Quotes About Belonging

I stuck out more in an English public school than I would have had I marched in a May Day parade with the Red Army in Moscow or sashayed the Yves St. Laurent catwalk with supermodels or hunted seals with the Inuit or - well, you get the idea.

The Chinese Student Association at Cornell put together their own play. It was all Asian people in the cast except for me, because they wanted to do a couple of scenes about an interracial relationship. I was the only non-Asian person on stage; the entire audience was Asian apart from my 10 friends that showed up.

I do not belong to this world. I continue to write everything in longhand. If I have to see something on the Internet, I ask my secretary or students. I am lucky, because I have people who do it for me.

I was born in Beijing and raised in England and America. I studied political science in college and film in graduate school in New York.

I lived in the studio apartment that I bought for four years before I bought it in 1989, so I was already in it. I began living there in 1985, so I've had the same address and phone number since then.

Growing up, I thought I was white. It didn't occur to me I was Asian-American until I was studying abroad in Denmark and there was a little bit of prejudice.

I always thought I wasn't cool enough in school, I was in the 'nerd' crew. I actually enjoyed studying.

A friend of mine at the American Enterprise Institute says there are two parties: the silly party and the stupid party. I'm too old for the silly party, so I had to join the stupid party.

My parents moved around Stockton and Lodi. I had a lot of anxiety about jumping into another classroom. They were always putting me in special ed. But I was smart; I wasn't like these kids in the special-ed classes. But it would make me feel a little bit stupid.

The Jews integrated themselves into American life to the point that the argument that the Jews aren't American sounded so stupid, that people stopped thinking it.

I don't think I ever felt an outsider when I had a stutter.

I always thought that there was something in hip-hop culture that was the misfit of all the musical styles, where they didn't really belong. They're kind of like, 'No, we're a real culture! We're not going anywhere, you can't get rid of us!' I really liked that there was a rebelliousness about it. I connected with that.

My interest in writing about American history stemmed originally, I think, from a subconscious desire to find roots - I felt like a girl without a country. I have put down roots quite firmly by now, but in the process, I have discovered the joys of research and am probably hooked.

My personal experience has been that in my free bohemian subculture, I'm not unique.

I realized that I was African when I came to the United States. Whenever Africa came up in my college classes, everyone turned to me. It didn't matter whether the subject was Namibia or Egypt; I was expected to know, to explain.

It's about, I did talk about my life in broad strokes and what home meant to me in order to really explore the subject of home and can you go back and what that means for people in that sense of community that we've lost.

I sometimes feel like a British writer more so than I feel like an American writer. But I think that has to do with my subjective understanding of what it means to be either of those things.

Identity is becoming more dependent on what people are willing subscribe to and less dependent on objective criteria such as skin colour or where they're born. Ways of identifying blackness are no longer black or white. It's not a case of us or them, you can now be us and them; like them but different.

I always feel like you should walk into a room or walk down the street, like you belong. That's the philosophy that I always try to subscribe to.

Canada is the essence of not being. Not English, not American, it is the mathematic of not being. And a subtle flavour - we're more like celery as a flavour.

I'm a Londoner, and I feel I can't live anywhere but London, but I feel more connected to Ireland as a country. I 'get' Irish people and the humour here, which is more subtle.

I hate the term black sheep, but I just felt like I wasn't keeping up. It was a subtle pressure I put on myself.

By the time I was 5, I was already an outcast. It was the early 1960s, and I was part of the only Jewish family in a decidedly Christian suburb of Waltham, Mass.

My parents decided - because they were not going to teach us anything Jewish at home - to send both me and my sister to a Jewish primary school. So I went to Kerem Primary School in Hampstead Garden Suburb. But, for me, that school really didn't work that well.