Quotes About Identity

It was sort of an experiment to try to leave the violin. Can I be a real person without this thing? It was a big part of my identity.

Well, my main instrument is violin, but I think of myself as a songwriter who happens to play violin.

I mean, I'm a Ukrainian immigrant from Brooklyn who grew up dancing and playing the violin!

I'm not going to play my violin, but with my dwarfism, I'm a bit of a mutant.

I guess as a kid, I was always creative, and I was involved in music, like piano and violin and choir, so I always knew - I always knew that I wanted to do something that would allow me to be who I am. Generally, that was creatively, imaginatively.

I've played the violin since I was seven but stopped because there was a stage when it became 'uncool'. I was listening to Nirvana and wanted to play the guitar, so I ditched the violin.

My grandma has a picture of Louis Farrakhan playing violin in her house.

I was the kid who didn't speak English, with a violin and ballroom dance shoes.

I was leaving my violin out of a lot of songs, and that's a strange thing to do because I've been playing the violin since I was 2. It's a part of me. Adding pedals and sounds is great because I get to play the instrument I feel most comfortable on and the one I feel gives my truest expression when I'm making a solo or anything like that.

There are people that have that confidence, who march into VIP areas. I assume I won't get in. I don't say, 'Do you know who I am?', but sometimes I'm with someone who says it for you. Then, I pretend to be all, 'Oh, please don't shame me!'.

My family is Chinese-Taiwanese. I'm from Richmond, Virginia. The community in which I grew up was pretty white. The storybooks you got at school featured white children and an animal, or animals, and as you got older, the novels you were assigned were about, like, the problems of white boys and their dogs.

If I ever felt like I was getting lost in the hurricane that was storming around Nirvana, I'd just go back to Virginia.

Virginia is a good start for Italy.

I was just a bumpkin. Just a country bumpkin. I had just come to New York from Virginia. Or was it Baltimore?

Sister Virginia used to say, 'You'll be known by the company you keep.'

I'm from Middlesboro, Ky., a little town on the Tennessee and Virginia border.

I love the area I grew up in, which is right outside D.C., in Alexandria, Virginia.

In 1979, when I was toddler, the Russians invaded Afghanistan, and my whole family fled to Vienna, Virginia. Far from home, my parents were determined to raise my two sisters and me according to Afghan traditions.

I grew up in Florida in different cities. I was born in Mississippi. My parents moved a lot, so I moved to Tennessee, Alabama, South Carolina, Virginia, all through the South. But my family's roots were from central Florida, like Daytona Beach area, so we ended up moving there.

My secret world had been invaded, and the attractive figure of Tiptree - he did strike several people as attractive - was revealed as nothing but an old lady in Virginia.

I write about Texas, New York, California and Virginia, and they're all important places in my repertoire.

When you say you're from Virginia, when you travel outside of this state and somebody asks where you're from, you say with pride, 'I am from Virginia. I'm very, very proud of it.' You're very, very proud of it. And why is it? It's because of our history, folks. It's because of our history.

I attended a middling high school in central Virginia in the mid-'90s, so there were no lofty electives to stoke my artistic sensibility - no A.P. art history or African-American studies or language courses in Mandarin or Portuguese. I lived for English, for reading.

I know I wore number 70 in high school, and then when I got to Virginia Tech, I decided to go with the No. 78, and from that point, I just fell in love with and I wanted to make that number special.