Foreign Roots Quotes

As a child growing up in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, my connection to my Indian roots came from summer visits to New Delhi where my grandparents lived.

It's hard to think of myself as an American, and yet I am not from India, a place where I was not born and where I have never lived.

I was born in the Year 1632, in the City of York, of a good Family, tho' not of that Country, my Father being a Foreigner of Bremen, who settled first at Hull; He got a good Estate by Merchandise, and leaving off his Trade, lived afterward at York, from whence he had married my Mother, whose Relations were named Robinson, a very good Family in that Country, and from whom I was called Robinson Kreutznaer; but by the usual Corruption of Words in England, we are now called, nay we call ourselves, and write our Name Crusoe, and so my Companions always call'd me.

Six years after al-Awlaki was born, his family moved back to Yemen, but he returned to the States for college and remained there for much of his adult life.

I come from a part of New York that was almost entirely immigrants. I was born in America, but all of my friends' parents, everybody's parents, including my own, had come to America from Europe.

Superheroes are also about immigrants. Superman, the prototype of all superheroes, is a prototypical immigrant. His homeland was in crisis, so his parents sent him to America in search of a better life. He has two names, one American, Clark Kent, and the other foreign, Kal-El. He wears two sets of clothes and lives in between two cultures. He loves his new country, but a part of him still longs for his old one.

I really do feel part of America to my very bones; at the same time, I know that I come from somewhere else.

My mother born in Mexico, but was Lebanese in origin. She born 1902 the same year my father arrived to Mexico when he was 14 years old.

Nearly all of us came here [Maine] as immigrants.

It's where you come from that's the strange, exotic, quirky, mad place.

I fell in love with Scotland and made good friends here, so I stayed after graduating with Honours in Chemistry.

Henry James and Edith Wharton are huge for me because they gave me a way to understand America while still respecting the European backgrounds of my relatives.

I'm completely Americanized - I have an American accent, an American wife - but a residue of me is foreign.

My childhood was very sheltered. I grew up in a palace. But I lived in Morocco as a Moroccan citizen.

My father came from a country called Bolivia. He was of Spanish descent. I never went to Bolivia until I was 60 years old, but apparently when he was 17, he had already planned his entire academic curriculum so that he could graduate high school and enter college in the United States. That's how much he wanted to come to this country.