Quotes About Heritage

I've learned that for Indian people, the opportunity for us to succeed is very slim. So acting was a great tool for that. And in the process of learning about my culture, I've learned how to connect myself again to my ancestors.

The Parthenon without the marbles is like a smile with a tooth missing.

My mom had Julia Child and 'The Fannie Farmer Cookbook' on top of the refrigerator, and she had a small repertoire of French dishes.

I decided to finish at Oxford because I looked up at the top of the buildings - the gargoyles and spires - and decided to stay.

My mom was a folk singer and Celtic harpist. My dad was in a barbershop quartet and my great grandma was an opera singer. As I grew up, I discovered pop music and Top 40 radio, but it was in the '90s, so music was very different then - it was really lyrical.

It was very hard for me, for most of my life, to feel American, or call myself American, and that is a very complicated topic that would require a very long conversation.

I think one big thing with food and race that is a hot topic is cultural appropriation.

I don't think you can separate a place from its history. I think a place is much more than the bricks and mortar that go into its construction. I think it's more than the accidental topography of the ground it stands on.

People expect someone with the name 'Israel Horovitz' to be a little old man with sideburns carrying a Torah.

The Land of Israel goes with the Torah of Israel under the sovereignty of the State of Israel.

I fought tooth and nail: I didn't want to learn Hebrew. My Bar Mitzvah came around, and I didn't want to read the Torah portion. I look back with a lot of chagrin about how I behaved.

We pay homage to the people who came before, doing satires, like Mel Brooks; we're just carrying the torch.

I had to get to the point where I just had to embrace carrying the torch for the traditional girls out there. I love representing the traditional black woman.

B.B. King wanted people to carry the torch. He wanted people to keep that music alive, and he would talk about it.

Toronto is a very multicultural city, a place of immigrants, like my parents.

Canada is a country of ingredients without a cuisine; we're a country with musicians without an indigenous instrument; Toronto's a city that doesn't even have a dish named after it.

I always say in my camps in Africa, in everything we do, 'My name is Masai and I'm from Nigeria.' My name is Masai and I'm from Nigeria. It's plain and simple. If you're from La Loche or you are from Toronto you should be proud of it.

We immigrated when I was 3 1/2 years old, to Toronto. But I'm still very, very close to my culture and - back home in Egypt.

I was tossed all over the place growing up, which I guess prepared me for the music business, but the one thing that has always been there, that has never ever left me, has been country music.

The other aspect of American identity worth focusing on is the concept of America as a nation of immigrants. That certainly is a partial truth. But it is often assumed to be the total truth.

Israelis are the total Jews.

We are a total of our sum parts, right? I came from a family of very strong women - black women. And if I go back as far as my great grandmothers, there was always that love and the ability to be nurturing. Then I grew up in a household where my father was the one who was more affectionate with me.

I know Ritchie Valens in 1959 had 'La Bamba' but to be totally Spanish - because, you know, Ritchie didn't speak Spanish - but to be a total Latin artist like myself, to be out in a field where there weren't any categories for Latinos... I felt good that I was maybe - I didn't know it at the time - but I felt good that I opened the door.

how he hated the word "homeland"; it sounded just one step shy of "fatherland"—