Quotes About Heritage

My grandfather was extremely dark and from Puerto Rico, but his brother had blond hair and blue eyes. There are so many different shades, and I think Hollywood has yet to realize that.

We have our roots in country, and that's our foundation, but we pull from a lot.

My roots are in Paris, and I will not pull them up.

We want to pull out songs from the American song book, and we want to make them palatable for a modern audience.

It would be great if people could guess right off that I am Japanese-Finnish-American. But then I'd have to be wearing a kimono and pulling a reindeer.

It's a bit naff, but there is something exciting about pulling a bit of pottery out of the ground that's 2,000 years old.

I cut 'Diamond in My Crown' in my home in Georgia, because I wanted to use an old 1848 pump organ that my mother-in-law had gotten for Emory for Christmas one year. His mother would be proud to know that pump organ was made use of.

I grew up in the northernmost parts of New Jersey, known more for lush forests and old farmland than industrial wastelands and fist pumping.

Ain't nobody more punk rock than Robert Johnson, Lead Belly, even Little Richard.

My identity is linked to my grandmother, who's pure Filipino, as pure as you can probably get. And that shaped my imagination. So that's how I identify.

I don't think there is only one Arab culture or a pure Arabness. We are very multiple, especially our generation, which is very multilayered.

We twentieth-century Mexicans, even those of pure Indian descent, look on the pre-Columbian world as a world on the other side, not only distant in time but across the cultural divide.

One time, I went to school, and they asked us all to find out where our roots were. It's goin' around the class, and the kids were going, 'I'm Swedish-German' or 'I'm English-Irish.' They got to me and I said, 'Pure Kentuckian.'

Pure dance form is not dying.

I love old-time music, I love country music and I love the American music that we have to offer the world. And any part of that is fine with me, as long as it's pure.

It's impossible to be ethnically pure.

There is one day that is ours. Thanksgiving Day is the one day that is purely American.

When we find a ship, we turn it over to the state or federal government. It's purely historical. I've never made a dime on any of it.

I just feel that 'The Color Purple,' which was my 10th book, was a true gift from my ancestors.

A characteristic of older folksongs, in most cases, is that we don't know their composers or authors. Older folksongs were written often with no commercial purpose in mind. They were passed down by word of mouth, from generation to generation.

We have to preserve it and use it sustainably. And the short-term use of resources at the destruction of the long-term heritage of this country is not a policy that we can pursue.

Two of my grandfathers had been artists, lifelong oil painters, so I was exposed to art very young. I've always been interested in it, although I never pursued it as a career or even as an avocation.

I obeyed my parents' rules inside our Chinese household while I pursued my dreams in the American world outside.

In the Sanghi family, there is no one who has undertaken intellectual pursuits.