Quotes & Sayings About Your Family Roots

I went to L.A., and I was on two different studio movies at Fox and Sony, but they were never made in the end. When the second one wasn't happening, I ended up doing an episode of 'Who Do You Think You Are?' for the BBC, and went on a roots trip from England to Kenya, India, and pre-partition India in Pakistan, where my family originally came from. — Gurinder Chadha

To be around family is to feel the possibility of growing roots again. — Nadia Hashimi

Mama and I sat on a burping bus full of chickens in cages, and round-eyed babies on round mothers' laps. (The Pinata-Maker's Daughter) — Eileen Granfors

Being an American is a state of mind, and to be in a family is to feel the power of belonging, the power of your roots. Family is a tree, the strength of a tree, the roots, the leaves, the past and the present, the future, the fruits, the seeds. — Esai Morales

What's great about TV, and what I love about being on 'Parenthood,' is you have this family. I'm now going on four years of working with the same 100 people, and that helps you feel like your life has more roots. It's more conducive to having a family, and you're staying in town. So that part is amazing. — Dax Shepard

I am not mad here, but clear and calm. I am not transformed, but allowed to be wholly myself.I am isolated, but have never felt more connected to people. I am not imprisoned, but free. I am not cut off from my family and my roots, but am brought back to them. I am not living alone with dogs, but permitting my dogs to lead me somewhere I need to go, and it has been a great trip. We have more distance to travel together, I'm sure, before we are through. — Jon Katz

We have chaos reigning in the Middle East. There is a great deal of instability. In the past, people would have turned to their church, and some still do. Counterintuitively, people are now turning into themselves to find their roots. The way you do that is through your family tree. "Where did I come from?" There is an urge to preserve the names of the people who produced you. — Henry Louis Gates

Fear helps us survive. I've spent a larger portion of my life being afraid than I have being in control. But, here I am. Forget this escape idea, son. It won't help you or your family. Play the game. Find a tall tree somewhere. A tree that's survived all the coups and massacres of history. Go to that tree and dig a hole near its roots and bury your pride there. — Colin Cotterill

Our doctrinal obligation is to our own ancestors. This is because the celestial organization of heaven is based on families. The First Presidency has encouraged members, especially youth and young single adults, to emphasize family history work and ordinances for their own family names or the names of ancestors of their ward and stake members. We need to be connected to both our roots and branches. The thought of being associated in the eternal realm is indeed glorious. — Quentin L. Cook

I grew up in Florida in different cities. I was born in Mississippi. My parents moved a lot, so I moved to Tennessee, Alabama, South Carolina, Virginia, all through the South. But my family's roots were from central Florida, like Daytona Beach area, so we ended up moving there. — Diplo

This is why moral uneasiness is destined to become even more acute. It is obvious that a fundamental defect, or rather a series of defects, indeed a defective machinery is at the root of contemporary economics and materialistic civilization, which does not allow the human family to break free from such radically unjust situations. — Pope John Paul II

There are still times when the thief I started out to be feels more authentic to me than the priest I've been for decades. To be pulled out of a slum and educated is to be an outsider forever - " He stopped talking, deeply embarrassed. Giuliani could never understand the price scholarship boys paid for their education: the inevitable alienation from your uncomprehending family, from roots, from your own first person, from the original "I" you once were. — Mary Doria Russell

All the best and worse things in us are bound up in the legacy of our family. As children we ardently trust in the stability or, in some cases, the instability we were born into. No matter which...we embraced what was decent while simultaneously suppressing what was deficient yet both traits weaved roots of faithfulness and consternation into the very fabric of who we've become. This now plays significantly into how we nurture our own families and how we relate to others. Our love, our fears, our insecurities, and our loyalties all draw from how we were raised as well as our inherent desire to shift its paradigm to optimistically better the life of not just our children...but our children's children. That's the gift and or the curse of a legacy. Which will you leave behind? — Jason Versey

I grew up in a strong faith-based family. I think I have selected to return to those roots for strength, for my family, for myself and to protect our children and to forgive others and move on and face forward. — Paula Broadwell

When I was just a twenty-something, I came to Newark, and I found a connection to the city in a spiritual way. I found a connection here and people here that reminded me so much of my roots and my own family. — Cory Booker

I kept thinking how the five of us had had a really unhealthy family, but I saw then too how our roots were twisted so tenaciously around one another's hearts. — Elizabeth Strout

