Joseph O'Neill Quotes

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.

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

I have a deep and passionate love of America. It is where I have always thought I would be happiest, and although I miss England desperately, I find that my heart definitely has its home over here.

I live in Beverly Hills and I'm proud of it. The only things I miss are pie and mash shops and football games. I've lived in America longer than I lived in England. When I first got here, it just felt right to me. I like the open space, and the weather's great.

About 1900 my parents came to the United States as children from what was then the Polish area of Russia.

As an Irish person, there's a historical fascination with America: America is the default green and promised land for Irish people and Italians; that's what we grow up with.

I went to Cork, Ireland, and stood on the dock some of my ancestors had left from. I felt their ghosts gather round me, and I cried to imagine what it must have felt like - leaving that beautiful land and those beloved people, knowing it was forever.

One of my clearest impressions about India as a child was that my parents' stories would have been impossible had they stayed. Of course, such a vision was self-serving, for it made a virtue of our displacement.

When you leave your country, it's hard to leave your family over there. My whole family is in Venezuela.

I was born in London, and my family is here. America is an interesting place, but it's incredibly different culturally. It doesn't take long being there before I want to get back.

All of my dad's family, his brothers and sisters, my nana and grandad and all of the cousins emigrated to Australia within two years of each other. Irish families are close at the best of times, but when you move to the other side of the world, we were like a big posse over there.

Ever since I was a little girl, I watched many movies, and a lot of them are in California. So I already felt the United States was my home. It wasn't a difficult choice to move here.

Even though I have lived in the States since I was 18, in my head I am still very British, and I do have this romance for towns in Middle America that nobody gets to see.

Apparently, my grandfather left from Cork to America without saying goodbye to his mother! The family in Longford is still not happy about that.

As a child brought up in Paris, I dreamed of America, that lost world my parents had left behind - it was in my genes. Plus, American music has always been close to my own aesthetic, because of the mix of symphonic music with jazz.

My parents were among the first families from their area to leave Nigeria and come to America, the land of the free.

But my parents picked Ft. Wayne, which was the best decision because if they had brought me to New York or Philly, I would have swam back to Trinidad!

My mother left Hungary as a refugee, and she is not nostalgic for the life that she had back in Hungary, and yet Cubans certainly want the economic opportunity in the United States, but they're desperately homesick for the culture that they left behind.

Years after my parents made the United States their home, I had the joy of traveling to the Dominican Republic with my kids. They saw where it all started and how their grandparents' values survived and thrived in America.

My father was born in Denmark. He came to this country when he was 12 years old.

I figured New York was the closest I'd get here in America to Scotland.

My father came here from Mexico.

I am the grandson of immigrants from Japan who went to America, boldly going to a strange new world, seeking new opportunities. My mother was born in Sacramento, California. My father was a San Franciscan. They met and married in Los Angeles, and I was born there.

My family reached the United States before the Holocaust. Both of my parents emigrated from Russia as young children. My grandparents were fleeing religious persecution and came to America seeking a better life for their family.

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.