Yu Darvish Quotes

America is remarkable, don't you think so? When I came to Washington, I was twelve years old. I spoke English with an English accent. It was assumed that it would go on in that way.

People say to me all the time, 'When did you know that you had fully become an American?' And I say, 'The day I realized I loved peanut butter.'

I've grown up a lot in England.

My mother is American. I first went to school in America, and we came back when I was about six to rural Norfolk. In primary school, I was teased immediately and mercilessly. I probably dropped that accent within about 10 days.

It's a project that touched me as an immigrant and as a New Yorker.

I couldn't be more American if I tried. I was born in Ethiopia, but I was raised and educated as an American.

If you move to Canada, after a few years you call yourself Canadian. In Germany, it's difficult to belong.

Most previous immigrants came to the United States to become Americans, with no intention of returning home. They relinquished their ties with their homeland. English was their key to prosperity, and they worked hard to master it.

I've now been in this country for thirteen years, since I was seventeen. So this is my second home.

I adopted England as least as much as England adopted me.

They've lived here now for more than half of their lives, and they raised a family here and now have grandchildren here... It has become their home, but at the same time, for my parents, I don't think either of them will ever consciously think, 'I am an American.'

Being an immigrant myself, but feeling very American, and also being the child of immigrants, I understand the feeling of wanting a home.

Ever since I was little, when I moved to Canada, Canada has been my home.

I have lived in the United States for half of my life, my entire adult life.

I'll always be a foreigner.

I'm still a proud Irishman, of course, but I've become an American citizen. I'm very, very proud of that.

I've always wanted to be able to say that I come from Los Angeles, California and feel quintessentially American - even if I said that in Spanish.

In general, I have felt more at home in the U.S. than I ever felt in England.

Among those best known, their highest ambition is to build American homes, possess American furniture, dress in American clothes, adopt the American style of living and be American citizens.

I certainly know German colleagues in the U.S. who try to be Americans, try to melt into Americanism, even before they get married and become American citizens. But I've never tried that.

We [native-born] could not choose, but they [immigrants] could and did choose to be Americans.

Immigrants are changed by the greater society. Immigrants change the greater society.

To become an American is a process which resembles a conversion. It is not so much a new country that one adopts as a new creed.

London made my family and myself.

From the beginnings of literature, poets and writers have based their narratives on crossing borders, on wandering, on exile, on encounters beyond the familiar. The stranger is an archetype in epic poetry, in novels. The tension between alienation and assimilation has always been a basic theme.