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Quotes About Belonging

Waters of the Waingunga, the Man Pack have cast me out. I did them no harm, but they were afraid of me. Why?
~ Rudyard Kipling
Wolf Pack, ye have cast me out too. The jungle is shut to me and the village gates are shut. Why?
~ Rudyard Kipling
Waingunga, the Man Pack have
~ Rudyard Kipling
I see that ye are dogs. I go from you to my own people- if they be my own people.
~ Rudyard Kipling
Estaba confuso. Se miró las botas con tristeza, él que siempre había ido descalzo. ¿Quién soy yo?, se preguntó. Yo soy Kimball O'Hara, un blanco, un sahib. No, un sahib, no. Yo soy Kim. Pero, ¿quién es Kim?. Él, Kim, en medio del rugiente torbellino de la India, no era más que un ser insignificante que iba hacia el sur, ignorando lo que el destino iba a depararle.
~ Rudyard Kipling
In me you exist,' says the house.
~ Rumer Godden
Not really a demon; not really human. I'm not either. That's all. There was no place for me, so I had to find one myself. And then I realized. I had a place, but I was the only one in it. I didn't know any other way to live.- InuYasha
~ Rumiko Takahashi
Throughout human history, the apostles of purity, those who have claimed to possess a total explanation, have wrought havoc among mere mixed-up human beings. Like many millions of people, I am a bastard child of history. Perhaps we all are, black and brown and white, leaking into one another, as a character of mine once said, like flavours [sic] when you cook
~ Rushdie Salman
I've got nothing against outsiders, per se, you understand. It's just that you have to love a town before you can live in it right, and you have to live in it before you can love it right. Otherwise, you're a parasite of sorts.
~ Russell Banks
The life history of the individual is first and foremost an accomodation to the patterns and standards traditionally handed in his community. From the moment of his birth the customs into which he is born shape his experience and behavior.
~ Ruth Benedict
If skin marks the border where an I ends and a you begins, then that night they did all they could to cross it.
~ Ruth Ozeki
Ownership is the most intimate relationship that one can have to objects. Not that they come alive in him; it is he who lives in them.
~ Ruth Ozeki
So thank you for noticing, and thank you, too, for what you said just now: I knew you were mine. These are words every book wants to hear, and they sent a tremor of delight down our spine.
~ Ruth Ozeki
It also felt like home, and she wasn't sure she liked it.
~ Ruth Ozeki
I felt for the first time that the library belonged here. The house was reclaiming its spirit, and the library, which had stood aloof and apart for so many years, was turning back into what it was always meant to be: the heart of this home.
~ Ruth Reichl
It is a funny thing about families and dogs – either they belong to each other or they don't. If you asked Peterkin and me – and Daddles – we would all have said we belonged to each other. But if you asked the Monroes – the meanest, dirtiest and most shiftless family in Haddock Harbor – they would have said he was their hound-dog.
~ Ruth Sawyer
Lady #1, Maki, had never once given any thought to what was really right for her in her life, simply believing that if she surrounded herself with super-exclusive things, she'd become a super-exclusive person.
~ Ry? Murakami
American loneliness is a completely different creature from anything we experience in this country, and it made me glad I was born japanese.
~ Ry? Murakami
In Japan, even when you're alone, you're never really that lonely. But the loneliness you feel living among people with differently coloured skin and eyes, whose language you don't even speak very well - that sort of loneliness is something you feel down to the marrow of your bones.
~ Ry? Murakami
The paradox lies in the fact that even if I do not want to be a colonizer, and have even protested against colonialism, I am a colonizer by the mere fact of membership in the nation that colonizes others. Only at the price of renouncing my own country and nation, and perhaps at the price of changing my skin color (a theoretical proposition), could I rid myself of this taint, this odium.
~ Ryszard Kapu?ci?ski
Alone on the earth! Hamed cries out, and there is a note of terror in his voice, for that is the one thing a Somali cannot imagine: finding himself alone in the world.
~ Ryszard Kapu?ci?ski
Lo sradicamento dalla propria cultura costa caro. Per questo è così importante avere chiaro il senso della propria identità, della sua forza e del suo valore. Solo allora l'uomo può liberamente confrontarsi con una cultura diversa. In caso contrario si chiuderà nella sua tana, isolandosi timorosamente dagli altri.
~ Ryszard Kapu?ci?ski
I am poor—you are my riches; dark—you are my light; I own nothing, need nothing. And how could I own anything? After all, it is a contradiction that he can own something who does not own himself. I am happy as a child who is neither able to own anything nor allowed to. I own nothing, for I belong only to you; I am not, I have ceased to be, in order to be yours." —Johannes the Seducer, from_Either/Or_
~ Soren Kierkegaard
I am poor—you are my riches; dark—you are my light; I own nothing, need nothing. And how could I own anything? After all, it is a contradiction that he can own something who does not own himself. I am happy as a child who is neither able to own anything nor allowed to. I own nothing, for I belong only to you; I am not, I have ceased to be, in order to be yours." —Johannes De Silentio, from_Either/Or_
~ Soren Kierkegaard