Quotes About Heritage

I think we really forget how connected we are to the past.

For me, clothing has always been connected to history. That's what draws me in.

As a kid, I always felt connected to Africa; it was something I was very proud of.

I was born in Middletown, Connecticut, while my dad was getting his Ph.D. in ethnomusicology and anthropology at Wesleyan University.

I don't feel any connection to Russia.

I worry about children not having a sense of any direct connection to the past.

There are many people still ashamed of their roots because of the negative connotations that come with being an 'African.' That sentiment exists many places around the world - in England, in the U.S., everywhere.

The first light of human consciousness and the world's first civilizations were in Africa.

All great peoples are conservative.

I come from a very conservative background.

Growing up in England, I was constantly surrounded by the Arthurian legend.

My parents came from Calcutta. They arrived in Cambridge, much like the parents in my novel. And I found myself sort of caught between the world of my parents and the world they had left behind and still clung to, and also the world that surrounded me at school and everywhere else, as soon as I set foot out the door.

I grew up surrounded by both Haitian and Japanese culture.

My mom is a painter and photographer and my grandfather was an artist, so I've always been surrounded by creative people.

My mom was a singer, and my dad had been playing in bands with my mom's brother. My dad married my mom, and so I was sorta surrounded by music from the get-go. Born right into it.

One always goes back to one's childhood in the beginning, and I come from a very religious family and surrounding. Very religious.

My earliest recollections are of the teeming East Side where I was born. This Hester Street and its surrounding streets were the most densely populated of any city on Earth; and looking back at it, I realize what I owe to its unique and crowded humanity.

All Americans need a sense of place. That's what makes our physical surroundings worth caring about.

I don't think I related to the Irish Catholic surroundings that was my environment when I was growing up.

Survival, in the cool economics of biology, means simply the persistence of one's own genes in the generations to follow.

Good history is a question of survival. Without any past, we will deprive ourselves of the defining impression of our being.

I think any black woman is a queen. It's just, do you know it? Do you see it in yourself? Do you recognize it, do you abide by that, do you define yourself as that? Based on who we are and what we've been through and how we survive and where we stand, we are on kind of sacred ground. We stand on the backs of our ancestors.

You cannot survive if you do not know the past.

You don't restore 'The Last Supper' by filling in the missing bits - you preserve. You accept the material that has somehow survived.