Quotes About Heritage

My dear brother Barack Obama has a certain fear of free black men. As a young brother who grows up in a white context, brilliant African father, he's always had to fear being a white man with black skin. All he has known culturally is white. He has a certain rootlessness, a deracination.

Think of your forefathers and posterity.

My little hobby. Book Collecting. And yet, old friends, books do not age as you and I do. They will speak still when we are gone, to generations we will never see. Yes, the books must survive. -Bulldog

And yet, old friend, books do not age as you and I do. They will speak still when we are gone, to generations we will never see. Yes, the books must survive.

Kurt Cobain] had a lot of German in him. Some Irish. But no Jew. I think that if he had had a little Jew he would have [expletive] stuck it out.

There are so many of us now that we threaten to devour the world with our touching, starting with the things we adore most. At the same time, we obviously yearn for contact, and I fear what would happen if we were cut off from a distinctive, on-the-ground relationship with the past.

We're Irish, Jake, which means heredity carries us halfway to madness smack out of the womb.

I've started looking at my own father a bit funny. He assures me, though, that I really am the son of a Scottish postman.

There is no Thanksgiving back in the old country where I come from. You know why? Because being thankful is a sin.

I think insanity runs in the family. Hell, it practically gallops.

When an old man dies, a library burns to the ground." "Voltaire?" I shook my head. "An old African proverb.

Most Indians don't identify themselves as American particularly, but as members of nations unto themselves." She looked at me blankly. "A nation, like a tribe.

There's only one London. That's it. We are what we are.

Living history is thrilling, especially in an eloquent city, in a talkative town, in a place where people fought to get here, fought to stay here, fought to get out.

My lands are where my dead lie buried.

One does not sell the earth upon which the people walk.

Americanah; Ayad Akhtar, American Dervish; Julia Alvarez, How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents; Sandra Cisneros, The House on Mango Street; Junot Díaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao; Teju Cole, Open City; William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying; Nell Freudenberger, The Newlyweds; Cristina García, Dreaming in Cuban and King of Cuba; Chang-rae Lee, Native Speaker.

Some people think we don't have the rightTo say it's my countryBefore they give in they'd rather fuss and fightThan say it's my countryI've paid three hundred years or moreOf slave-driving sweat and welts on my backThis is my country

If we blow into the narrow end of the shofar, we will be heard far. But if we choose to be Mankind rather than Jewish and blow into the wider part, we will not be heard at all; for us America will have been in vain.

You can never tell how genes ricochet.

No, non imiterò mai coloro che cancellano le proprie tracce, ripudiano il proprio passato e sono morti, anche se con equilibrismi intellettuali fanno finta di essere vivi. Le mie radici sono laggiù, all'Est, su questo non v'è alcun dubbio. Anche se trovo difficile e spiacevole spiegare chi sono, bisogna pur tentare di farlo.

alla fin fine, bisogna saper apprezzare i vantaggi che si traggono dalle proprie origini.

You who think of us: they lived only in delusion... Know that we the People of the Book, will never die!

being the woman that i am will make a way out of no way..[these are the words of all women of color who assert who they are, who create sound out of silence, and who build worlds out of remnants. (282