Dania Ramirez Quotes

I have a sense that many Americans, especially those like me with European or foreign parents, feel they have to invent their families just as they have to invent themselves.

If you forget your history, you forget who you are.

As little boys, my brother and I used to spend hours with my grandmother, asking her about the details of how she came to America. She could only give us a smattering of details, but they all found their way into our collective imagination, eventually becoming a part of our own cultural identity and connection to the past.

There's virtually nothing made up in 'The Immigrant.' So much of the film came from somewhere in my family's past. All the details are from my own family.

My father was an immigrant from Russia and my mother was first generation.

I'm a first-generation Canadian.

I'm an immigrant and I've always wanted to write something about America.

Part of my whole project from the beginning was to make an absent world present for my parents, which was India.

We should not ignore or isolate our roots, no matter where we stay.

Let's treasure our roots, even when we're far away.

Our old stories happen to be your new stories. The stories that you're seeing as immigrant stories are your grandparents' stories, are your great-grandparents' stories. You just happen to be separated from them a little bit.

I'm certainly proud to be Cuban American, and it's a fantastic opportunity for anybody - regardless of their ethnicity or nationality. It does carry a measure or pride to know where you're from and to know what your roots are.

I love my heritage!

I've always known that my father's father and grandfather and grandmother were from Mexico. I've never denied it. I've always said it.

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

I understand people want to hold on to their roots.

To understand and reconnect with our stories, the stories of the ancestors, is to build our identities.

That's how I got my name, you know. The Bonny scot, see?

I realized if I didn't start talking to my relatives, asking questions, thinking back to my own beginnings, there would come a time when those people wouldn't be around to help me look back and remember.

What I said to my family is, 'Our history is our own. Let people write what they want, we know who we are.'

You never realise how much of your background is sewn into the lining of your clothes.

Stories are one of the means by which a culture preserves its identity.

For Africa to me... is more than a glamorous fact. It is a historical truth. No man can know where he is going unless he knows exactly where he has been and exactly how he arrived at his present place.

To my astonishment, everything that I had assumed was now questioned by the findings. What started off as a search for identity that appeared to be purely Scottish in origin ended up as a discovery of my migrant roots - indeed an understanding that almost all of our families, at some stage, have been migrants - and my European roots.

I'm Cuban. My parents are immigrants.