Thalia Quotes

Language also encodes our past. We want to know who we are. To know who we are, we have to know who we used to be. Consequently, our literature, written in the past, anchors us in that past.

My music is really about people connecting with their identities, even if they aren't Jewish.

I think that people assumed I was white because of my last name. My father is Caucasian, my mother is Hispanic. But English was my second language, believe it or not.

As a kid I had all kinds of questions about how I fit it with my neighborhood and friends and other Latinos.

I didn't put out this album because I wanted everybody to know I was grown up. I'm 21 and that's not grown up.

Hip-hop, which is my generation's blues, is important to the characters that I write about. They use hip-hop to understand the world through language.

The greatest guarantee for the preservation of a person’s identity is language and faith, and all Armenians must carry these two values.

The greatest guarantee for the preservation of a person’s identity is language and faith, and all Armenians must carry these two values.

Language and identity are so fundamentally intertwined. You peel back all the layers in terms of what we wear and what we eat and all the things that mark us, and in the end, what we have are our words.

I came out at 17.

After my bar mitzvah, I started to assimilate, to really not pay attention to my roots. The anti-Semitic experiences of my youth had been very painful. You try to put all that in the past and become a person of the world. I think that's the right thing to do. But it's not right to leave out who you really are. That's a tragedy.

I didn't really grow up with any traditions. I grew up in a pretty liberal household in Southern California. I think that's part of my interest in thinking about heritage. I don't have a second language or cultural heritage in that way.

When I started soul-searching, I tapped into the old me and what I grew up around. I learned a lot about myself, and it really made me appreciate my upbringing.

My music is about identity.

These are the pieces of my youth, the small secrets and the not-so-great expectations that defined my coming of age.

A people's speech is the skin of its culture.

What are we? Young or new? We must be something.

In the coming decades, questions of identity, meaning cultural heritage, language, and religion will play a central role in politics.

Poetry is one of the essential structures of civilization - carrying myth, ritual, 'tales of the tribe' and the essence of language.

I have brothers and was a tomboy, if that's still a designation. It wasn't a stretch for me to think and write as a 13-year-old boy - it is freeing.

A society that forgets about art risks loslng its soul.

Language is the tool of my trade -and I use them all - all the Englishes I grew up with

He said that if culture is a house, then language was the key to the front door; to all the rooms inside. Without it, he said, you ended up wayward, without a proper home or a legitimate identity.

I'm happy to be a woman but much of it was learned over the course of life. Really thudded into me. You learn it. It's a kind of mastery and artistry. The deeper person underneath the scent of Diptyque Philosykos or whatever is much less gendered. Every person has a range. In fiction, you get to be it all. I'm as much the men in my book as I am the women. I write how I write and there is no mission to stake a claim.

It was Friday, July 24, 1992, when I stepped on the train. Every year I think of it. I see it as my real birthday: the birth of me as a person, making decisions about my life on my own. I was not running away from Islam, or to democracy. I didn't have any big ideas then. I was just a young girl and wanted some way to be me; so I bolted into the unknown.