We need to expand the idea of choice to be about all the choices we make in our lives: including which country we choose to live in so we can be whole and full women.

There is no room in this country for hyphenated Americanism…. The one absolutely certain way of bringing this nation to ruin, of preventing all possibility of its continuing to be a nation at all, would be to permit it to become a tangle of squabbling nationalities.

Some Americans need hyphens in their names, because only part of them has come over; but when the whole man has come over, heart and thought and all, the hyphen drops of its own weight out of his name.

if she wishes to be American—to be known as such and to actually belong—she must become a thing unimaginable in her home country: she must become white.

If we can accomplish the integration of the search without obliterating cultural differences or destroying ourselves, we will have accomplished a great thing.

It was as if, because of the very strangeness of my heritage and the worlds I straddled, I was from everywhere and nowhere at once, a combination of ill-fitting parts, like a platypus or some imaginary beast, confined to a fragile habitat, unsure of where I belonged. And I sensed, without fully understanding why or how, that unless I could stitch my life together and situate myself along some firm axis, I might end up in some basic way living my life alone.

No white American ever thinks that any other race is wholly civilized until he wears the white man's clothes, eats the white man's food, speaks the white man's language, and professes the white man's religion.

If Jesus were living in our culture, he would probably hang out in coffeehouses.

Art is not a treasure in the past or an importation from another land, but part of the present life of all living and creating peoples.

American music comes from the same tree, but sometimes we get to these places in history where we forget where things come from, and they get compartmentalized.

If we desire a certain type of civilisation and culture we must exterminate the sort of people who do not fit into it.

When you are at Rome live in the Roman style; when you are elsewhere live as they live elsewhere.