Cultural Mismatch Quotes

I was a Vietnamese kid with a mullet hair cut. I had all Westie mates, and, geez, a Vietnamese guy with a mullet doesn't work; no wonder I couldn't get a girlfriend for so many years.

I don't seem to fit really into the 20th Century

Like the guy I was dating. White, liberal, educated. I went to meet his family and I think that they probably didn't know they had a problem with it until he walked in with me. And they definitely had issues. Mom had issues with it. Could not, didn't want to see her son. And I don't think she had anything against me. But it was about her son bringing me home. And I felt that for the first time. I was like, 'Wow, that's deep.' It's really simple: I don't fit their picture.

Never eat at a Chinese restaurant named Mama Teresa's Trattoria.

I talk about being a 'what' to people. Like, being gay in mainstream society is a different kind of 'what' than being black. They don't always jive. It's confusing and leads to these really awkward personal stories that have just been in me for awhile.

I never liked living in Montreal. And I don't really like the music scene there. It was never my cup of tea, and I never felt like I ever fit in.

In 1993, when I landed in Zimbabwe, there were just 10 psychiatrists in that country of 10 million people. Nine of the 10 were foreigners who spoke no regional language.

Opera in English is, in the main, just about as sensible as baseball in Italian.

I'm a 21st-century kid trapped in a 19th-century family.

When you're the only woman of color, and you walk into a room of people who don't look like you, most of them with blond hair and blue eyes, it's disheartening. The weirdest part is that I walk in and assume they think I'm auditioning to play a different role than them, but I'm going out for their same role.

Yes, the Masters is too stylish to be an American icon. It's as out of character for Uncle Sam as a McDonald's is for France.

Honestly, after five, six months, I thought it was unlikely I'd be here long: my characteristics seemed to go against everything Barcelona stood for.

Sometimes I joke that I'm an Elizabethan who's had the misfortune to be alive during the reign of the wrong Elizabeth.

In this movie, 'Jigarthanda,' audience can feel it as English movie because this BGM is totally different from Indian background score.

I never really felt at home with that - the headbands, the roses, the feet, the peace sign, all that bollocks. That wasn't me at all; I felt like a fish totally out of water during the mid-'60s thing.

You can't take no Chinese man and give him no Puerto Rican woman and talking like they're in love and emotionally in love and physically.

I've always just felt a little out of place. I still feel out of place in San Francisco. It's this place where everything is going great, and everyone feels super optimistic about the world. It's a little different about how I grew up.

I found a movie called “Light in the Piazza.” I finally made the movie with Olivia de Havilland and myself, but initially there was no way I could make that movie, so I went to work on becoming that character. They told me they had an Italian [actor], and I said, “That’s a Cuban boy!” His name was Tomas Milan. I thought that’s the craziest thing I’d ever heard: They have a Cuban who’s going to play an Italian, and I can’t play it because I’m an American.

I never really caught on in America. I don't have an agent. It's too strange for me.

I wasn't shy, but I was really hyper. Nobody got my sense of humor. I was a black skater kid.

I've lived in California for half of my life. It's weird, everyone thinks of me as this guy who's from the South ... I'm really a Californian.

Young people are constantly absorbing - through media, textbooks, and policy - the myths of American exceptionalism; for black children, this means that what they are taught in class does not match the world that they navigate daily.

We didn't feel we fitted into the '80s.

The culture of Rome just doesn't match the culture of Yoga, not as far as I can see. In fact, I've decided that Rome and Yoga don't have anything in common at all. Except for the way they both kind of remind you of the word toga.

I took an estimated two thousand years of high school French, and when I finally got to France, I discovered that I didn't know one single phrase that was actually useful in a real-life French situation.