Quotes About Heritage

I think that anyone who denies their heritage doesn't deserve their destiny. My grandmother was a maid. She put nine children - eight of them - through college; I did not finish college.

All of my dishes kind of have the same thing going on - I'm always going to give you the same things that I grew up with or that my mom used to make. I'm not going to use nitrogen in my tacos.

Culture knows no boundaries.

I wanted a name on my shirt that represented who I am, and I feel I have no connection with the Alli surname.

I have no nationality, no country.

I'm Cuban. Both my parents are Cuban. My grandparents are, too. Although I have no idea where Fit comes from.

Foreigners have no idea of the diversity of India and its culture. We hope to be able to give them a glimpse of that diversity.

Maybe if I go far enough back into my ancestry, I have African roots or something. I've got no idea.

April 25th is DNA Day. I know, you probably had no idea.

There's no point apologizing about where you come from.

I was always a little unsteady in my self-belief. Then there was the Jewish thing. I love being Jewish, I have no problem with it at all. But it did become like a scar, with all these people saying you don't look it.

I'm in fact Australian but my mother's English so I've got no problem playing a domineering English woman.

The identity of the Filipino today is of a person asking what is his identity.

Identity is the history that has gone into bone and blood and reshaped the flesh. Identity is not what we were but what we have become what we are at this moment.

Before 1521 we could have been anything and everything not Filipino; after 1565 we can be nothing but Filipino.

Mitochondrial genes act like a female surname, which enables us to trace our ancestry down the female line in the way some families try to trace their descent down the male line from William the Conqueror, or Noah, or Mohammed.

She knew them by their thick woven cloaks, their hanging hair and beards, and their Anglisc voices: words drumming like apples spilt over wooden boards, round, rich, stirring. Like her father's words, and her mother's, and her sister's. Utterly unlike Onnen's otter-swift British or the dark liquid gleam of Irish. Hild spoke each to each. Apples to apples, otter to otter, gleam to gleam, though only when her mother wasn't there.

The whole afternoon might go by without our saying a word. If we do talk, we might never speak in Yiddish. The words of our childhood became strangers to us--we couldn't use them in the same way and so we chose not to use them at all. Life demanded a new language.

Once or twice a year I attended the English Romantic conferences held throughout Europe, brief gatherings perhaps not dissimilar in feeling for the participants than the feeling Jews have when they get off the plane in Israel: the relief of at last being surrounded on all sides by your own kind--the relief and the horror.

Why do people always have to be named after dead people? If they had to be named after anything at all, why can't it be things, which have more permanence, like the sky or the sea, or even ideas...?

I took a drink, wiping my mouth with the back of my hand, repeating the gesture that was made a hundred times by my father and his father and his father's father, eyes half closed as the sharpness of the alcohol replaced the sharpness of grief.

I love China! I love my country even though it is not always good ro right,' my daughter proclaimed in a firm voice. Her words brought tears to my eyes. I also had a deep and abiding love for the land of my ancestors even though, because of my class status, I had become an outcast.

Our ancestors pay the price for who we are

We cannot leave it to history as a discipline nor to sociology nor science nor economics to tell the story of our people