Family Origins Quotes

[Kurt Cobain] had a lot of German in him. Some Irish. But no Jew. I think that if he had had a little Jew he would have [expletive] stuck it out.

My parents were both from Scotland, but had been resident in Lower Canada some time before their marriage, which took place in Montreal; and in that city I spent most of my life.

My grandfather was from outside of Moscow, and my grandmother, although some of her family were French, was from Odessa. They met as immigrants in New York in the early '20s. My mother's family came over from Ireland generations ago.

My dad was born in Desertmartin at the foot of Slieve Gallion.

My family immigrated when I was 3, and our predecessors inhabited the Korean Peninsula for as long as can be recalled.

My mom is from Texas, but I was raised in Florida.

'The Secret River' began because, at the age of 50, I suddenly realised I knew nothing about how my own family had got its foothold in Australia.

You know, my wife is a south Florida girl. She was born and raised in Tampa so she's traditionally lived in the South.

My mother is from Compton, California, but my father is from Hayneville, Alabama, and that's less than 20 miles from Selma.

I was raised in Maryland. My mom was born in London, and my dad was born in Chattanooga, Tennessee.

My mother Diana was a true-blue aristocrat, descended from William the Conqueror and listed in 'Burke's Peerage.' My father David, from a poor Scottish family, was a doctor.

I was born and raised in a suburb of Paris by a working-class family.

My mother's parents, Bernard and Rivka Levine, were from Russia and also immigrated to New York City. My mother, Rose, was the elder of their two daughters. My maternal grandmother's family included several scholars and professionals.

My father's family, I think, were mostly from Lancashire, but I don't know how far back we go. I think it's quite a few generations.

Millions of Indonesians who live with secrets in their family who have a sense of that kind of secret that their parents never told them, want to be told about what happened so they can know where they come from.

I'm sort of a Southerner because those are my roots, but my parents are from Iowa.

My father was a San Francisco firefighter. He also was an amateur artist. Art ran deep on his side of the family, which originated in Spain. He painted our portraits. My mom, Jacqueline, was Scots-Irish. They met in 1947 when dad played for the Houston Buffalos, a minor league baseball team affiliated with the St. Louis Cardinals.

So my mom's folks are from one side of Greensboro - and, you know, outside of Greensboro. And my dad's folks, the white side, is from another very small town outside of Greensboro. So both sides are coming from the country.

My early childhood was spent living by the Pacific Ocean. I carry with me something imprinted by that wide, limitless horizon, which I learned connected us to different people and cultures, including my own family's origins in the Arab World and Northern Europe. I understood early that my world was only a small part of a much larger one. That captivated me.

I don't know why people always think of the Kennedys as a Boston family.

How was I conceived? Was it love, was I meant, or was I just an accident?

My parents both came from very poor working-class families.

There are over a million people running around the United States that were born to parents just on Match.com alone, to say nothing of the other properties we run, so that's a million lives that our company just had a little to do with in bringing their parents together.

My father emigrated from Poland and my mother from Romania. There was no affluence in my family.

My father was from Belfast; my mother was from Crossmolina. I grew up in Dublin.