Quotes About Belonging

He [Ma's Tooth] was part of her a minute ago but now he's not. Just a thing.

by her family circle. That was my phrase, one that could include me by some stretch of the imagination; 'circle' sounded too symmetrical, but it would have to do.

My names were hand-me-downs too: girl, the creature, or, most often, you there.

Hi, Watzisname!' called Joe, loudly. Watzisname came up. 'My name is not Watzisname,' he said a little haughtily. 'I've at last found out what it is. It is an absolutely marvellous name.' 'What is it?' said Beth. 'It is Kollamoolitoomarellipawkyrollo,' said Watzisname, very proudly indeed.

The red caravan, picked out with black and yellow, is ours,' said Dick. 'The blue one, picked out in black and yellow, is yours and Anne's.' 'Woof,' said Timmy at once. 'Oh, sorry – yours too, Timmy,' said Dick at once, and everyone chuckled.

One of the great comforts of our present home, on the other hand, was that we hadn't chosen it. Inevitability is surely part of the sense of home, the irreplaceable something for which the heart yearns.

Birthright citizenship remains an eloquent statement about the nature of American society and a repudiation of a long history of equating citizenship with whiteness.

The permanent misfits can find salvation only in a complete separation from the self; and they usually find it by losing themselves in the compact collectivity of a mass movement.

A mass movement attracts and holds a following not because it can satisfy the desire for self-advancement, but because it can satisfy the passion for self-renunciation.

the connection between the escape from an ineffectual self and a responsiveness to mass movements is very clear. The slipping author, artist, scientist—slipping because of a drying-up of the creative flow within—drifts sooner or later into the camps of ardent patriots, race mongers, uplift promoters and champions of holy causes. Perhaps the sexually impotent are subject to the same impulse. (The

A plant needs roots in order to grow. With man it is the other way around: only when he grows does he have roots and feels at home in the world.

The man just out of the army is an ideal potential convert, and we find him among the early adherents of all contemporary mass movements. He feels alone and lost in the free-for-all of civilian life. The

The ideal potential convert is the individual who stands alone, who has no collective body he can blend with and lose himself in and so mask the pettiness, meaninglessness and shabbiness of his individual existence.

Your hair--it's kind of wavy. Indian in your blood, or are you a hypocrite and texturize your hair? He hesitated, appeared uneasy, then said, My mother is black and my father is white. Your a brown-skinned Drake and didn't vote for your cousin Obama?

You are the reason I wake up with a smile on my face, and the reason I go to sleep with a sense of belonging in this world

It doesn't matter,' Monsieur Ibrahim said. 'Your love for her belongs to you. It is yours. Even if she refuses it, she cannot change it. She isn't benefiting from it, that's all. What you give, Momo, is yours forever. What you keep is lost for all time!

Né quelque part où il ne fallait pas, j'ai voulu en partir ; réclamant le statut de réfugié, j'ai dégringolé d'identité en identité, migrant, mendiant, illégal, sans-papiers, sans-droits, sans-travail ; le seul vocable qui me définit désormais est clandestin.

There is nothing inhuman, evil, or irrational which does not give some comfort, provided it is shared by a group.

Ethical principles stand above the existence of the nation and that by adhering to these principles an individual belongs to the community of all those who share, who have shared, and who will share this belief.

Also in contemporary Western society the union with the group is the prevalent way of overcoming separateness. It is a union which the individual self disappears to a large extent, and where the aim is to belong to the heard. If I am like everybody else, if I have no feeling or thoughts which make me different, if I conform in custom, dress, ideas, to the pattern of the group, I am saved: saved from the frightening experience of aloneness.

Whether or not we are aware of it, there is nothing of which we are more ashamed than of not being ourselves, and there is nothing that gives us greater pride and happiness than to think, to feel, and to say what is ours.

It seems that nothing is more difficult for the average man to bear than the feeling of not being identified with a larger group.

The deepest need of man, then, is the need to overcome his separateness, to leave the prison of his aloneness.

Man can attempt to become one with the world by submission to a person, to a group, to an institution, to God. In this way, he transcends the separateness of his individual existence by becoming part of somebody or something bigger than himself, and experiences his identity in connection with the power to which he has submitted.