33 Quotes About Living Abroad You Need to Read

Moving abroad is one of those experiences that resists a single feeling. You're excited and terrified in the same afternoon. You're homesick for a place you haven't left yet. You belong fully to neither country and partially to both.

These quotes don't resolve that tension. They name it. When you're in the middle of it, that's sometimes enough.

Before You Go

The decision to move abroad rarely arrives clean. For most people it's part pull, part push, and a fair amount of guilt about both. These quotes are for the version of you that hasn't left yet.

"If I'm an advocate for anything, it's to move. As far as you can, as much as you can. Across the ocean, or simply across the river. The extent to which you can walk in someone else's shoes or at least eat their food, it's a plus for everybody. Open your mind, get up off the couch, move."

— Anthony Bourdain

Bourdain doesn't ask you to have a plan. He doesn't ask you to be ready. He's just asking you to move, and to trust that the movement itself is the point.

"I had to get out. I got to Paris with forty dollars in my pocket, but I had to get out of New York."

— James Baldwin

The decision to leave isn't always romantic. Sometimes it's a push as much as a pull. Baldwin moved to Paris at 24 with almost nothing. The forty dollars isn't the detail that matters. The "had to" is.

"Travel is not really about leaving our homes, but leaving our habits."

— Pico Iyer

This reframe matters before you go. The fear of moving abroad isn't usually about the new place. It's about who you'll be without the routines and roles that defined you at home. That's not a reason to stay. That's the reason to go.

"The hardest part wasn't leaving my old life. It was leaving the people who still needed me."

— A personal note

Leaving when people in your life are going through a hard time is its own kind of guilt. My family supported the decision fully, which somehow made it harder, not easier. You don't stop feeling responsible for people just because you've crossed an ocean.

"Sometimes you have to leave to keep the relationship, including the one with yourself."

— A personal note

Staying somewhere that's draining you doesn't make you more available to the people you love. It makes you less. Leaving was the only way I could show up as someone worth showing up for.

The First Months

Nothing prepares you for the first year. Not the research, not the expat forums, not the people who've done it before you. These quotes are for the months when everything feels slightly wrong and you can't explain why.

"When you move from one country to another, you have to accept that there are some things that are better and some things that are worse, and there is nothing you can do about it."

— Bill Bryson

This is the most useful thing anyone told me in my first year, and I didn't hear it until much later. The sooner you stop expecting the new place to compensate for what you left, the sooner you can actually live in it.

"Loving life is easy when you are abroad. Where no one knows you and you hold your life in your hands all alone, you are more master of yourself than at any other time."

— Hannah Arendt

Arendt wrote this after fleeing Nazi Germany. The freedom of anonymity isn't a small thing. When no one has an existing version of you in their head, you're free to construct the one you actually want.

"Splendid to arrive alone in a foreign country and feel the assault of difference. Here they are all along, busy with living. They don't talk or look like me. The rhythm of their day is entirely different. I am foreign."

— Frances Mayes, Under the Tuscan Sun

"Assault of difference" is exactly right. It's not hostile. It's just the full force of realising that everything operates on a different frequency. The grocery store, the silence on the train, the way people queue. All of it calibrated for someone else.

"What Europe still gives the American expatriate is the sanction, if one can accept it, to become oneself."

— James Baldwin

This takes time to understand. The first months abroad feel like confusion, not becoming. Later you realise the confusion was the becoming. The not-knowing-how-to-be is the work.

"A foreign country is not designed to make you comfortable. It is designed to make its own people comfortable."

— Clifton Fadiman

The most useful reframe for the frustrating days. The bureaucracy, the unwritten rules, the way people don't make eye contact. None of it is wrong. It's just not built for you. Adjusting to that is the whole job.

The silence was the first real culture shock. In the Philippines, quiet in a group means something is wrong. In Sweden, it just means nobody has anything to say yet, and that is completely fine.

The In-Between

Nobody warned me that living abroad would make me a foreigner in both directions, not just in the new country but eventually in the one I came from. These quotes are for that specific, unresolvable feeling.

"So, here you are. Too foreign for home, too foreign for here. Never enough for both."

— Ijeoma Umebinyuo

This is the one that doesn't have a resolution. You don't get over it. You get used to carrying it. Some days it feels like loss. Most days it just feels like yours.

"It is a bitter-sweet thing, knowing two cultures. Once you leave your birthplace nothing is ever the same."

— Sarah Turnbull

"Bitter-sweet" is precise. Not devastating, not triumphant. Just the weight of knowing that no single place will ever feel completely right again, but that you're richer for it, even when it's inconvenient.

