Lennon Parham Quotes

America is a land in which a man forgets his native country.

Increasingly I feel like a Jew, an immigrant, a Russian - anything but a normal, mainstream American.

Remember that when you say "I will have non of this exile and this stranger for his face is not like my face and his speech is strange," you have denied America with that word.

I'll always be a foreigner.

When I was at school, you had to choose; there was a lot of pressure to assimilate. You were an Aussie, or you were one of 'the wogs' - which was everybody else. But I didn't want to be in either group, so I felt like an odd one out.

I don't feel alienated from American culture, but I understand people who do.

In Geneva, I was seen as an outsider. In the U.S., I was considered Eurotrash. And in London, I'm seen as an American.

I always feel like a foreigner in America.

I know that some people, when they are growing up and they - as a person of color in a majority community - that they may feel as if they are left out, or they feel a bit strange.

I grew up in L.A. in a school that was diverse, but it was not really integrated, so I didn't ever fully fit in with the black girls or the white girls or the Latina girls.

People say to me all the time, 'When did you know that you had fully become an American?' And I say, 'The day I realized I loved peanut butter.'

They've lived here now for more than half of their lives, and they raised a family here and now have grandchildren here... It has become their home, but at the same time, for my parents, I don't think either of them will ever consciously think, 'I am an American.'

I've gotten used to being a foreigner.

I was an immigrant when I came, and one of my biggest things was I really wanted to fit in. I didn't want to be, 'Oh, look at that guy;' I wanted to be part of the crowd. Which is a weird thing, because the more successful I got, the more out of the crowd I became.

Ed Koch once said that New York City is where immigrants come to audition for America. That's what happened to my parents; that's what happened to me.

Sometimes we feel we straddle two cultures; at other times, that we fall between two stools.

To be an Indian in modern American society is in a very real sense to be unreal and ahistorical.

I refused to learn English for two years when we moved to London, hoping to send my family back home. It was tough, but at the same time, it has given me a sense of displacement that actually really suits the life that I'm living now.

What any immigrant is after is a taste of home.

During my childhood in Cyprus, the British talked about the Cypriots as if the Cypriots were outsiders in their own country. And even though I was born in Cyprus, my parents were American, and so I was an outsider in the land of my birth.

I never felt like I was in the grime scene. I was the outsider. So when I veered away from it, I didn't feel like I was leaving the circle - I felt like I was never in it.

The notion of someone who is fitting in or trying to become part of a larger family... It's hard to separate that from my own Jewish roots.

I tried to find a social niche at Harvard - a group, my group - but I was unsuccessful.

I know what it's like to be ignored; when I got to L.A., I longed for somebody who looked like me to show me the ropes.

If we work on it, we can absolutely refuse any notion that suggests that after generations of contributing to this country, being a part of the bones and the marrow, that I'm supposed to be uncomfortable here.