" The expatriate mentality is a tough thing to explain easily. Any affluent or even middle-class American who renounces the good life of sushi delivery and 50-channel cable television to relocate permanently to some third-world hole usually has to be motivated by a highly destructive personality defect. Either that, or something about home creates psychological demons that in turn create the urge for radical escape.

I’d moved overseas straight out of college and been a classic expatriate ever since. I had all the symptoms: periodic unsuccessful attempts to repatriate, a tendency to try to make grandiose foreign adventures compensate for a total inability to accumulate money; bad teeth; unhealthy personal relationships, etc. I’d been aware for years that my passion for uprooting and completely changing my lifestyle and even my career was like a drug addiction – not only did I get off on it, but I needed to do it fairly regularly just to keep from getting the shakes. "

― , The Exile: Sex, Drugs, and Libel in the New Russia