Jhumpa Lahiri Quotes

I grew up in the States, but I go back to Brazil quite often, and a big part of me is very Brazilian, so there's a constant struggle between the two cultures within me. They're very different approaches to life.

Growing up in the U.S., I'd siloed off my identities. While I was an Indian at home, I was an American at school. I have now embraced both the identities.

I grew up very American but also fully Asian.

Sometimes we feel we straddle two cultures; at other times, that we fall between two stools.

I grew up having two different perspectives - one in English, one in Spanish. Two different cultures, very different - but I think that, to me, it's one. I'm just as American as I feel Latin.

I do think of myself very strongly as a New Zealander, but when I moved out to the States, I was aware that I didn't want to just live in a satellite community of only other New Zealanders.

I would go to school and be American and then come home and be Greek.

I grew up in a unique environment where I was immersed in both Japanese and American cultures equally.

In my 40s, the two cultures finally came to peace with one other inside me, and I have come to identify myself as both 100% Chinese and 100% American simultaneously.

In some ways I consider myself more Chinese, because I live in San Francisco, which is becoming a predominantly Asian city. I avoid falling into the black-and-white dialectic in which most of America still seems trapped. I have always recognized that, as an American, I am in relationship with other parts of the world; that I have to measure myself against the Pacific, against Asia. Having to think of myself in relationship to that horizon has liberated me from the black-and-white checkerboard.

I have always been in favor of a healthy Americanization, but that does not mean a complete disavowal of our German heritage. It means that our character should take on the best of that which is American, and combine it with the best of that which is German. By doing this, we can best serve the American people and their civilization.

I'm one of the millions of immigrant children, children of loneliness, wandering between worlds that are at once too old and too new to live in.

I often say to my friends that I felt too Puerto Rican to live in the States; then I felt too American to live in Puerto Rico. So when I settled back in Puerto Rico in 1992, I had to come to terms with all of that.

I have this internal cultural struggle where there's a side of me that is very Brazilian that misses the food and culture, and a side of me that's very American that really loves the structure and predictability here.

When I first moved from Shanghai when I was five, I just thought of myself as Chinese.

I think that a lot of the stories I would see was kids who are first-generation immigrants, watching them try to rip themselves from their family and their faith and kind of erase. I hadn't really seen anything where someone's trying to reconcile the two.

I feel like I've mixed my Middle Eastern and Western loves together.

My grandparents bowed to the Americans and sought to learn from them. My parents sought to be them.

I can be a mix of both. I don't have to be an Indian or an American. They're not mutually exclusive. It's something growing up I didn't know.

I grew up surrounded by both Haitian and Japanese culture.

I was born in Canada, and then my dad played pro soccer in England and then also on an island off the coast of Portugal. So we lived there for, like, 10 years. And then we moved to Minnesota. So I feel like I've experienced a lot of different cultures, and I'm still figuring out who I am.

I mix things from my Somali culture and my American side.

I have so much appreciation for how those two cultures have created who I am. I'm a full-blooded Brazilian, with an entire extended family of Brazilians, but I was born and raised in the U.S.

For me, being an 'American Latina' means identifying with and being influenced by both my American upbringing and my Latin heritage, and I have so much appreciation for how those two cultures have created who I am.

I mean, London has shaped me as a person. My parents are Nigerian so I've had the luxury of blending different cultures together just through my everyday life.