Quotes About Belonging

I talk about religion because it's one of the ways human beings find power and belonging. Religion is more than just that - I think faith traditions give us ways to talk about experiences of the numinous, too - but power and belonging are a big part of it.

I'm so proud to be a Latina. Growing up and being Latina and growing up with my father and getting to do a lot of the Hispanic traditions, I loved it.

Traditions are our roots and a profile of who we are as individuals and who we are as a family. They are our roots, which give us stability and a sense of belonging - they ground us.

Third-generation Indians love maintaining their cultural traditions, but they can also go down the pub, shop till they drop, do whatever anyone else does.

I like the idea that something happens to everybody who comes to L.A. - whether they are Mexican, Irish, black, or hillbillies. You come here, and you leave all your traditions behind. And since there's no traditions here, you just make one up.

I am very happy that TV is going back to where we belong and what we believe in, the traditions.

One side of my family cooked this way, talked this way, celebrate this way, traditions is this way, and then one of the sides is different, and as a kid, I was just confused and kind of had to find my way in my identity.

A lot of mixed-race stories are these navel-gazing, horrible accounts of mulatto tragedy.

After my bar mitzvah, I started to assimilate, to really not pay attention to my roots. The anti-Semitic experiences of my youth had been very painful. You try to put all that in the past and become a person of the world. I think that's the right thing to do. But it's not right to leave out who you really are. That's a tragedy.

I find myself increasingly forced to think of my ethnic identity instead of the national identity I adopted as a boy in 1976. That is discomfiting for me, and a tragedy for America.

At Harvard I was taking an African-American studies class, and we were reading about the tragic mulatto. Invariably, the tragic mulatto can't fit in either world and flings herself off a bridge. So I'm reading, and I'm like, 'Oh, my God, I think I'm in literature,' but my life was never like that.

I've lived in a trailer park.

I grew up in a lot of different homes when I was younger: my parents rented trailers and small, boxy houses set high on cement block pillars.

I spent ten years in London; I trained there. But because I started in English, it kind of feels the most natural to me, to act in English, which is a strange thing. My language is Spanish; I grew up in Argentina. I speak to my family in Spanish, but if you were to ask me what language I connect with, it'd be English in some weird way.

I wasn't completely comfortable in the footy culture because I wasn't that comfortable in my own skin, which I am now. I'd fit in better now, but I don't miss the training and the injuries you get playing footy.

Growing up in this post-apartheid era, the first generation of teens in South Africa living in this new democracy, I often found myself feeling different. I was often the only person of color in an otherwise all-white school. And within the Indian community, because of my training with an English acting teacher, my accent was very different.

I obviously felt a very strong need to be a part of a family. Looking at trains and thinking 'These kids are writing their names from one end of the city to the other,' I finally felt like I'd found one.

I've been called a traitor a few times in my life by some of my countrymen.

We have people around the world who live in the United States, and these people don't deserve to be called traitors.

When I go to Brazil, I feel like an American, and in the U.S., I always notice the traits that make me Brazilian.

I so desperately wanted to fit in. There was a trajectory, and obviously, our society tells us that you go to high school, you graduate, and then you go to college, and from there, you get an internship, you get a job, and some people study abroad, and there are so many things you see that you desperately want to be a part of.

If a group of people feels that it has been humiliated and that its honour has been trampled underfoot, it will want to express its identity and this expression of an identity will take different shapes and forms.

Not only was I the only black kid and the only poor kid, but my parents were transcendental meditation devotees, and I live in an ashram for a good portion of my childhood.

Sports is something that transcends generations, transcends backgrounds, cultures, races. And so the power of sports is real.