Quotes About Belonging

When I speak with people who love their jobs and have vital friendships at work, they always talk about how their workgroup is like a family.

I had studied Irish history. I had read speeches from the dock. I had tried to fuse the vivid past of my nation with the lost spaces of my childhood. I had learned the battles, the ballads, the defeats. It never occurred to me that eventually the power and insistence of a national tradition would offer me only a new way of not belonging.

No matter what you eventually become - free, empowered - the lingering feeling of 'once an outsider, always an outsider' is very vivid for me.

What I remember most vividly was the sense of always being a little behind the other kids in class - that sense of I wasn't cut out for class or I wasn't cut out to read.

I remember very vividly being little and bringing my lunch to school and taking out what was my to-die-for treats from home, whether it was pig ears or dried seaweed, and the reactions of my classmates just hurt, down to my core.

I remember at school one day there was a vocabulary list on the chalkboard, and the word 'nonconformist' was on there, and it said, 'Someone that doesn't appeal to society, someone who doesn't fit in.' We had this whole conversation about it, and I realized it cohered to the punk-rock world that I was into.

I'm sure I went through a stage when I resented being Indian because in every other manner, in terms of cultural reference points and vocabulary and all the rest of it, I was way ahead of everybody else - so the one thing that set me back was being Indian. And I couldn't do anything about it.

It's funny: when I first started getting vocal about how much I liked 'Doctor Who,' I didn't realize how deep the fan base was.

My days at the Studio sustain all the work that I do today. They gave me a sense of legacy, a sense of belonging, and a community that made me believe in my talent and vocation.

Being an outsider means not being heard, not having a voice. It means being treated as a second-class citizen, being diminished in the eyes of others. We have all felt this way at one time or another, but some feel it more consistently. Unfortunately, our schools often do not embrace the talents of many of their occupants.

I've always felt like I was an actor for hire. And almost apologetic for being a woman of color, trying to stifle that voice. But I don't feel that way in Shondaland. I feel like I am accepted into a world where I'm a part of the narrative - I'm a part of it.

I do not have voice for Russian music; I cannot be cute little peasant like in operas of Glinka or Rimsky-Korsakov. I am now never in Russia; I am Austrian citizen. But definitely I am Latin!

I try to swim against the current as much as possible when it comes to the tribalism that defines the way people do politics on social media, and I try to present myself as an individual and humanistic voice. I'm interested in people, not just factions.

Musicals have long given voice to outsiders and speak of experiences in our culture and environment.

I was an outsider. I looked different, and I felt really voiceless as a kid.

As I've written more, and as other Indian American voices have grown around me, I strive harder to find experiences that are unique yet a meaningful and resonant part of the American story.

I've never had issues with popularity. I was always a popular guy... I've always had friends and loved ones and everything, so it wasn't like, 'Oh man, I gotta fill some void that was left by high school.' I had a great high-school experience.

To me, politics is culture. I became a journalist, and later a filmmaker, to get to know my new country and my volatile place in it as a gay, undocumented Filipino-American.

Most black British people who have come to our shores were not brought here in chains, but came voluntarily due to their connections to the U.K. and in search of a better life. I should know: I am one of them.

People who volunteer at the recycling center or soup kitchen through a church or neighborhood group can come to feel part of something 'larger.' Such a sense of belonging calls on a different part of a self than the market calls on. The market calls on our sense of self-interest. It focuses us on what we 'get.'

Either one is French and can vote, or one is not French and cannot vote.

If we want people to vote, we need to make it a larger part of their self-image.

I have a funny relationship to the British working class movement... I'm in it, but not culturally of it... I was aware that I'd come from the periphery of this process. I was reluctant to go canvassing for the Labour party. I don't find it easy to say, straight, face to face with an English working class family: 'Are you going to vote for us?'

I left home at 18, but I still voted in Kentucky. Every holiday, I came home to Kentucky.