Olga Fonda Quotes

I was Everett LeRoi Jones. My grandfather's name was Everett.

If I changed my name, everyone would have just known that I changed my name. If I had been anonymous, it would have felt pretentious. It would seem like I'm trying to dodge something. I love my family and have such respect for their work, for their career and talents, and I'm very proud to be connected with them.

A name is so important. A surname connects you to your past, to your family. Even a given name has meaning - why did your parents pick that particular one?

I really appreciate the British part of my family.

Rosecrans is a family name - it used to be a last name in our family.

As I don't know what life would be like without my Chaplin connections, I work with them. I'm just really happy it's a family I can be proud of; it's not as if I'm related to some Z-list celebrity.

I know my father and my mother, but beyond that I cannot go. My ancestry is blurred.

Both my mother's family and my father's family go back almost a hundred years in the district. I was born in the district, raised in the district, raised my family in the district. And so that's the way I see myself.

One curious thing about growing up is that you don't only move forward in time; you move backwards as well, as pieces of your parents' and grandparents' lives come to you.

I've known where my heritage is from all along.

Some of what I am doing when I am researching is looking for things people in my family have done and finding out what those things mean, why they did those things and seeing how I fit into them.

More and more I understand that it's very fine not to know where you come from.

For a while, I thought a lot about lineage. Where do I belong? Who am I standing next to?

I discovered that there is Indian blood in my ancestry on my father's side - a fact that had not been talked about in my family. No wonder I've often been cast in exotic roles - Indian princesses, Russian revolutionaries, Algerians, Gypsies and Greeks.

Your soul is a dark forest. But the trees are of a particular species, they are genealogical trees.

I love many places to which I have no connection, but identifying an ancestor, or someone I think is an ancestor, has taken me to places I'd never have gone to otherwise.

How simple a thing it seems to me that to know ourselves as we are, we must know our mothers names.

For a number of years in England nobody had any idea what I looked like.

As you get older, you get more... genealogical.

American? Indian? I don't know what these words mean. In Italy, it is all about blood, family, where you come from. I'm asked where I am from. I'm from nowhere; I always was, but now I am happy knowing it.

Returning to your family and where you came from, and your history... this is what makes you strong. It's not looking out that's going to do that - it's looking in.

I guess we're all kinda searching for a connection with something that's relevant to our past and speaks to who we are, and maybe helps us make a connection to what we are, and where we come from.

Getting to know where we come from is a really profound way of getting to look at who we are.

We should all know our family's story, all the more so if nobody tells it to us directly and we have to find it out for ourselves.

Blue Ivy can say she knows who her great-great-great-great-grandfather is. How many people can say that?