Maya Soetoro-Ng Quotes
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Barack himself is very much a regular guy, not a silver spoon, incredibly smart, but, you know, he's a scholarship kid, made good use of the resources that were available to him, worked incredibly hard.
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I like that there are young people being given opportunities to explore and learn and grow and become themselves with a path that is associated with my mother. She would have liked that very much.
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My brother loves this country deeply. He has laid down roots, and he has always been incredibly patriotic and committed to this country.
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You really need to love something or someone in order to work hard enough to be very successful. You have to believe in something and have a certain optimism. Faith and optimism come from love.
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I ended up very American and very Indonesian and a little bit of a lot of things.
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One of the things that I have my students do is to take a look at English-language newspapers from all around the world in order to see the different ways in which the same story might be told.
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As children, we develop some scorn for our parents and their imperfections.
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My mother would have enjoyed the idea that her name was being used to build bridges. She cared a great deal and was very thoughtful and passionate about education and young women.
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I don't think the White House has always reflected the textures and flavors of this country.
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This is not a family of privilege by any stretch of the imagination. Our family is very low key.
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We can't afford to live in isolation, and we need to teach our kids that the things that they do not only matter to others far away but impact others who live far away, and there are ripples of effect.
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Each of us has a right to name ourselves as we will.
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I absolutely do believe that we need to not be so myopic. We ought to throw open widely the windows on the world in order to learn more about it.
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I think a lot about our globalized world, our global interconnectedness, and it really saddens me when I see people 'othering,' when I see people who are willing to live narrowly.
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My father saw Islam as a way to connect with the community. He never went to prayer services except for big communal events. I am absolutely certain that my father did not go to services every Friday. He was not religious.
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My mother was a courageous woman, and she had such tremendous love for life. She loved the natural world. She would wake us up in the middle of the night to go look at the moon. When I was a teenager, this was a source of great frustration because I wanted to sleep.
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I think we could benefit from world history that is specifically taught in a multi-faceted fashion that allows for an understanding that perspectives on truth can be very different.
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My hope is that I can continue writing and, in the future, I can just be Maya Soetoro-Ng.
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Mom was an academic, so the riches that she had to bestow were of the mind.
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I'm half white, half Asian. I think of myself as hybrid. People usually think I'm Latina when they meet me. That's what made me learn Spanish.
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I think you can have varied and seemingly contradictory depictions of a single person because we all have many facets and, in a way, many selves.
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It was as a mother that I needed my mother back, and I needed to conjure her anew and think about what she would have counselled and what she would have given.
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My whole family was Muslim, and most of the people I knew were Muslim.
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Being told that I looked like I belonged everywhere and to everyone helped me feel my fledgling pride in my own multiracialism.