Quotes About Belonging

The poet David Whyte calls this sense of creative entitlement "the arrogance of belonging," and claims that it is an absolutely vital privilege to cultivate if you wish to interact more vividly with life.

Your home is whatever in this world you love more than you love yourself.

Yet I can tell you that there was a lonely and untenanted corner of my heart that I'd never known was there—and Frank moved right into it. Holding him in my heart made me feel like I belonged to love itself. Although we never lived together or shared a bed, he was always a part of me. I saved stories for him all week, so I would have good things to tell him. I asked for his opinions, because I respected his ethics.

The guardians of high culture will try to convince you that the arts belong only to a chosen few, but they are wrong and they are also annoying. We

Aside from my cockeyed internal compass, I also have a shortage of personal coolness, which can be a liability in travel. I have never learned how to arrange my face into that blank expression of competent invisibility that is so useful when traveling in dangerous, foreign places. You know - that super-relaxed, totally-in-charge expression which makes you look like you belong there, anywhere, everywhere, even in the middle of riot in Jakarta.

I'm damn sure not going to rent a place—what am I, an immigrant?

Every city has a single word that defines it, that identifies most poeple who live there. If you could read people's thoughts as they were passing you on the streets of any given place, you would discover that most of them are thinking the same thought. Whatever that majority thought might be - that is the word of the city. And if your personal word does not match the word of the city, then you don't really belong there.

Because often what keeps you from creative living is your self-absorption (your self-doubt, your self-disgust, your self-judgment, your crushing sense of self-protection). The arrogance of belonging pulls you out of the darkest depths of self-hatred—not by saying "I am the greatest!" but merely by saying "I am here!" I

I will always be safe from the random hurricanes of outcome as long as I never forget where I rightfully live.

And with me and Rosella—things were never bad. We just lived separate lives. What you gotta understand about South Brooklyn, is that the neighborhood itself is a family. You can't break up that family. Really, my wife is married to the neighborhood. It was the neighborhood who took care of her while I was in the service. The neighborhood still takes care of her now—and Angela, too.

We can change our wives. We can change our jobs, our nationalities and even our religions, but we can never change our team

Moreover, they would likely agree that there is not one special person waiting for you somewhere in this world who will make your life magically complete, but that there are any number of people (right in your community, probably) with whom you can seal a respectful bond.

We humans come into this world - as Aristophanes so beautifully explained - feeling as though we have been sawed in half, desperate to find somebody who will recognize us and repair us. (Or re-pair us.)

The guardians of high culture will try to convince you that the arts belong only to a chosen few, but they are wrong and they are also annoying

Love the sojourner for you were once sojourners in the land of Egypt.

I had always thought of home not as a house, or even a place, but a feeling of safety and acceptance, a warm light when the rest of the world was a dark, forbidding place. Whenever my family was around, wherever we were, I felt like I was home.

You may find that when you try to live in two worlds you are at home in neither of them.

Will you make my house a home, Isabel?

Will you make my home a home, Isabel?

It gave me a feeling of temporary acceptance into that elite community, to stroll across the quad at his side. It also gave me my first faint quiver of sexual belonging, the elusive feeling that if I slipped my hand into his as we walked along, a door would fall open somewhere in the long wall of reality as I knew it, never to be closed again.

I lay awake for hours in my twin bed next to the other, empty bed, feeling and hearing the spruces, the hemlocks, the rhododendron scraping at the partly open window, the verdant mountain out there in the night, the burgeoning of nature that did not seem to include me. And when, my restless body asked my teeming brain, had I agreed to be excluded?

I recently heard a great writer say that an essential element in the life of a writer is to have been an outsider in childhood, to have been given the gift of not belonging.

People are different in different places,' he thought hazily. 'And if they're all right in one place, it's best to leave them there.

It's in the air. You have to get fond of people here.