Quotes About Belonging

We do not only have a Turkish side, inherited from our parents and our families, we were born and raised in Gelsenkirchen. It is a city with a high percentage of emigrants.

You still miss Turkish people, talking Turkish, you still miss your culture. That's why New York is the best place to be because everywhere you go there's Turkish people, your friends are here, you can go to eat Turkish food every day.

Because of our Turkish roots, we still have a very strong relationship with Turkey.

I have always found it jarring to encounter people born and raised in, say, Switzerland, who are denied its citizenship and still considered Algerians or Turks.

My father's father fought to free Crete from the Turks, who expelled my mother from her ancestral home in Asia Minor in 1922. So how could I stand aside from my country's troubles?

I was given an incredible gift growing up in the Chelsea, a space where it is completely fine to be yourself - you just had to figure out what that was. You didn't have to figure that out in the face of opposition at every turn.

My father was Greek, but he turned French during the war, and my mother was French. So I'm French, but I have Greek blood.

I never felt like I belonged in Minnesota when I was growing up there. That's why I was out the door as soon as I turned 18.

I really turned into, you know, the real street kid. I was kind of like a runaway, but I had a mother, you know what I mean, and I had a place to stay.

The fact is, I loved being English. I was very happy to be turned into an English schoolboy.

The more I come to recognize my story's place in God's grander Story, my once-bewildered questions are turning to psalms of thanksgiving at the wonder that I have been included in what He is doing.

TV is a medium where I've been an outsider for the most part.

The thing about working on a Ryan Murphy TV show is that he has such an extraordinary collective of artists, so everyone is really like a family.

When you're a guest star on a movie or a TV show, I always say it's like being invited to a family reunion, but it's not your family. So you don't belong - they're being nice to you, but you don't fit in completely; you don't know everybody's story. You don't have a history.

I grew up in a very, very diverse neighborhood back home in Maryland. And when I see that on TV shows, it makes me want to watch it, personally. I just gravitate towards that.

I spend all day replying to tweets and reblogging posts and sharing fan art. I think it's the most important thing I can possibly do, to stay involved in the community as a part of the community, not ahead of the community. I'm very much the same level of them in it.

I spent my late twenties and all of my thirties figuring out what I was supposed to be doing and where my home was.

My father was second-generation Chinese-American, born in 1923 in California. My mother emigrated to the States from China when she was in her early twenties, in part to escape the political turmoil in China.

I always feel quite Jewish but I used to deny it until I was in my twenties.

For most of the twentieth century, a Minnesotan abroad could fix his home state in the cosmos by invoking for his hosts the name Charles Lindbergh or Bob Dylan, native sons who were claimed by the world and never really returned to the Gopher State.

I was an immigrant twice, once from Egypt to Israel. Israel opened her arms and took me in. And America opened her arms, and I'm an American citizen now.

All my family look Irish. They act Irish. My sister even has red hair... it's crazy. I'm the one that doesn't seem Irish. None of the kids in my family, my siblings, speak with an Irish accent... we've never lived there full-time; we weren't born there. We just go there once or twice a year. It's weird. Our parents sound Irish, but we don't.

Religion is no longer a connection point for most people. Our communities were built on coming together in physical locations once a week or twice a week. These institutions have dissipated.

Everyone is concerned about his niche, his name, and wants to adapt the concept to so-called national characteristics. But at the end of the day, it's all the same.