You can become an artist. Commit suicide. Adopt a new name, a new country, a new language.

“Literature allows us to cross the borders -- as imaginary as they are indispensable -- which circumscribe and define our selves. Reading, we allow other people to enter us -- and if we make room for them so willingly, it's because we know them already. The novel celebrates our miraculous capacity to recognize others in ourselves, and ourselves in others.”
― Nancy Huston, Losing North: Essays on Cultural Exile

“All sorts of behaviour can be inspired by self-hatred. You can become an artist. Commit suicide. Adopt a new name, a new country, a new language.
All of the above (Romain Gary).”
― Nancy Huston, Losing North: Essays on Cultural Exile

“The truth is that all of us have multiple identities -- if only because all of us were children once, then teenagers, and are these things no longer, yet are them still.”
― Nancy Huston, Losing North: Essays on Cultural Exile

“The problem, of course, is that languages are not only languages. They're also worldviews -- and therefore, to some extent, untranslatable ...”
― Nancy Huston, Losing North: Essays on Cultural Exile

“You've got to pay visits to your memories from time to time. You've got to feed them, take them out and air them, show them around, tell them to other people or to yourself. If you don't, they waste away.”
― Nancy Huston, Losing North: Essays on Cultural Exile

“People in exile are rich -- rich with the accumulated sum of their contradictory identities.”
― Nancy Huston, Losing North: Essays on Cultural Exile

“A person who decides, voluntarily, as an adult, unconstrained by outside circumstances, to leave her native land and adopt a hitherto unfamiliar language and culture, has to face the fact that for the rest of her life she will be involved in theatre, imitation, make-believe.”
― Nancy Huston, Losing North: Essays on Cultural Exile

“Who am I, in French? I really don't know -- a bit of everything, perhaps.”
― Nancy Huston, Losing North: Essays on Cultural Exile