Top 25 Maya Soetoro-Ng Quotes

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.

We can do much to help our communities loosen their boundaries and begin to welcome a multitude of ways of being to make sure that individuals of mixed race, religion, or ethnicities don’t feel the need to choose one or the other but see their layers as a gift, something that adds beauty.

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.

I think it’s true we look forward to enormous amounts of information, but I think we would be better off if we thought about the kinds of wisdom and thoughtfulness that we need in order to handle the amount of information ahead.

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.

The rich emotional tapestry of being a mother, becoming a mother, connects you to your own mother. I didn’t realize how much I’d become her. I pass a mirror, and am surprised by how much I look like her.

Each of us has a right to name ourselves as we will.

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.

My hope is that I can continue writing and, in the future, I can just be Maya Soetoro-Ng.

I’ve always kept a journal and brought storytelling into my teaching.

Government should exist in order to help fortify the country and make those who are in need better able to meet their own.

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.

As children, we develop some scorn for our parents and their imperfections.

We need to teach our children empathy and care and love and communication and social responsibility in preparation for adulthood.

I don’t think the White House has always reflected the textures and flavors of this country.

My whole family was Muslim, and most of the people I knew were Muslim.

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.

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.

Government is supposed to lead by example in many cases. Government that’s not particularly caring and is hands-off is not particularly inspiring.

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.

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.

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.

My brother loves this country deeply. He has laid down roots, and he has always been incredibly patriotic and committed to this country.

I ended up very American and very Indonesian and a little bit of a lot of things.

I’m a teacher, so much of what I’m doing remains in the abstract. But I also support a lot of educational initiatives that support kids to really get out there and work hard in their communities. But I also think that we need poets in our country to inspire.