To every Old World belief, habit, or tradition, there was and still is a technological alternative. To prayer, the alternative is penicillin; to family roots, the alternative is mobility; to reading, the alternative is television; to restraint, the alternative is immediate gratification; to sin, the alternative is psychotherapy; to political ideology, the alternative is popular appeal established through scientific polling. There is even an alternative to the painful riddle of death, as Freud called it. The riddle may be postponed through longer life, and then perhaps solved altogether by cryogenics. — Neil Postman

kept thinking how the five of us had had a really unhealthy family, but I saw then too how our roots were twisted so tenaciously around one another's hearts. My — Elizabeth Strout

The Sanscrit language, whatever be its antiquity, is of a wonderful structure; more perfect than the Greek, more copious than the Latin, and more exquisitely refined than either, yet bearing to both of them a stronger affinity, both in the roots of verbs and the forms of grammar, than could possibly have been produced by accident; so strong indeed, that no philologer could examine them all three, without believing them to have sprung from some common source, which, perhaps, no longer exists; there is a similar reason, though not quite so forcible, for supposing that both the Gothic and the Celtic, though blended with a very different idiom, had the same origin with the Sanscrit; and the old Persian might be added to the same family. — William Jones

A young girl needs to spread her wings, but a young woman needs roots. — Sydney Logan

Roots is not just a saga of my family. It is the symbolic saga of a people. — Alex Haley

Family is the root of all that is good in our lives, and I am so grateful for mine. — Ivana Trump

But my dad was kind of a travelin' man too, and he liked his family with him, so he almost always took us along. News Deke did not like to hear because she said it not like she missed having roots while growing up but like she liked being a tumbleweed as long as she was tumbling close to someone she love. — Kristen Ashley

I love anything to do with cooking, from watching the Food Network to reading recipe books by Gordon Ramsay, Jamie Oliver and Levi Roots. My favourite types of cuisine are Asian and Caribbean, and I love cooking new recipes for my family. — Jourdan Dunn

Good parents give their children Roots and Wings. Roots to know where home is, wings to fly away and exercise what's been taught them. — Jonas Salk

In all honesty, because my name is Cinco and I grew up in Phoenix, I had a lot of exposure to Latin culture and those sorts of things, and that inspired the idea of this villain, El Macho. The name came first and everything else came after that. We loved the idea of this villain. Ken actually has a lot of Latino roots in his family, too. — Cinco Paul

I tell my kids and my grandkids, 'Never forget where you came from. Never forget your roots.' My grandkids, they didn't go through the hard times as much as other ones in our family did. One thing is to just never forget where you came from and you never forget that nothing is more important than your relationship with Jesus Christ. — Kay Robertson

I guess, like most foreigners, when you're away, you see your own culture being even more strange. But where I come from and my roots mean a lot. I miss my family and my friends. Something I've realized as I've been traveling is that it's more about the actual people than the actual place. — Alicia Vikander

Losing myself interests me. The fertile topsoil interests me, sprawling beneath a light dusting of snow, and the snow that crams the trunks and branches of the pines and elms and redwoods, having frozen up their roots, subdues me to consider life and death. What lurks beneath the ground? Surely dead seeds and frozen worms reside deep below that earth, and surely all those presentiments of life lying dormant, dead or dying, scattered and mute, like memories. — S.K. Kalsi

Horacio paused to pour himself another glass of brandy. "Do you understand what I'm trying to tell you, Prudencia? You can't build yourself a world made to measure, but you can build a village. In a way, all of us here belong to a club of refugees. Your employer is one of the few inhabitants with family roots in San Ireneo. He came back a few years ago and set it all up. You may not know it, but his father's family has lived here for centuries." Miss — Natalia Sanmartin Fenollera

. . . when my family headed out west, like any birth canal Rochester was forgotten. — Kim Gordon

Each civilization, each nation, each family, each profession, each sex and each class has its own history. Humans have so far been interested mainly in their own private roots, and have therefore never claimed the whole of the inheritance into which they were born, the legacy of everybody's past experience. Each generation searches only for what it thinks it lacks, and recognizes only what it knows already. — Theodore Zeldin

Maintaining connections with family and community across class boundaries demands more than just summary recall of where one's roots are, where one comes from. It requires knowing, naming, and being ever-mindful of those aspects of one's past that have enabled and do enable one's self-development in the present, that sustain and support, that enrich. One must also honestly confront barriers that do exist, aspects of that past that do diminish. — Bell Hooks