"Once I found myself on the other side of the ocean, I could see where I came from very clearly, and I could see that I carried myself, which is my home, with me. You can never escape that."

— James Baldwin

Distance gives you a clarity that living inside a place never could. I understood the Philippines better from Sweden than I ever did while I was living there. You need the remove to see the shape of it.

"He who knows no foreign language does not know his own."

— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

This goes beyond language. You can't fully see your own culture until you have something to compare it to. The second culture isn't a replacement. It's the lens that makes the first one legible.

"The very notion of home is foreign to me, as the state of foreignness is the closest thing I know to home."

— Pico Iyer

Some people reach this place after years abroad. It's not homelessness. It's a different kind of belonging. The in-between stops being a problem you're trying to solve and starts being where you actually live.

The moments that make you feel most in-between are never dramatic. It's laughing at something in Swedish and not knowing how to explain why it's funny in Filipino. Or missing something specific about Manila while sitting in a square in Barcelona.

Missing Home

Homesickness isn't one feeling. It's a category. These quotes are for the different shapes it takes: the sharp kind, the quiet kind, and the kind that catches you off guard.

"The loneliness of the expatriate is of an odd and complicated kind, for it is inseparable from the feeling of being free, of having escaped."

— Adam Gopnik

This is the paradox nobody warns you about. The same thing that makes you lonely is what makes you feel alive. You can't have the freedom without the ache. They come from the same source.

"Every dreamer knows that it is entirely possible to be homesick for a place you've never been to, perhaps more homesick than for familiar ground."

— Judith Thurman

The place you're homesick for is sometimes the life you imagined, not the one you left. You grieve a version of home that never quite existed, one where everything would have been fine if you'd just stayed.

"You get a strange feeling when you're about to leave a place, like you'll not 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

This hits on return trips too. You grieve a version of yourself that only exists in that place, at that time. Every departure is a small ending.

"Part of your heart always will be elsewhere. That is the price you pay for the richness of loving and knowing people in more than one place."

— Miriam Adeney

You learn to live with the divided heart, to treat it as richness rather than loss. The price is real. So is what you got for it.

"Maybe you had to leave in order to really miss a place; maybe you had to travel to figure out how beloved your starting point was."

— Jodi Picoult

The absence makes the love legible. You couldn't feel it properly while you were still inside it. Home becomes home the moment you can't get back to it.

"If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast."

— Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast

Replace Paris with wherever you've lived. The city doesn't matter. The fact that you lived there fully does. Every place you've called home stays in you permanently. You carry all of them.

What It Made You

The last section is the one you can only see from a distance. These quotes are for after: after the first year, after the homesickness, after you've stopped trying to explain yourself and started just being.

"I am not the same, having seen the moon shine on the other side of the world."

— Mary Anne Radmacher

You notice the change most when you're back visiting home. The person who left and the person who returned have the same face but a different interior map. The people who stayed sometimes notice before you do.

"The world is a book and those who do not travel read only one page."

— Widely attributed to St. Augustine (attribution disputed, original source unclear, but the idea holds)

Living in one country gives you one chapter. Living in another gives you two, and with each one, the first becomes richer too.

"It's a funny thing coming home. Nothing changes. Everything looks the same, feels the same. Even smells the same. You realize what's changed is you."

— Widely attributed to F. Scott Fitzgerald (original source unverified)

The hardest part of returning isn't the jet lag. It's the gap between who everyone remembers you as and who you actually became. You've moved on. They've kept a placeholder version of you.

"Why do you go away? So that you can come back. So that you can see the place you came from with new eyes and extra colors. And the people there see you differently, too. Coming back to where you started is not the same as never leaving."

— Terry Pratchett, The Wee Free Men

Pratchett wrote this for children. It's the most honest thing I've found about living abroad. Leaving is a way of seeing more clearly, not just the new place but the one you left.

"Travel early and travel often. Live abroad, if you can. Understand cultures other than your own. As your understanding of other cultures increases, your understanding of yourself and your own culture will increase exponentially."

— Tom Freston

The "if you can" matters here. Not everyone has equal access to this kind of life. But if you have the window, even a temporary one, the compound interest of that perspective accrues for decades.

"Home is not just the place where you happen to be born. It's the place where you become yourself."

— Pico Iyer

After enough years abroad, this stops being a consoling thought and starts being a factual one. Home is constructed, not assigned. You can build it more than once.

Living abroad changed more than my address. If you're thinking about making the move, read [the advantages of living abroad](https://karenroldan.com/advantages-of-living-abroad/) and [the real challenges nobody talks about](https://karenroldan.com/challenges-of-living-abroad/) for the honest version.