Quotes About Belonging

My identity is not based on performance; it's based on something that's pre-determined by someone else, and I don't even understand what that is because I'm an African who came to America.

I have performed for people around the world but it is always a different feeling when you perform for your own people.

When I go onstage and am performing the way I want to... I finally feel like myself.

The thing I miss about performing is being with people.

LaGuardia High School is a place of acceptance. You have every type of kid there, performing. The outcast girl would not have been made fun of in my high school.

When I first started performing, the only community that truly got what I was trying to do was the LGBTQ community.

I was adopted without the benefit of papers. They used to hide adoption in the forties; I don't know why. Perhaps it was shameful. I could have been kidnapped - there are all kinds of crazy things that people have done - but I got over dealing with that a long time ago.

I loathe my name because it is mine and also because it is not mine; it is at once too intimate and seems to have no connection with me. Perhaps because the name is quite common, it never seems to fit me, or fit me alone. Nevertheless, when I see the name, I always feel a peculiar sense of shame.

I feel perhaps my heart is still in China.

I felt on the periphery of high school culture; one of those invisible creatures that walk the campus. I think it was a lot worse for my parents.

It's quite nice to have a place to leave things. You can be a permanent gypsy, but it's nice to go home.

Jews outside Israel live in permanent contradiction. I think they should come home.

I could easily make Nashville a permanent home.

When I look at my own work, I see love, loss, and loneliness. Part of it might be that I was an army brat. I moved around all the time. There was a sense of nothing being permanent.

When I came into the Perry family, it was just kind of one of those deals where they were the only family I had.

I grew up eating and loving Persian food, going to school, and everyone making fun of me.

I was Persian-American, but I hated bringing Persian food to school. I just didn't want to stand out in that way. I wanted to be like everybody else.

Few Iranians these days go through the fiction of calling themselves 'Persian.' Calling yourself Persian is a way of distancing themselves from Iran.

What does it mean to be Catholic and not a Catholic? I feel adrift, homeless. My Catholic imagination allows me to see the soul as a lit breath, seeking the divine. It persists.

You get to a new school, and you're the new guy, or you're the foreigner, or you're the guy with the funny accent. That first day at school was a whole new opportunity to create a new persona.

I've spent most of my life trying to wear a persona that didn't quite fit and when I started writing books, it was like finally becoming the right person.

If everyone is my brother, I have no brothers.

perché chi è cresciuto qui, per quanto possa sembrare impossibile a chi vi ha passato pochi giorni con gli occhi lacrimosi e la gola bruciante, ama il suo De-Efe di un amore viscerale ed appassionato...

In whatsoever countrey men are bred (I know not by what sweetnesse of it led), They nourish in their minds a glad desire, Unto their native homes for to retire