Quotes About Belonging

Children, like cats, made a house into a home, and the echoes of their presence lingered.

She was crying because she was far from home, and who among us has never wanted to do that? There need be no other reason; just that. We cry for home, and for flowers on tables, and biscuits in little tins, and for mother; and we feel embarrassed, and foolish too, that we should be crying for such things; but we should not feel that way because all of us, in a sense, have strayed from home, and wish to return.

This girl, now in her early teens, had never had a photograph of herself. There was no record of her childhood, nothing which would remind her of what she used to be. There was nothing, no image, of which she could say: That is me. And all this meant that there was nobody who had ever wanted her picture; she had simply not been special enough.

He came over the border at night, as he had no papers. It is not easy, Mma, to have no papers. If you are a person without papers, then you are nothing. Even cattle have papers these days, Mma—I'm joking, of course, but that is what it can feel like to have no papers.

the human world, he reflected, was divided into little clusters of people—tiny tribes, small groups of friends, families—and if you belonged to only a few of these, then your life was circumscribed.

every man has a map in his heart of his own country and that the heart will never allow you to forget this map.

Families come in different ways... sometimes they are given to you, but sometimes you find them yourself, unexpectedly, as you go through life.

to people who are unhappy inside themselves. There is room for everyone. Everyone should be able to find somewhere on this earth to sit down.

Every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main; if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less…" She thought: when will it come—that moment when that no longer resonates with people too tired of others and their demands, too exhausted to open their doors to those in need, too overwhelmed by the scale of humanity in all its billions to value individual human life.

You can't have a cohesive society without a shared culture.

That was the marvelous thing about going back to one's roots; there was no need for explanation.

His particular insight was that we need to be at home; all his concerns with division within ourselves, with the tragic flaws in our nature, with the thwarting of love—all these point to the need that he felt we had within us to locate ourselves in a place we could live in with love, with people with whom we could share.

So it was in Botswana, almost everywhere; ties of kinship, no matter how attenuated by distance or time, linked one person to another, weaving across the country a human blanket of love and community. And in the fibres of that blanket there were threads of obligation that meant that one could not ignore the claims of others. Nobody should starve; nobody should feel that they were outsiders; nobody should be alone in their sadness.

I was deliberately southern African. Not in a good or easy way. There is no getting around the fact that there had been so much awful violence to get me here; my people had engaged in such terrible acts of denial and oppression; I so obviously did not look Africa; and yet here I still was.

We belonged nowhere here; we belonged nowhere else.

You belong with me, Scarlett, haven't you figured that out? And the world is where we belong, all of it. We're not home-and-hearth people. We're the adventurers, the buccaneers, the blockade runners. Without challenge, we're only half alive. We can go anywhere, and as long as we're together, it will belong to us. But, my pet, we'll never belong to it. That's for other people, not for us.

And the world is where we belong, all of it.

Random, meaningless groups can adopt an us-versus-them mentality.

The cafeteria made him feel like an observer rather than a participant in the high school experience.

Membership in small groups allows people to feel similar and different at the same time: similar because they are a part of a group in different because the group is separate from the masses.

He didn't realize that simply by mingling among various lunch tables, he was befriending people in different crowds, weaving together the fringes of the cafeteria.

Exclusion is common behavior. But that doesn't make it unchangeable. And that doesn't mean that anything is wrong with the cafeteria fringe.

straight white males need supportive communities, too.

Perhaps more than an American high school, Japan is like an English public school. You are supposed to learn, excel, and win athletic distinctions—not for yourself, but for the house and for the country, for being Japanese. First on the field, all for the sake of your school. And then, the emptiness when you graduate.