A Quote by Alice McDermott

For immigrant generations especially, family is the first structure, or shelter, for a people who are in exile.

Alice McDermott

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Exile Family First Generations Immigrant People Shelter Structure

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Alice McDermott
American - Writer
Born: June 27, 1953

Probably all of us, writers and readers alike, set out into exile, or at least into a certain kind of exile, when we leave childhood behind...The immigrant, the nomad, the traveler, the sleepwalker all exist, but not the exile, since every writer becomes an exile simply by venturing into literature, and every reader becomes an exile simply by opening a book.

Roberto Bolano

A tiny apartment might hold three generations of an immigrant family.

Rick Smolan

Every immigrant family, it seems, has someone who does not belong in the new country they have come to. It feels like permanent exile to that one brother or wife who cannot stand a silent fate in Boston or London or Melbourne. I’ve met many who remain haunted by the persistent ghost of an earlier place.

Michael Ondaatje

I don't think of myself as a dissident, and I'm more of an immigrant than an exile.

Ha Jin

North Korea publicly denounced me as an enemy of my people and punished all my relatives. They have this guilty by association policy and they go after three generations of your family or up to eight generations of your family.

Park Yeon-mi

I'm Jewish. That's all. So I am in exile all the time. Wherever we go, we are in exile. Even in Israel, we are in exile.

Chantal Akerman

Arranged marriages are big business in the U.K. Second- and third-generation immigrant families, with no extended family structure, limited networks and religious restrictions on acceptable ways to meet future spouses, are turning to external matchmakers for help.

Jemima Khan

They say people are fundamentally interested in only three things - food, sex and shelter. I can't say I'm authoritative on the first two, although I'm in favor of both. It's shelter that concerns me, and it's nice to be doing something people are interested in.

Edward Durell Stone

My father was a Jewish immigrant who settled in Argentina and was left to his own devices at the age of 15. My mother was a teacher, herself the daughter of a poor immigrant family.

Cesar Milstein

My grandfather worked in a shoe factory - he was an Italian immigrant. My father was the first to go to college in the family.

Camille Paglia

I remember many years ago, I asked [Dalai Lama] about exile and he said: "Well, exile is good because it's brought me and my people closer to reality," and reality is almost a shrine before which he sits. Exile brings us up against the wall and forces us to rise to the challenge of the moment.

Pico Iyer

Exile is a dream of a glorious return. Exile is a vision of revolution: Elba, not St Helena. It is an endless paradox: looking forward by always looking back. The exile is a ball hurled high into the air.

Salman Rushdie

One of the hard things coming from an immigrant family - or any family that doesn't believe in the arts - is that you have to disappoint your parents. That's hard for people to do if you're a good kid.

Jimmy O. Yang

I came from an entrepreneurial family. My father and five generations of people in my family do not make good employees.

Ted Waitt

If you want to look at the state of humans, you should look at the state of animals first. People are choosing whether or not they can feed an animal and their family. And every shelter coast-to-coast is stuffed.

Rachael Ray

The first time I was homeless was when I went to Atlanta. I was in a homeless shelter, then when I got a job I used to miss the curfew for the shelter. So I ended up sleeping outside in the streets.

Jay Electronica

A Quote by Alice McDermott

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