A Quote by Mark Riebling

Consider the death of Princess Diana. This accident involved an English citizen, with an Egyptian boyfriend, crashed in a French tunnel, driving a German car with a Dutch engine, driven by a Belgian, who was drunk on Scotch whiskey, followed closely by Italian paparazzi, on Japanese motorcycles, and finally treated with Brazilian medicines by an American doctor. In this case, even leaving aside the fame of the victims, a mere neighborhood canvass would hardly have completed the forensic picture, as it might have a generation before.
I was born into a Turkish family that had acquired Italian citizenship. Many members of the family subsequently became British, French, Brazilian, and German, so there was a bit of everything. It was not uncommon for people in the family to speak seven languages: English, French, Ladino, Italian, Turkish, Arabic, and even Greek.
I speak Dutch, German, French, and English and have acted in all of those languages, but I love the American experience.
What, then, is this new man, the American? They are a mixture of English, Scotch, Irish, French, Dutch, Germans, and Swedes. From this promiscuous breed, that race, now called Americans, have arisen.
I believe in the fact that an audience has one heart. I can just tell you one thing: If I sing the 'Adagio,' and I pull it out with all the honesty I have - whether they're Japanese, Italian, American or Belgian or French - they will react in the same way.
Being hapa, or more specifically, half-Japanese half-Euro mutt (English, Irish, Scottish, Dutch, French, Welsh, German. . .in case you were wondering), has definitely helped shape who I am. It's very cool to get to identify and learn about all these unique cultures and I think it's helped put the world in perspective.
My family was blue collar, a middle-class kind of thing. My father was born in Detroit, Italian-American. My mother is English. She acted on the stage with Diana Dors. Her parents were French.
I'm all self-taught. I never had a teacher. Even for English, and French, and German, I hardly went to school.
I recently wrote a piece on comics in architecture - I was talking about the three kinds of comics I pay attention to: the Franco-Belgian, the Japanese manga, and the American comics. I started thinking about the relationship between Japanese manga and Japanese architecture, or Franco-Belgian bande dessinée versus Franco-Belgian architecture, it began to make sense; there are parallels to the modes of operations and the cultures they belong to. If I didn't force myself to write, I would have no forum to clarify these thoughts. Writing is really helpful.
There's no light at the end of the tunnel, there isn't even a tunnel. The best thing I can do is get drunk and listen to classical music. Or sleep and wait for death to get closer. Leaving this will not be a horrible thing. Yet I'm glad, somehow, that I threw my words in the air: confetti, celebrating nothing.
I learned to say 'hello' in German, French, Spanish, Dutch, Chinese, Indonesian, and Italian - languages of the countries I've visited.
The recent riots in France demonstrate the problem European countries face where second and third generation immigrants still do not consider themselves French, German, or English.
Born in England during the First World War, of Belgian parents with partly German roots, I grew up in the cosmopolitan city of Antwerp, where I had the benefit of a classical education taught in the two national languages of Belgium: French and Dutch.
In Japanese and Italian, the response to ["How are you?"] is "I'm fine, and you?" In German it's answered with a sigh and a slight pause, followed by "Not so good.
I am the first prime minister of this country of neither English nor French origin. So I determined to bring about a Canadian citizenship that knew no hyphenated consideration....I'm very happy to be able to say that in the House of Commons today in my party we have members of Italian, Dutch, German, Scandinavian, Chinese and Ukrainian origin and they are all Canadians.
Must love be ever treated with profaneness as a mere illusion? or with coarseness as a mere impulse? or with fear as a mere disease? or with shame as a mere weakness? or with levity as a mere accident? whereas it is a great mystery and a great necessity, lying at the foundation of human existence, morality, and happiness,--mysterious, universal, inevitable as death.
I'm a bit of a melting pot, I try to speak British, but there's some European lilt - a not-so-conventional one because I'm Belgian, from the Flemish part. Dutch was my mother language, and I learned English, and I speak French, too.
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