Quotes About Belonging

I still think of myself as from Illinois.

That image is a couple different people's homes that I knew growing up.

In the mind, in the heart, I was always home. I always imagined, really, going back home.

When I was little, I knew that I was not adopted, but I actually imagined and hoped that I was - and that my real parents were going to come get me.

Growing up in my mother's Pueblo household, I never imagined a world in which I would be represented by someone who looked like me.

When you walk into a room, and you're the only one of something - the only woman or the only African American - that immediate feeling of loneliness happens.

As soon as you say that there is a community called, let's say, black Americans, you've immediately created a boundary line - who's in that group, who's outside that group.

I've never been able to shake the idea of family, which is to say I've never been able to shake my family. Being membered - being one limb of an immense grosser body - that's always been a fact to me.

It's part of me, Scotland. I'm still immersed in it even though I am not there.

American literature has always been immigrant.

America was and is the immigrant's dream.

I became more interested in the idea of being an immigrant and particularly of being in a country you're not familiar with. And so I began reading migrants' stories. The fact that my father is Chinese - he emigrated from Malaysia when he was about 20 - may have had some bearing on my attraction to the subject.

I'm a first generation immigrant.

I - my experience was really no different from any other immigrant that came to this country. It was rough.

We just need more complex, important roles that tell our experiences as an immigrant; as someone with an accent, but also American; but also someone who's second or third-generation American, born and raised here who actually don't speak any language other than English.

I never did very well as an immigrant. I've lived in several countries and been a disaster everywhere.

We are all human beings, immigrant or non-immigrant. We all feel fear. We all love and become confused when we don't act as well as we would like to. We all get depressed and have feelings of uselessness. All of these things are true and have always been true.

In becoming an American, from Europe, what one has in common with that other immigrant is contempt for me-it's nothing else but color.

I'm an immigrant and I will stay an immigrant forever.

Considering our history, I can think of nothing more American than an immigrant.

I'm an immigrant and I've always wanted to write something about America.

I'm an immigrant. I came here when I was 3 months old.

We are an immigrant nation.

I knew I had to write about Canada. I just could not find in literature any examples of the immigrant experience that I've had.