Dee Rees Quotes

If there is an abiding theme in 'The Pursuit of Happiness,' it is the idea that you come into the world already shaped by other people's past histories.

People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them.

Wouldn't you say that most of us are a reflection of or a reaction to the people who have been closest to us? I'm a reflection of my grandmother.

The narratives in which you're born have a fierce pattern of repetition.

Of course, we carry inside of ourselves our parents. Even when they are dead, we carry them inside ourselves. And they are carrying inside themselves their dead parents and so on and so forth. There is a legacy of language and culture and religion.

Without history we are the prisoners of the accident of where and when we were born.

I have Aboriginal roots on my father's side, and have always indentified with that spirit. I feel a lot of my music comes from that place.

I subscribe to William Faulkner's' view that history is not just about what we were before but who we are now.

A lot of my identity as an Aboriginal person is about family.

Food might be more immediately important than history but if you don't understand what's been done to you - by your own people and the so-called 'they' - you can never get around it.

All my life I believed I became an athlete through my own determination, but it's impossible to think that being descended from slaves hasn't left an imprint through the generations.

I carry the voices of all my family within me, and they were with me there in the jungle.

We all grow up with inherited genes and inherited sensibilities, and they run very, very deep.

I am a product of my father's work.

The thing that I hate the most is when people have prejudice - when they see me as the granddaughter of Benito Mussolini and not as Alessandra. That, really, I don't like. I didn't know my grandfather. I am me.

Tribal designs are a part of my heritage. It boils down to the influences from my father, Viv Richards' side.

To me, it felt that if I give up my name, I am also sending a message to my children, saying my name was not important enough as your father's; I am not as important as your father. That is a message we are passing down generation after generation without realising.

There was a lot of aggression in me. It comes from my Bihari roots, I guess.

I realized my father's sister Joanne, who died at 19 had instilled her spirit in me.

Nothing is more acceptable than what we are born into.

The past lives within the present, and our ancestors breathe through our children.

I came here with something in me that I inherited from my folks. So I'm going to do something called life and times.

With our parents we bury our past, with our children our future.

A name is so important. A surname connects you to your past, to your family. Even a given name has meaning - why did your parents pick that particular one?

He was my father. I own half his genes, and all of his history. Believe this: the mistakes are part of the story. I am born of a man who believed he could tell nothing but the truth, while he set down for all time the Poisonwood Bible.