Kashayam [was] a drink the vanaras had morning, noon and night, and a few times in between. It was a kind of brew with all kinds of herbs thrown in: the thick, sharp-tasting furry karpuravalli, the strong spicy tulsi, the slightly bitter bark of the coconut tree, pungent pepper roots, the breathcatching nellikai, the cool root of vetriver, and just about anything else that was considered edible. And some things that weren't. In their craze for novelty, vanaras sometimes flung in new kinds of leaves or berries just because they smelt interesting; whole families had been known to fall ill, or even die. Gind's family were not a very adventurous lot, and stuck to things they knew not to be poisonous. Still, every day's kashayam was different, and this was a great topic of conversation among the vanaras. — Harini Gopalswami Srinivasan

A lot of my work goes to the center of where we belong
if there is any root to life -because nowadays the family is broken up, and people don't live in the same place for very long. — Arthur Miller

Because I had my family, I felt like I could be a bird and fly and experience and do. Because I had roots somewhere, I knew that they would love me no matter what, and I could always go back home and they were going to love me. — Gisele Bundchen

All beneath Heaven is rooted in nation. Nation is rooted in family. And family is rooted in self. — Mencius

All writers have roots they draw from - travel, work, family. My roots are in science and it is fertile ground for fiction. — Alan Lightman

Don't put down too many roots in terms of a domicile. I have lived in four countries and I think my life as a writer and our family's life have been enriched by this. I think a writer has to experience new environments. There is that adage: No man can really succeed if he doesn't move away from where he was born. I believe it is particularly true for the writer. — Arthur Hailey

The things we share with each other are deeply felt from within our hearts that neither of us will ever forget. For the gifts that are priceless are the ones that are heartfelt; their roots are within our soul. They are the greatest gifts, of all. — Ellen J. Barrier

I suppose I have become a sort of living monument in Portugal. But I come from a family with roots all over the world, so the idea of patriotism is not very strong in me. My country is the country of Chekhov, Beethoven, Velasquez - writers I like, painters and artists I admire. — Antonio Lobo Antunes

Your roots, your family, your friends all become so much more important to you as you get older, especially if you are a wandering minstrel like me. — Amanda Donohoe

The Hitler movement is a stampede. It is something beyond reason, like a pulse beating, like a rush of blood to the head, like the sap rising from the twisted roots of a family tree ... in many ways it is the most remarkable upheaval of our time, perhaps the most momentous. — Anne O'Hare McCormick

To have deep roots in a place means having dead buried there. It is almost that literal, the dead forming your bond to the earth and to the others whose dead lie buried there. I always had that bond whether I knew it or not. — Julene Bair

To survive, to avert what we have termed future shock, the individual must become infinitely more adaptable and capable than ever before. We must search out totally new ways to anchor ourselves, for all the old roots - religion, nation, community, family, or profession - are now shaking under the hurricane impact of the accelerative thrust. It is no longer resources that limit decisions, it is the decision that makes the resources. — Alvin Toffler

Because I feel 'Thor' is the beginning of finding my roots, and I found that I have family in America, I want to take my time and put effort on my future work so that foreign people get to know me better, and I also want to enjoy that process itself! — Tadanobu Asano

We drank coffee. We talked. She loved Charles Dickens, whom she read in Norwegian. Years after she was dead, I wrote a dissertation on Dickens, and though my study of the great man would no doubt have alarmed her, I had a funny feeling that by taking on the English novelist I was returning to my Norwegian roots. — Siri Hustvedt

Oh, yeah, insanity ran deep in the roots of that family tree.' (Talon) — Sherrilyn Kenyon

Too many artists and writers have forgotten their roots. I embrace my fans because, in a way, they're family. — Jim Steranko

For all the huffing and puffing of the doubters, a home of our own is still the rock on which our hopes are built. Price appreciation aside (and most houses will appreciate, eventually), homeownership is a state of mind. It's your piece of the earth. It's where a family's toes grow roots. It's where the flowers are yours, not God's. — Jane Bryant Quinn

No one goes anywhere alone, least of all into exile - not even those who arrive physically alone, unaccompanied by family, spouse, children, parents, or siblings. No one leaves his or her world without having been transfixed by its roots, or with a vacuum for a soul. We carry with us the memory of many fabrics, a self soaked in our history, our culture; a memory, sometimes scattered, sometimes sharp and clear, of the streets of our childhood, of our adolescence; the reminiscence of something distant that suddenly stands out before us, in us, a shy gesture, an open hand, a smile lost in a time of misunderstanding, a sentence, a simple sentence possibly now forgotten by the one who had said it. — Paulo Freire

The roots of our grief coil so deeply into loss that death has come
to live with us like a family member who makes you happy by avoiding
you, but who is still one of the family. Our anger is a rage that
Westerners cannot understand. Our sadness can make the stones
weep. And the way we love is no exception — Susan Abulhawa