Rhiannon Giddens Quotes

When I was in Beck's world, I felt like the little sister. I'm in the big brother's room with all his friends. You just hang out and keep your mouth shut so they don't realize you're there and kick you out. I like being in situations where I can be an underdog, where I can be in the corner and observe and soak it in.

I don't feel comfortable as an insider.

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.

We are a very close family, and I love them very much, but I'm definitely the odd one out. I live a completely different kind of life style. I always was different. I felt like a fish out of water; I really never knew who I was.

In Los Angeles, I feel like the ugly duckling, like I'm from Venus or something.

It is a little weird now, going over to Heath's place. It's like, 'Hi Heath, hi Nomes.' Very strange!

I've always tried to defend the idea that the blues doesn't have to be sung by a person who comes from Mississippi, as I did.

When I arrived, at first a lot of people were like, 'This kid is different.'

My Mum is not used to being in-front of camera.

I know how it feels to be the newbie.

For Fox, it's extremely discomfiting not to be No. 1 all day, every day.

'Greatest American Hero,' I really dug that as a kid because it had an alienation to it, where he was given a gift and didn't know why, and yet he was forced to do something with it, and he was very much an out-of-place character who was trying to cope with his own surroundings, and I can kind of relate to that guy.

We're in a long line of English people pretending to be Americans and not being as good as Americans.

So I was really excited when I came to America about meeting black people. But it was a huge culture shock, because I was rejected by the black community. They were like, 'You talk like a white girl.' People would call me an Oreo. All I wanted was acceptance.

I wanted the music to sound, like, made in Mexico. I wanted to connect to my roots.

I had an Arabic background. but I lived a very scattered childhood. I didn't belong to any one culture, which meant I didn't have musical geographies in my head.

When does a fake Mohawk become a real Mohawk? Who decides? How do you know if it's happened?

If I felt like a fish out of water in my family, I felt like a fish on Mars in Adam’s circle.

I´m a stranger in a strange land.

"Native" always means people who belong someplace else, because they had once belonged somewhere. That shows that the white race does not really think they belong anywhere, because they think of everybody else as native.

The one who tried too hard, the outsider, the oddball. Yeah, that was me.

They were involved in that awkward procedure of getting to unknow each other.

India is still flinching from a cultural insult, still looking for its identity.

You've always been a tourist here. You just didn't know it.

The basis of national identity is to say, "This is authentic to me or my forebears," and is there even such a thing? How authentic is it to your life? Just because your grandfather did it, what does that have to do with you? If I say I'm working in the style of Rembrandt, so what? You can say it, but are you really? No, because when you try to literally copy a cultural artifact, you change it. It dissolves, and then who's looking at it? People who appreciate that kind of drawing, or people it means nothing to?