Kent Nerburn Quotes

The way I think we were living is an invention. The truth is nobody can own anything. That was an unheard-of concept among indigenous people. We invented that.

I think nobody owns the land until their dead are in it.

I'm the only one in my family - I'm a practicing Jew - who has attached themselves to religion in a more traditional way.

Myth and poetry represent a reservoir of vertical thinking, which we could also call longing and gratitude to ancestors. We need that gratitude desperately.

I'm one of these children who grew up at the knee of my grandmother and her elder sister, listening to very old people talk about their memories.

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'm a closet Catholic. I love the iconography of the saints. There was a point in my life when I was going to convert to Catholicism, but I didn't want my grandmother spinning around in her grave like a rotisserie chicken.

It's in your DNA to be a Filipino; how can you just turn your back on it?

That's how we do it in the black community; we give back to the people who made us who we are. We never forget that.

My father is 100% Japanese and came to the United States when he was only 18 years old. My grandmother still resides in Japan, which has allowed me to travel to the roots of my ancestors with my father.

Do not let where you come from define you, but never forget the values you learned from your close community.

I grew up in southwestern Ontario in the heart of a Mennonite community. All my family are part of the Mennonite church.

The only thing I have to go by is what my mother and father told me, how I was brought up.

I'd love to work more with the American Indians, my people.

What is buried in the past of one generation falls to the next to claim.

When I was 11, I went to Puerto Rico for a month to stay with my grandmother. To see the way people lived there and experience my own culture was wonderful.

Country, Religion, Family!

When I was here before, the President gave me my country, and I put my stake down in a good place, and there I want to stay.... You speak of another country, but it is not my country; it does not concern me, and I want nothing to do with it. I was not born there.... If it is such a good country, you ought to send the white men now in our country there and let us alone...

I grew up until I was seven in Jamaica with my grandmother, who I still think of as the greatest person I have known in my life.

I started listening to gospel when I was a little boy and my grandmother used to rock me on her lap.

I am the granddaughter of an English woman. I love England and her people and, regardless of politics, consider you to be family... and always will.

I kinda started watching wrestling through Lucha Libre because my grandmother was always watching Lucha Libre.

Japanese feel an intimacy with the dead, at least for people up to my generation.

Individuality, family, and community are, by definition, expressions of singular organization, never of "one-right-way" thinking on the grand scale. Children and families need some relief from government surveillance and intimidation if original expressions belonging to THEM are to develop. Without these freedom has no meaning.

Even now / I am not old. / I never think of it, and yet / I am a grandmother to eleven grandchildren.