Quotes About Identity

Indian-Americans are physicians, engineers, CEOs, professors, teachers, entrepreneurs. They are a vital part of the United States' economic and social fabric. Because of this long history, the bonds among our people and our cultures will remain strong.

By 12, my body had changed, although instead of blossoming into Cindy Mancini from 'Can't Buy Me Love,' I more closely resembled Chunk from 'The Goonies.' My inside world may have been filled with a poetic and vital feminine life force, but the outside world saw and told me otherwise.

When my novels are packaged as exclusively for women, I'm not only cut off from a vital portion of my audience but clearly labelled as an author the literary establishment is free to dismiss.

Early in my career, playing a character was vital. I had to be Thomas Penmanship because I couldn't be Tommaso because he is a shy kid, so I had to create an alter-ego.

Public conversations about who we are and who we want to be are key to the vitality of our democracy, and leaders can seed those conversations when they speak out their own views.

My vigor, vitality and cheek repel me. I am the kind of woman I would run from.

I always felt slightly grubbier than most American people. I was never quite as groomed as everyone else, never quite as fit as anyone else. I didn't have my protein shake and my vitamins.

My memories of being nine or ten years old are especially vivid, since this is the time when you have a real sense of who you are - before the self-conscious preteen years start.

I had studied Irish history. I had read speeches from the dock. I had tried to fuse the vivid past of my nation with the lost spaces of my childhood. I had learned the battles, the ballads, the defeats. It never occurred to me that eventually the power and insistence of a national tradition would offer me only a new way of not belonging.

Giving in to your ego is one of the oldest stories in the showbiz book. But so is figuring out how to stay vivid.

No matter what you eventually become - free, empowered - the lingering feeling of 'once an outsider, always an outsider' is very vivid for me.

I vividly remember hearing the car pull into the driveway and looking into the mirror on my mom's vanity with a face full of makeup and the counter below me a mess; it sent me into complete panic mode. From there, I would steal bits of makeup where I could to start my own little collection and play in my bedroom with the door locked.

I vividly remember D'Angelo's 'How Does it Feel?' as a song I listened to around the time I came out.

What I remember most vividly was the sense of always being a little behind the other kids in class - that sense of I wasn't cut out for class or I wasn't cut out to read.

I remember very vividly being little and bringing my lunch to school and taking out what was my to-die-for treats from home, whether it was pig ears or dried seaweed, and the reactions of my classmates just hurt, down to my core.

When I say dirt-poor, I mean Mom made maybe $25,000 a year. I remember buying milk with food stamps. Vividly. So, growing up, I was the minority.

I remember at school one day there was a vocabulary list on the chalkboard, and the word 'nonconformist' was on there, and it said, 'Someone that doesn't appeal to society, someone who doesn't fit in.' We had this whole conversation about it, and I realized it cohered to the punk-rock world that I was into.

In Greek mythology, the hero wants to be great, but the very concept does not exist in the Indian vocabulary. Yet it has become the global template. And it's a template that won't fit in India.

I'm sure I went through a stage when I resented being Indian because in every other manner, in terms of cultural reference points and vocabulary and all the rest of it, I was way ahead of everybody else - so the one thing that set me back was being Indian. And I couldn't do anything about it.

People are complex. You can be smart and still look hot. You can be a punk rocker yet have a refined vocabulary. It's all about this mashup that makes us who we are and I think that's a beautiful thing.

I think the most overused words in our vocabulary in the South are black and white.

I was probably just trying to be Dennis Miller, but without the vocabulary to actually be Dennis Miller. I guess I was just less interesting than I am now, if I am interesting at all.

All my life, people have made fun of the way I speak. I guess because a lot of my vocabulary is made up of things that other people say. I started making fun of them and imitating them and now that's how I speak.

To see yourself on the big screen, you're big, you hate your voice, your vocabulary. You say the same words, you speak bad.