Quotes About Belonging

Ownership is the most intimate relationship that one can have to objects. Not that they come alive in him; it is he who lives in them.

The people in your life who don't need an invitation still like to get one.

Blood relatives often have nothing to do with family, and similarly, family is about who you choose to make your life with.

Religion did not exist for the saving of souls but for the preservation and welfare of society, and in all that was necessary to this end every man had to take his part, or break with the domestic and political community to which he belonged.

Society is no comfortTo one not sociable.

An ill-favored thing, sir, but mine own.

That is my home of love: if I have rang'd,Like him that travels, I return again.

What's mine is yours, and what is yours is mine.

The thread that has run through my life is loneliness. Even as a child I was never part of a group. I don't know why. It was not by choice. Maybe because I was Jewish in a predominantly non-Jewish school. But I was fighting all the time. I had very few friends.

T]he conviction grew in him that the earth and the sky knew he was there and also felt friendly; so he was not really alone, and not really entirely lonely.

As a writer one doesn't belong anywhere. Fiction writers, I think, are even more outside the pale, necessarily on the edge of society. Because society and people are our meat, one really doesn't belong in the midst of society. The great challenge in writing is always to find the universal in the local, the parochial. And to do that, one needs distance.

His claim to his home is deep, but there are too many ghosts. He must absorb without being absorbed.

So if I'm not normal and you're not normal and they're not normal—why in the blue blazes do we all spend so much time pretending we are?

An Indian is an Indian regardless of the degree of Indian blood or which little government card they do or do not possess.

There are many histories of North America. The experiences of successive waves of immigrants are distinct, as are—to a large degree—the histories of the different classes compromising the immigrant waves. The histories of the various peoples native to the continent are also quite distinct within themselves. The story of each of these groups holds a rightful claim to its own integrity, to its own place and fullness of meaning within the whole. To deny this is to distort.

I am a collection of the family's body parts.

As the company of the redeemed, we do not belong to ourselves anymore; we belong to God and therefore to God's community.

Some Americans need hyphens in their names, because only part of them has come over; but when the whole man has come over, heart and thought and all, the hyphen drops of its own weight out of his name.

Some Americans need hyphens in their names because only part of them has come over.

This land is your land, this land is my land,From California to the New York island,From the redwood forest to the Gulf Stream waters,This land was made for you and me.

Everyone in California is from somewhere else.

I remember the sights and sounds and smells of home because the memory of home is the thing that never leaves us.

In those clubs, I learned that everything my town had taught me about race was absolutely wrong. The memories of that time in my life on Auburn Avenue are great ones, and they're all mine.

I was the kid who always thought I was chickenshit, and I had been terrified for most of my life. In treatment, people were suddenly loving me for me. Unconditionally. I had told them the goriest, most horrible stuff about myself … and they hugged me for it. This was what I had been looking for forever— a place to fit in.