Quotes About Belonging

It ain't bad, said Shug. But I just feel funny living in a square. If I was square, then I could take it better, she said.

My first step from the old white man was trees. Then air. Then birds. Then other people. But one day when I was sitting quiet and feeling like a motherless child, which I was, it come to me: that feeling of being part of everything, not separate at all.

That feeling of being part of everything, not separate at all.

They had the look of people deliberately distancing themselves from the center of things, as their own cultures defined it. Seeking the edge, the fringe. But also, paradoxically, the heart.

She say, My first step from the old white man was trees. Then air. Then birds. Then other people. But one day when I was sitting quiet and feeling like a motherless child, which I was, it come to me: that feeling of being part of everything, not separate at all. I knew that if I cut a tree, my arm would bleed.

What makes a circle sacred is that those who show up for it are the ones who belong in it.

Yet I honestly think that in her absence, and over time, she became powerfully present to him. Perhaps this is simply the way it is with writers. It is when they don't see you that you matter. Because then you can belong to them in a way that permits them complete possession. You are determined by them. You are controlled. You are, generally speaking, exaggerated.

That summer marked the beginning of a realization that I could never live happily in Africa--or anywhere else--until I could live freely in Mississippi.

I didn't know there were women who wore men's clothes and had men's haircuts. But like a traveler in a foreign country who runs into someone from home - someone they've never spoken to but know by sight - I recognized her with a surge of joy.

And woe betide the person with the 'double abnormality' of a false self and 'a fine intellect' that they find they can use to escape their pain. 'The world may observe academic success of a high degree, and may find it hard to believe in the very real distress of the individual concerned, who feels 'phoney' the more he or she is successful. [as quoted by Winnicott]

until we make peace with our homes, we can never quite make peace with ourselves.

maa tujhe salaam pher lete hai nazar jis waqt bete or bahu.. ajnabi apne hi ghar me hae ban jati hai maaa..

I suppose a lot of teenage girls feel invisible sometimes, like they just disappear. Well, that's me—Cammie the Chameleon. But I'm luckier than most because, at my school, that's considered cool. I go to a school for spies.

It was a place you could make into a home if your home hadn't worked out.

It is ironic that many Filipinos learn to love the Philippines while abroad, not at home.

Breath belongs to Mehay. Ecl has no use for it.

I am one of them. I am also Rachel. I am Risika

Homesickness was an adjustment disorder, that was the long and short of it.

already know by instinct we're not comfortably at home in our translated world.

One must keep a close eye on the current definitions. To be unpatriotic would be terrible. To be patriotic in the wrong way could be fatal.

You're going for a feeling. Make them think you're one of them.

But they weren't aliens, I had to remind myself — we were.

First time I ever joint the Chorus," Don Lewiston said, "I forgot the face of my father

A flock isn't such a bad thing if you belong, but a few hundred starlings will tear an unlucky martin to feathers if it crosses their path.