Quotes About Belonging

I often say to my friends that I felt too Puerto Rican to live in the States; then I felt too American to live in Puerto Rico. So when I settled back in Puerto Rico in 1992, I had to come to terms with all of that.

I wasn't really geeky. In terms of the high school hierarchy, I was very much in the middle ground. You have the really popular guys, you have the nerdy guys, and then you have the people who really don't care - and that was me. I wasn't really picked on or anything like that.

But we wish to give the Jews a Homeland. Not by dragging them ruthlessly out of their sustaining soil, but rather by removing them carefully, roots and all, to a better terrain.

There is beauty in our roots. Sometimes we think our roots are shameful, and people tell you that you're no good or your ancestors are no good or that you come from a neighborhood of no hope and terrible crime. But it's about the beauty of those places, and I carry that with me.

Ah, Scotland. I am three-parts Scottish and terribly proud of it, although maybe we should divide it into eighths, because my two-eighths are Danish and English, the Lumley part. But the bulk of the rest of me is Scottish - and Scottish ministers especially.

There's something sort of intrinsic in being a Southerner that doesn't go away. You can't get rid of it, but it's not something that's terribly obvious.

My family settled in Cairo in 1980. I was nine. I missed Libya terribly, but I also took to Cairo. I perfected the accent. People assumed I was Egyptian.

We take things to remind us of home. I think my favourite is a stuffed dog that was homemade from a picture of my little Jack Russell terrier.

I wasn't the class nerd, but I was weird. I could tell long stories and be funny, but I couldn't do sports. And I was always terrified of being held back.

I moved to Los Angeles when I was 20 years old and was absolutely terrified. I grew up in a small town, so the city itself scared me. I initially did not plan on staying but fell in love with it and never went home.

Sports passion is deeply, infamously territorial: our city-state is better than your city-state because our city-state's team beat your city-state's team. My attachment to the Sonics is approximately the reverse of this.

We can feel in Poland a kind of phantom pain for lost multi-ethnic territories.

The malady of the Jews is that they don't see territory as part of their identity.

Sunday afternoons at a parish center - or a community center - is familiar territory for me.

As a black Republican you sort of find yourself in unique territory.

People should look at the government as 'us,' not as 'them' and not in terror.

Non-citizen terrorist suspects are not members of the American national community, and they have no proper claim on the rights Americans accord one another.

The people-pleasing and performing is 100% ingrained in me, partly because I was a little brown girl growing up in a very white, homogeneous community in San Diego - where, in second grade, I was called a terrorist.

We maintain and hold that Muslims and Hindus are two major nations by any definition or test of a nation.

I'd been taught from an early age that I was in the 'other' category on the standardized tests. You know, I had to go down the checklist - Caucasian, African-American, Latino, Asian-Pacific Islander, and then, you know, at the bottom is other. So, you know, very early on I was taught, in a way, that I was somehow this anomaly.

Home, the spot of earth supremely blest, A dearer, sweeter spot than all the rest.

fulfilling the essential human need for contact with others.

Music is for every single person that walks the planet.

The church is the great lost and found department.