft vowel, and they hate me and my father, and my father's father, and they would have my blood and put me down, but they are old now, dying in the sun and in the hot dust of the road, and I am young and full of hope and love for my country and my times, and when I say Greaser to you, it is not my heart that speaks, but the quivering of an old wound, and I am ashamed of the terrible thing I have done.

— John Fante

I have this feeling that immigrants unwittingly help to keep peace between nations by being scapegoats for national ills that would otherwise be blamed on neighbors.

— Agona Apell

I like it too," Angelo said. "I love this country. Much you and anybody, and you know it."" I know it," Crew said." But I still hate this country. You love the Army. But I don't love the Army. This country's Army is why I hate this country. What did this country ever do for me? Give me a right to vote for men I can't elect? You can have it. Give me a right to work at a job I hate? You can have that too. Then tell I'm a Citizen of the greatest richest country on earth, if I don't believe it looks at Park Avenue. Carnival prizes. All carnival prizes. [.] They shouldn't teach their immigrants' kids all about democracy unless they mean to let them have a little bit of it, it on makes for trouble. I and the United States is dissociating our alliance as of right now, until the United States can find time to read its own textbooks a LI

— James Jones

I like parents, old-school, old-world parents. So real. Just think of all they've seen in their lives. They were born in another world, and now they can watch it on Google Maps. So much change for a single soul to see.

— Laleh Khadivi

It may be that writers in my position, exiles, or emigrants or expatriates, are haunted by some sense of loss, some urge to reclaim, to look back, even at the risk of being mutilated into pillars of salt. But if we do look back, we must do in the knowledge - which gives rise to profound uncertainties- that our physical alienation from India almost inevitably means that we will not be capable of reclaiming precisely the thing that was lost, that we will, in short, create fictions, not actual cities or villages, but invisible ones, imaginary homelands, India's of the mind.

— Salman Rushdie

It’s a great honor, m’Jo. We know that. I’m sure everyone in Islet is proud of you. But this is who you are," she said, for a moment scanning the dark night air and the empty street. A cricket chirped in the darkness. "God help you when you go to this ‘David.’ You will be so far away from us, from everything you know. You will be alone. What if something happens to you? Who’s going to help you? But you always wanted to be alone; you were always so independent, so stubborn."" Like you.

— Sergio Troncoso

It seems to me that America is constantly reinventing what "America" means.

— Ronald Reagan

Laws ostensibly directed at undocumented immigrants inevitably affect the treatment of lawfully present immigrants and citizens who share the ethnic, racial, or national origin characteristics of undocumented immigrants.

— Pratheepan Gulasekaram

Like other discriminatory legislation in our country's history, immigration laws define and differentiate legal status on the basis of arbitrary attributes. Immigration laws create unequal rights. People who break immigration laws don't cause harm or even potential harm (unlike, for example, drunk driving, which creates the potential for harm even if no accident occurs). Rather, people who break immigration laws do things that are perfectly legal for others, but denied to them--like crossing a border or, even more commonly, simply exist.

— Aviva Chomsky

Most New Yorkers spent their lives somewhere between the fruit cart and the fifth floor. To see the city from a few hundred feet above the riffraff was pretty celestial. We gave the moment its due.

— Amor Towles