Quotes About Belonging

I wish I understood my country. I can only love it.

Cand cineva se hotaraste sa emigreze intr-o tara indepartata, isi impune in mod fatal obligatia de a se afirma in aceasta tara.

The efficacy of prayer consists in a cognitive-spiritual catharsis, which purifies man of the most hideous untruth and deception, namely, the pretension that he belongs to himself and that he is his own lord.

We are the people birthed from this land. For the first time I can seem something I've not fully understood before, not until now as these pale creatures from somewhere far away stare down at us in wonder, trying to makes sense of what they see. We are this place. This place is us.

We are the people birthed from this land. For the first time I can see something I've not fully understood before, not until now as these pale creatures from somewhere far away stare down at us in wonder, trying to make sense of what they see. We are this place. This place is us.

A year is plenty of time to fit in, right? Like a square peg is going to fit into a round hole if you just give it time? You could say that when I arrived here in the middle of my seventh-grade year I settled into a well-defined niche that was purely my own and remains so in eighth grade. The niche of a minuscule, mouthy Mohawk misfit. And nothing is going to change that.

We need myths that will identify the individual not with his local group but with the planet.

Die Gesellschaft stellt eifersüchtig denen nach, die sich von ihr ausschließen, und wird kommen und an die Pforte pochen.

It's not much of a tail, but I'm sort of attached to it.

Are you a monster?" she asked. Helen smiled. "No, sweetie. I'm just an Enchanted American.

And said in wonderment My love I have finally come home...

Wilson insisted the time had come for "hyphenated" citizenship to end.

Westerners say, "I think, therefore I am," with the focus on individual identity apart from social context. Africans say, "We relate, therefore I am"—a

I belong with her, wherever that may be.

Islands prove, I think, that geography makes people what they are.

It's not much of a tail, but I'm sort of attached to it.

All the same he got a pinch of misery, thinking, just as he had sometimes in Kentucky when he'd be out in the woods, feeling good that he was alone, with everything to himself, and then he would spy someone and it would all be spoiled, as if the country wasn't his any more, or the woods or the quiet.

The only sheets I'll ever long for are my own.

The question I asked Georges has now become a general one - You, who thought you were superfluous, who thought there was no place for you in society, not only are you not superfluous, you are needed and so those who were beggars become givers.

Each of us is an orphan in some sense or another, and yet someone's love and shelter come to us by the grace of God.

Yet I lay in bed that night imagining what it would be like not to feel such an alien in England, to be able to live with someone to whom I could speak casually about things without having to give long explanations, what it would be like not to live in England at all, but here, in a crowd, rather than always being and feeling on the edges of everything.

New maps were made, complete maps, so that every inch was accounted for, and everyone now knew who they were, or at least who they belonged to. Those maps, how they transformed everything.

Abdulrazak Gurnah

I don't think I ever got over those early days, though. Even after all these years I can't get over the feeling of being alien in England, of being a foreigner. Sometimes I think that what I feel for England is disappointed love.