Dee Rees Quotes

I have two homes, like someone who leaves their hometown and/or parents and then establishes a life elsewhere. They might say that they're going home when they return to see old friends or parents, but then they go home as well when they go to where they live now. Sarajevo is home, Chicago is home.

I never seem to leave L.A., though I left L.A.

Uprootedness uproots everything except the need for roots.

I am not quite sure where home is right now. I do have places in London and Milan, and a house in Spain. I guess I would say home is where my mother is, and she lives in Spain.

All I ever want is to return to either Bangladesh, my motherland, or India, my adopted home.

I belong in America more than South Africa. I can't remember the feeling of living there anymore. It's like it was in another life. That's sad in a way. It is my country. It's where I grew up. You don't know what it's like to have these negative feelings about your homeland. There are roots you can't escape.

I have a very powerful sense of place, but I have a very powerful sense of being a migrant, so it's both. It seems like I'm always leaving my home. That's part of the formula. I love the Dominican Republic. I go back all the time. I love New Jersey. Go back all the time.

I was born in India - but never really lived there.

I've always been really interested in how people's identities are shaped by where they come from and how they want to get away from where they come from.

Once a refugee, always a refugee. I can't ever remember not being all right wherever I was, but you don't give your whole allegiance to a place or want to be entirely identified with the society you're living in.

You create a world away from home and make new rooms for yourself. But when you arrive back home in your old rooms, the world you've made for yourself ceases to be real. Everything seems to crumble. Anyone who's been sent away to boarding school can understand that.

As someone who is displaced - I left London almost fifteen years ago to make Connecticut my home - I am drawn to stories about people who don't belong, whether physically or emotionally, and who find their families of choice in their friends.

It's about, I did talk about my life in broad strokes and what home meant to me in order to really explore the subject of home and can you go back and what that means for people in that sense of community that we've lost.

The Lakers had been home to me, unlike the home I had grown up and felt apart from.

I've been writing the same book my whole life - that you're in one family, and all of a sudden, you're in another family, and it's not your choice, and you can't get out.

I have my husband and children near me in Rome, and I feel this is where we are temporarily belonging. But personally, all my life, I have felt the absence of a sense of history.

Language, identity, place, home: these are all of a piece - just different elements of belonging and not-belonging.

When you have a different mother, you want to be in her world. Because in mine, I didn't feel like I fit in.

Every time someone asks me where I'm from, I'm not sure how to answer that question... so I say I have no roots.

In America, we all come from somewhere else, and we carry along some dream myth of home: a notion that something - our point of origin, our roots, the home country - is out there.

I've lived in Texas now longer than anywhere and then California and then Oklahoma, but yet Oklahoma is what I consider home.

I've never felt at home in Kortedala, or in Gothenburg, so I always felt like I needed to go somewhere and find some kind of perspective on things.

When you've moved 13 times, you lose track of where you're from.

No one in this country has any root anywhere; we don't live in America, we board here, we are like spiders that run over the surface of the water.

Home pulls. It draws you back to tell you you don't belong.