Quotes About Belonging

One hand, five homes. A lifetime in a fist.

I realized that although I have adopted a new country, I cannot forget China. I wonder about Chna's present, and I worry about her future. I have realized that despite all my suffereing, I cannot stop loving the country where I was born and raised.

Home, I thought. Wasn't a home a private place? A place where the family could feel secure? How could strangers come and search through our secrets? If

I no longer worried that she was a landlord's wife. She was my grandmother.

To love this particular nation is to love the world. This paradox lies within all forms of liberal nationalism. A liberal nation is a nation to which anyone who affirms its civic ideals belongs.

Those forced to make impossible choices are rarely loved. If it's approval and reputation you care about, then you have no place here.

bookstores, libraries … they're the closest thing I have to a church.

Your need for acceptance can make you invisible in this world.

What does a lone wolf want? It wants to stop being a lone wolf. It wants togetherness, to be a part of something bigger. Survival depends on it.

Like the sodomite, "normal" men looked and acted like any non-queer man in Chicago, and so they too fit seamlessly into, and went unrecognized by, society. The investigator did learn, however, that they had a way of recognizing each other, often wearing red neckties to signal to others in the know that they were queer.

I think I feel not at home in America, but not necessarily at home outside of America.

Since antiquity, men have defined themselves by those who are excluded.

Some people are born into wonderful families. Others have to find or create them. Being a member of a family is a priceless privilege which costs nothing but love.

For someone who is invisible, why am I the only one in this family who can't seem to master the art of disappearing?

I'll belong to libraries wherever I go. Maybe eventually I'll belong to libraries on other planets.

What I mean is, when I look at other people, other girls in school, and see what they like and what they're happy with and what they want, I don't feel as if I'm a part of their species. And sometimes--sometimes I don't care.

But this is your home' 'Not any longer, my poppet. Women make nests but men make bequests and scatter them. Heigh-ho!

How have I changed? I know now that I belong right in the middle of every dilemma. The solution to my problems is not to avoid them, or to follow a scripted response. I need to have enough confidence, enough self-respect, enough bravery to meet each challenge head on and pursue an original solution.

WELCOME HOME, FOLKS WE'RE GOING TO MAKE IT

No wonder you get along with so many kinds of people, Foster. Look at all this heritage that's part of you. That's something to be proud of.

Yet such authenticity was part of [Sonia Sotomayor's] attraction. And she acknowledged what few other prominent figures revealed: she sometimes felt awkward and out of place. In her speeches, she talked about fighting the fear of missteps and failure. 'Like yourself. Like who you are,' she advised young people trying to make their way in the world.

Sonia Sotomayor's] opinion echoed with her personal story: 'Race matters because of the slights, the snickers, the silent judgments that reinforce that most crippling of thoughts: 'I do not belong here.

A place belongs forever to whoever claims it hardest, remembers it most obsessively, wrenches it from itself, shapes it, renders it, loves it so radically that he remakes it in his own image.

Why didn't I feel that I belonged to my parents? How early could I have known that I was not right? I think it has always been part of me. Can a newborn sense her parents' disappointment and feelings of frustration at not being able to change the unchangeable?