Abigail Washburn Quotes

I couldn't fit in the Irish community in New York. I was never one of the boys because they would talk about baseball or basketball, and I knew nothing about it.

I often feel like an outsider wherever I go, so I'm always attracted to stories about identity and the meaning of home.

I'm trying to make a case for those people who don't have a sense of belonging that they should have, that there is something really worthwhile in having a sense of belonging, and recasting and looking at our modern history.

Growing up outside your own country makes you feel that you don't belong when you return, so you feel free to make friends with whomever you like.

I had quite a scattered childhood. I was Irish in London, because I had my secondary school education there. I never really fitted anywhere. I didn't feel it was a negative thing, and I was never made to feel different - I just knew I was.

I was raised in Brussels as a Belgian but, at the same time, feeling that I wasn't necessarily from here.

Unfortunately, I think I drifted so much growing up that I don't have a strong sense of identity. I don't feel at home anywhere, and because of that, I think I'm more of a chameleon.

I don't know if I'm ever considered a part of the community I'm in.

My parents sent me to a school across town, an integrated school, where I had the chance to meet and grow up with people who were from other parts of the world. ... I remember feeling that I would never have anything to contribute on St. Patrick's Day. I couldn't tell the stories that they might have been telling about their forebears and I felt left out.

Maybe I am not French, maybe I am from nowhere.

I've never really fit in anywhere.

The only time I used to feel like an outsider was when I first went to India.

At its best, American music is the soundtrack of our long - and often painful - march toward a more perfect union.

I had a hard time when I came back to Sweden and started school, because I looked different. And we moved to a really small town on the west coast of Sweden, and there were no brown people around. It didn't really get any better until I started music school at about 10 years old.

I'd always somehow felt slightly as if I'd been born in the wrong country.

I was never very interested in my own experience, I think, in fact, if my films have a common link, maybe it's being a foreigner - it's common for people who are born abroad - they don't know so well where they belong.

I'm British - ostensibly British - but I don't know where I really belong, you know?

Thematically, in a lot of what I write, there's a sense of displacement, of being rooted in multiple places, and how that can tug at your identities and your wants and your goals.

I think my whole identity is formed around not knowing where I'm from. It might even be that I find comfort in that confusion.

I just always wanted to be part of something where I felt like I belonged.

Never feeling really at home in any one country is always challenging. You realise that you have to lean on yourself and to own it.

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.

This is the positive way of seeing the modern Jewish dilemma: I am from everywhere. The negative way is no matter where you go, you find out that you're a victim, that you're unwanted and don't belong.

I always felt that I wasn't as American as Americans and then I realised when I got back to the Philippines that I was not Filipino.

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.