Quotes About Belonging

We're alike, Jess would tell himself, me and Miss Edmunds . . . We don't belong at Lark Creek, Julia and me.

The idea of living in the same house for all your childhood and having the same knot of devoted friends seemed magical to me, who had lived in thirteen different places by the time I was thirteen.

Everyone had a place. Everyone fit. Everyone belonged. Everyone but Anna Mae.

Canyons of incomprehension yawn between me and most other human beings, and I keep acting as if it's possible for me to reach across and join them on their side, to span the gap between who they believe me to be and who I really am.

this fundamental effort to get your bearings, this paradox pressed upon teenagers of distinguishing yourself from everyone in the world while taking care not to be different from anyone—

I will go to the Ring of Sacred Volcanoes, but I shall go not as a member of the MacHeath clan — no, I shall go as a free runner. I reject you. I deny you, I refuse and repudiate you as my clan.

To belong did not mean ownership. You were not someone's property. The "be" syllable was about existence: "to be" yourself and "to be" in a special place that no one else could occupy within your family except you. The "long" part was about the heart, a place in the heart where a family met and lived together. They didn't just put up with each other. They longed for each other. To belong was not a state of mind but a state of heart.

I found out and lost the only place I ever sort of regarded as home. Oh well. Best to stay in one's garden but Voltaire was a boring writer and sex is one of the greatest things there is.

Education,' one of R's teachers taught, 'teaches you not to be yourself.' But who is yourself? R decided if it or he wasn't blood, it wasn't anything.

She shrugged. Ownership is a fragile concept.

Later, after Christmas carols and a nightcap of mulled ale in front of the fire, Mole reflects on how much he has missed the warmth and security of what he once had known, all of those "friendly things which had long been unconsciously a part of him.

The Self Is Not Portable The self is not portable. It cannot be packed. It comes sneaking back to any place from which it's been extracted, for it is nothing alone. It is not an entity. The ratio of self to home: one part in seventy.

I think of my pile of old paperbacks, their pages gone wobbly, like they'd once belonged to the sea.

Everything might scatter. You might be right. I suppose it's something we can't easily get away from. People need to feel they belong. To a nation, to a race. Otherwise, who knows what might happen? This civilisation of ours, perhaps it'll just collapse. And everything scatter, as you put it.

I suppose it had something to do with it being a secret, just how much it had meant to me. Maybe all of us at Hailsham had little secrets like that--little private nooks created out of thin air where we could go off alone with our fears and longings. But the very fact that we had such needs would have felt wrong to us at the time--like somehow we were letting the side down.

Leave us, you were always on the outside of our love.

People are not two-thirds one thing and the remainder something else. Temperament, personality, or outlook don't divide quite like that. The bits don't separate clearly. You end up a funny homogeneous mixture. This is something that will become more common in the latter part of the century—people with mixed cultural backgrounds, and mixed racial backgrounds. That's the way the world is going.

I think of my pile of old paperbacks, their pages gone wobbly, like they'd once belonged to the sea.

A lot of the time, how you were regarded at Hailsham, how much you were liked and respected, had to do with how good you were at "creating." Ruth

Even so, an AF would feel himself growing lethargic after a few hours away from the Sun, and start to worry there was something wrong with him – that he had some fault unique to him and that if it became known, he'd never find a home.

So you're waiting, even if you don't quite know it, waiting for the moment when you realize that you really are different to them; that there are people out there, like Madame, who don't hate you or wish you any harm, but who nevertheless shudder at the very thought of you--of how you were brought into this world and why--and who dread the idea of your hand brushing against theirs.

And the reason it meant so much—so much more than, say, dancing or table-tennis—was because the people out there were different from us students: they could have babies from sex.

So you're waiting, even if you don't quite know it, waiting for the moment when you realise that you really are different to them; that there are people out there, like Madame, who don't hate you or wish you any harm, but who nevertheless shudder at the very thought of you—of how you were brought into this world and why—and who dread the idea of your hand brushing against theirs.

Hace ya algún tiempo que me cuesta relajarme en mi propia casa. Si estoy solo, me pongo cada vez más nervioso, fastidiado por la idea de que me estoy perdiendo un encuentro crucial en otra parte. Pero si me quedo solo en casa ajena, a menudo me inunda una agradable sensación de paz.