George Michael Quotes

Ultimately, my connection to my Indian-ness comes back to my mom and dad. They would all tell me and my siblings stories about their life in India, so it was very close to my two brothers and my sister and I.

My father grew up in Brooklyn, N.Y., with my grandparents. In Norwegian my name is pronounced 'Yoo' but my father used to call me 'Joe.'

My grandfather was a chef for a Baron in Sicily before he came to America. I grew up with him. I used to do my homework at one end of the kitchen table while he cooked at the other end.

People have told me to change it over the years, but my dad is always saying, 'Never change your name!' My middle name is O'Hara, so it's a pretty epic name. Emily O'Hara Ratajkowski.

I have always lived abroad, but inside my family, we always speak in Bosnian and preserve all the Bosnian traditions. So it's always inside me, always in my heart.

I was born into a Greek family, and it was instilled in me not only to be passionate about the culture but also to be freaky loyal.

I've always been Ralphie, ever since I was a kid. My grandfather was Ralph. It suits me better to be Ralphie.

My grandma loves beauty pageants, like most of Latin American culture, but it's not for me.

Before I was nine I had learned the basic canon of Arab life. It was me against my brother; me and my brother against our father; my family against my cousins and the clan; the clan against the tribe; and the tribe against the world and all of us against the infidel.

Orthodox Jews often ask you: "Are you an Israeli first, or a Jew?" I see no difference between the two. After all, I'm also simultaneously the son of my parents, the husband of my wife and the father of my children.

When I was born, my dad and my mom gave me names, but in Africa, when your child is born, especially close family members can suggest names they want to add on.

Sensible fathers and mothers, when their children marry, go back to the old days and renew their youth.

You have to convince the adults that if a child is to learn his culture, he or she will have to see his mother and father reading about it, and explaining it to him. Then it gets a legitimacy it otherwise would never have. Until then, his learning is limited.

Fathers, sons, brothers, men everywhere: Your legacy will not perish if you take your partner's surname, or she keeps hers.

No living being is held by anything so strongly as by its own needs. Whatever therefore appears a hindrance to these, be it brother, or father, or child, or mistress, or friend, is hated, abhorred, execrated.

You have driven me from the East to this place, and I have been here two thousand years or more....My friends, if you took me away from this land it would be very hard for me. I wish to die in this land. I wish to be an old man here....I have not wished to give even a part of it to the Great Father. Though he would give me a million dollars or more I would not give to him this land....When people want to slaughter cattle they drive them along until they get them to a corral, and then they slaughter them. So it was with us....My children have been exterminated; my brother has been killed.

I use the phrase 'sibling society' to suggest a culture fundamentally without fathers, mothers, grandfathers, grandmothers, or ancestors. The thinking is horizontal.

I'm lucky to have had a father [John Lennon] who paid attention.

O slavish man! will you not bear with your own brother, who has God for his Father, as being a son from the same stock, and of the same high descent? But if you chance to be placed in some superior station, will you presently set yourself up for a tyrant?

The idea of legitimacy is something I suppose I deal with in my fiction, and in part it's probably a response to my upbringing. When I was growing up I was the middle child, pathologically shy, in a family with a very loud and opinionated older brother, and I felt as if I never had the right to speak. As a result, I simply didn't speak very much.

Islam doesn't have to mean blind faith. It can mean what it always meant in your family, a culture, a civilization, as open-minded as your grandfather was, as delightedly disputatious as your father was.... Don't let the zealots make Muslim a terrifying word, I urged myself; remember when it meant family.

My middle name is Nicole. It's so weird because my mom is from El Salvador, but my sisters and I have Irish names - Christy, Kelly, and Erin. And Christy and Kelly, they're not even girls' names! In Ireland, they're boys' names. And somehow, my mom was in El Salvador dreaming about Shamrocks before we were born.

Picking your favourite look is like picking your favourite child! I get so emotionally attached to each one.

I want to live life on my own terms. But I'm Mexican, so mi familia is always there to guide me in everything I do, whether I want them to or not. Well, "guide" is too weak a word. "Dictate" is more like it.

I would never date or marry an actress. I will marry the girl of my mom's choice.