Abraham Verghese Quotes

Have you ever watched someone become American? Last week, at a national citizenship conference I organize, thirty immigrants from 17 countries swore an oath and became citizens of the United States. It was a stirring experience for the hundreds of people in the room.

It takes more than just walking across the border to become an American citizen. It's what's in our souls.

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

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.

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

What makes America special is that people come here, assimilate and become American with all of the rights and responsibilities citizenship bestows.

America is the sum of all our journeys as we search for our national community and our national culture.

Considering our history, I can think of nothing more American than an immigrant.

I became an American in 2006. It got me thinking about what is my America and what's my perception of America.

The making of an American begins at that point where he himself rejects all other ties, any other history, and adopts the vesture of his adopted land.

It is a complex fate being an American.

Birthright citizenship in America is part of something larger: The American longing to sever from history, to be a place of new beginnings.

If you've never seen people taking the pledge of allegiance for the first time as U.S. Citizens, it will move you: a room full of people who can really appreciate what I was lucky enough to grow up with, simply by being born in Brooklyn.

America is a country defined by a set of ideas, and when people choose to accept those ideas, they should be able to become Americans, as fully so as any - and perhaps more so than most - regardless of how recently they or their ancestors arrived upon our shores. This is the true American tradition, which as conservatives we must defend.

I'm interested in what it means to be an American. I'm interested in what it means to live in America. I'm interested in the kind of country that we live in and leave our kids. I'm interested in trying to define what that country is.

I am proud to be an American Citizen.

I like coming to the United States because the United States played an important role in my life.

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.

Whether our forebears were strangers who crossed the Atlantic or the Pacific or the Rio Grande, we are here only because this country welcomed them in and taught them that to be an American is about something more than what we look like, or what our last names are, or how we worship.

The fact that so many of your people are today residents and citizens of the United States, lending their influence to our civic and economic life, which has meant so much to our development.

I became an American on Nov. 4, 2010, at an elegant ceremony in Great Hall of Bullfinch's Faneuil Hall, Boston, beneath a vast painting of Daniel Webster debating the preservation of the Union with Robert Hayne of South Carolina, before the Civil War.

I am a legal immigrant whose parents went from Russia to China to Chile to finally reach the United States and thereby give me a chance to have a better life. I served six years in the U.S. Army Reserve, went to college, have a successful career and have dedicated my life to being a good citizen.

I love the diversity of America. I love the plain, normal sense of humor Americans have. It is not wicked, like in some countries. And I also love how new America is.

In a sense I've made the same film over and over again. In all of them I've asked, 'Who are we as Americans?

In the midst of applying for American citizenship, of finally attempting to get my presidents in a row, I felt it incumbent upon myself to explore the national psyche in every way.