Quotes About Belonging

the secret histories of things deserve to linger, to belong again to the coil of your hair I found once as a child, dried out by shadows, in a shut-tight wooden box

Alienation means you don't feel at ease in any situation, any place, or with any person, not even with yourself. You are always trying to get 'home' but never feel at home.

One of the ways in which the ego attempts to escape the unsatisfactoriness of personal self­hood is to enlarge and strengthen its sense of self by identifying with a group – a nation, a political party, corporation, institution, sect, club, gang, football team.

en muchos casos, no estás comprando un producto sino un «realzador de la identidad». Las marcas son, básicamente, identidades colectivas a las que te incorporas pagando. Son

You are always trying to get "home" but never feel at home.

Georgie's grandfather had been born in Italy, and lived in America for five years before he got his citizenship papers, at which time he could rightfully be called an Italian-American. In Georgie's eyes, this was the only time the hyphenate could be used properly. His parents had been born here of Italian-American parents, but this did not make them similarly Italian-Americans, it made them simply Americans

As you know I am not of Barsoom; your ways are not my ways, and I can only act in the future as I have in the past, in accordance with the dictates of my conscience and guided by the standards of mine own people.

P56-his reason told him that he was of a different race from his wild and hairy companions

I never knew my father, my mother was an ape

I was just a screw or cog in the great machine I called life, and when I dropped out of it I found I was of no use anywhere else.

I have tried hard - but life is difficult, and I am a very useless person. I can hardly be said to have an independent existence. I was just a screw or a cog in the great machine called life, and when I dropped out of it I found I was no use anywhere else. What can one do when one finds out that one only fits into one hole? One must go back to it or be thrown out into the rubbish heap - and you don't know what it's like in the rubbish heap!

Believe me, all of you, the best way to help the places we live in is to be glad we live there.

She herself had grown up without any one spot of earth being dearer than another: there was no center of earth pieties, of grave endearing traditions, to which her heart could revert and from which it could draw strength for itself and tenderness for others.

There were certain things that had to be done, and if done at all, done handsomely and thoroughly; and one of these, in the old New York code, was the tribal rally around a kinswoman about to be eliminated from the tribe.

What did it matter where she came from, or whose child she was, when love was dancing in her veins?

Superficially so like them all, and so eager to outdo them in detachment and adaptability, ridiculing the prejudices he had shaken off, and the people to whom he belonged, he still kept, under his easy pliancy, the skeleton of old faiths and old fashions. He talks every language as well as the rest of us, Susy had once said of him, but at least he talks one language better than the others.

He and she belonged to each other for always: he understood that now. The impulse which had first drawn them together again, in spite of reason, in spite of themselves almost, that deep-seated instinctive need that each had of the other, would never again wholly let them go.

You mean, I suppose, that society here is not as brilliant? You're right, I daresay; but we belong here, and people should respect our ways when they come among us. Ellen Olenska especially: she came back to get away from the kind of life people lead in brilliant societies.

To a torn heart uncomforted by human nearness a room may open almost human arms, and the being to whom no four walls mean more than any others, is, at such hours, expatriate everywhere.

S? emigreze! Parc? un gentleman ar putea s?-?i p?r?seasc? patria!

To make us love our country, our country ought to be lovely.

Then I caught myself foolishly imagining that gays might someday constitute a community rather than a diagnosis.

She was happy I was home, I would come often, I would be company

I could feel she was angry with me because of my gawkiness, because of my accent and my oilskin bag, bound with twine. She talked to herself, mumbled, as the train rumbled along. Then all of a sudden her mood changed and she kissed me and hugged me and said my mother and her mother were first cousins and that meant that she and I were second cousins and would be buddies.