Quotes About Belonging

The country I live in is never clear about its name. My passport says 'the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland,' and citizens of the U.K. may call themselves British, English, Scottish, Welsh or from Northern Ireland.

I see myself as a different sort of Welsh. Because we are from Cardiff, we see Wales as Cardiff. This is Wales; outside Cardiff is beyond. It's a strange one. You are really Welsh, but you're not, if you know what I mean.

I'd rather be Welsh than English, that's for sure.

I'm a hugely proud Welsh person. I just love it - it's something very special, being Welsh.

I have become a queer mixture of the East and the West, out of place everywhere, at home nowhere.

My parents are Jamaican immigrants and both have a multiracial background. They're Jamaican but my genetic makeup is West African, European, Asian.

In the West, we have been withdrawing from our tradition-, religion-, and even nation-centred cultures.

As a child of West Texas, I identify with Hispanic culture every bit as much as I do North American culture.

I can't imagine life without Poland. I find it very hard to find a place for myself in the West.

There is a whole host of people that have got an accent like mine, whether they're from Merseyside or Wales or the North West.

For many years I saw the world as two sides: east and west, two powers. And I was trying to search what is white, what is black. Both sides wanted me.

Southall Broadway, in west London, has been a constant part of my life from the day I arrived in England as a baby from Kenya in 1962. My parents rented a room in one of the terraces off the Broadway, and I've seen it change from an ordinary English high street to what is now 'Little India.' with a confident Asian community.

All my mates are West Ham supporters; I went there at 15.

We need to go everywhere. There is not one county in this state, I don't care how far west you go, that doesn't have Democrats. We have to be proud of who we are.

The generation that migrated to the West in the 1970s or 1960s has now lived more in the West than India, and India has changed so much. My parents fall into that category.

I never felt totally, 100%, patriotically English... I'd seen a lot of the world by an early age - sort of spent a lot of time traveling around Lebanon and I'd seen Babylon, and Damascus, and all sorts of places in the Middle East by the time I was ten. Then we'd return to Ruslip in West London... Done a fair bit of traveling really.

I consider myself West African, among other cultural identities, and a writer, among other creative ones.

I'm a native West Virginian and I've been called everything from a hillbilly to a stump jumper. I'm always proud of it; I'm very proud to be a West Virginian.

All my stories take place on the West Coast - not the beach, but smaller inland towns. I feel homesick, and I find inspiration in capturing that.

In a way, it's taken me 25 years to acknowledge that I am from the West Coast. I was always sort of pretending I was bicoastal or that I really belonged on the East Coast.

I'm so much more of an East Coast girl than a West Coast girl.

I had a hard time when I came back to Sweden and started school, because I looked different. And we moved to a really small town on the west coast of Sweden, and there were no brown people around. It didn't really get any better until I started music school at about 10 years old.

All the way on the West Coast, never having seen a Broadway show, it was like, 'They don't want me. There's nothing there for me.' I'd come to New York a lot and never even tried to see a Broadway show. There was no reason for me to do that.

It took me a long time to adapt to the West Coast. I lived eight years in New York before California and might have gone back. Then I discovered surfing. It's the California equivalent of ice hockey, I guess. It gave me a real sense of place.