Quotes About Heritage

accent, as many Europeans

Kezia had the satiny delicacy of her mother and the sheer strength of her father.

It appears your son was 85 percent curry!

You like Nick a lot, don't you, Nora? Dorothy asked. He's an old Greek fool, but I'm used to him. Charles isn't a Greek name. It's Charalambides, I explained. When the old man came over, the mugg that put him through Ellis Island said Charalambides was too long...too much trouble to write... and whittled it down to Charles. It was all right with the old man; they could have called him X so they let him in.

The best way to learn Japanese is to be born as a Japanese baby, in Japan, raised by a Japanese family.

I was born in a hovel on the banks of the Tyne, as so many of us were back then.

inherited along with her dark good looks.

Well, that's my problem, isn't it? J'ai perdu la beauté de ma culture. Je suis américaine maintentant.

The white men had basically crapped all over the only race that could call itself indigenous in America.

Americans have had to work through the meaning of their Civil War in its rightful place- in the politics of memory. And as long as we have a politics of race in America, we will have a politics of Civil War Memory

The thing that mostly gets in the way of dialogue," he says, "is holding to assumptions and opinions, and defending them." This instinct to judge and defend, embedded in the selfdefense mechanisms of our biological heritage, is the source of incoherence.

It's a tradition: The Stick. Something so much an extension of you deserves a sobriquet.

I'm no Armenian. I'm an American. Well, the truth is I am both and neither. I love Armenia and I love America and I belong to both, but I am only this: an inhabitant of the earth, and so are you, whoever you are. I tried to forget Armenia but I couldn't do it.

Although I write in English, and despite the fact that I'm from America, I consider myself an Armenian writer. The words I use are in English, the surroundings I write about are American, but the soul, which makes me write, is Armenian. This means I am an Armenian writer and deeply love the honor of being a part of the family of Armenian wrtiters.

To Armenians, half Armenians, quarter Armenians, and one-eight Armenians. Sixteen and thirty-second Armenians, and other winners, are likelier to be happy with a useful book

A man's ethnic identity has more to do with a personal awareness than with geography.

My uncle Khosrove became very irritated and shouted, It's no harm. What is the loss of a horse? Haven't we all lost the homeland? What is this crying over a horse?

To think but nobly of my grandmother: Good wombs have borne bad sons.

My father's brother, but no more like my father Than I to Hercules.

Our home was in a beautiful valley far back in the rugged Ozarks. The country was new and sparsely settled. The land we lived on was Cherokee land, allotted to my mother because of the Cherokee blood that flowed in her veins. It lay in a strip from the foothills of the mountains to the banks of the Illinois River in northeastern Oklahoma.

Of all the small nations of this earth, perhaps only the ancient Greeks surpass the Scots in their contribution to mankind.

Without tradition, art is a flock of sheep without a shepherd. Without innovation, it is a corpse.

People who brag of their ancestors are like root vegetables. All their importance is underground.

in the best society hardly anyone can be certain who their father is.