Quotes About Heritage

The bar for loud family meals is set pretty high when you come from Portugal.

Because of my Portuguese heritage, I have an interest in all of the instrumentation that comes from Portugal and Brazil as well.

My daughter's Portuguese.

If you ask me where do I belong, it would be somewhere in the Irish Sea almost - born in Hong Kong, Chinese mother, Portuguese father from Macao, lived in Europe most of my life.

We, Portuguese, make this country very big.

Growing up biracial and speaking four languages - French, Chinese, Portuguese, and English - gave me a different lens. I was always very acutely aware of coming from a different perspective. I think that definitely contributed to what I chose to do with my life.

I'm English. I've never said the opposite. I'm 100 per cent English. In Portugal it happens that a lot of Brazilians play for Portugal and they're not Portuguese.

It's part of my DNA as a Portuguese. Like many of my ancestors, there's that need to discover the world - exploration is in my blood.

We might think we don't, but everyone descends from native Brazilians. When Portuguese arrived here, everyone was native Brazilians, so I have that in my blood.

I grew up with a posh English accent, and all my aunts sounded as if they came out of a Merchant Ivory movie.

I do speak well as I went to a posh school. But I come from no real breeding.

Neither money nor position can atone to me for low birth.

I would never want to deny my Mennonite background and culture; I'll always feel like and be identified as a Mennonite and therefore possess that little extra authority on our beliefs. I also see myself as a Canadian writer.

I was interested with exploring the idea of who gets to be in possession of the land - how it's sometimes impossible to go back home, how family can be the thing that drags you down.

Even the poorest in Israel are looked upon as freemen who have lost their possessions, for they are the sons of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.

My childhood memories include a time when the government confiscated my family's possessions and exiled us to a camp in the B.C. Interior, just because my grandparents were from Japan.

To me, a Harris Tweed jacket is the kind of thing you should be able to have in your closet years from now - possibly it was your father's jacket or, even better, your grandfather's jacket.

My dad is Japanese; he was an art director there. My mom is half-English, half-Argentinian. They met in Japan in the '70s. Her parents were diplomats posted there.

There is this myth, that America is a melting pot, but what happens in assimilation is that we end up deliberately choosing the American things - hot dogs and apple pie - and ignoring the Chinese offerings.

By growing up in Alabama, I had a melting pot of the whole pie: R&B, gospel, country.

My own personal melting pot has no room for Hendrix or heavy metal, filled as it is with European ancestors such as Debussy, Sibelius, Bartok, Lutoslawski, and Ligeti.

The best thing about being from Britain is that it's a melting pot of cultures, characters, and creativity. I couldn't imagine coming from anywhere else.

My family's very, very mixed. I am, I guess, a kind of melting pot in a person.

I'm a bit of a melting pot, I try to speak British, but there's some European lilt - a not-so-conventional one because I'm Belgian, from the Flemish part. Dutch was my mother language, and I learned English, and I speak French, too.