Quotes About Belonging

Leah had not realized until she sat down at the table with her book club friends that she'd been waiting all year for this moment. To reunite with women who understood and didn't judge her, and women whom she could call friends.

The longer we remain isolated in a period of liberty, the harder it will be to find one another in a time of persecution.

As I see it, this is the core, this is the essence of everything right now: Forming these communities and networks of communities," she says. "Whatever kinds of communities you can imagine. The point is that the members of that community must be very supportive of one another, no matter what comes. You don't have to be prepared to give your life for the other person, but you do have to have something in common, and to do things together.

You go through life wondering what is it all about but at the end of the day it's all about family.

I was a sickly baby, and after two sets of adoptive parents took me home, they returned me to the orphanage because of a serious respiratory infection. But as they say, the third time's a charm, because my mom and dad adopted me and took me into their home where I was raised in a family full of love.

Suppose," Helen Yokoyama said, "that some people have a philosophy of life which enables them to regard all human beings as belonging to a single family. Even though they might not know each other, even though they might live thousands of miles apart, they might still believe in their

these exultant yells for the Mets were also yells for ourselves, and came from a wry, half-understood recognition that there is more Met than Yankee in every one of us. I knew for whom that foghorn blew; it blew for me.

is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.

Yes, you can feel very alone as a poet and you sometimes think, is it worth it? Is it worth carrying on? But because there were other poets, you became part of a scene. Even though they were very different writers, it made it easier because you were together.

We are needy creatures, and our greatest need is for home—the place where we are, where we find protection and love. We achieve this home through representations of our own belonging, not alone but in conjunction with others. All our attempts to make our surroundings look right—through decorating, arranging, creating—are attempts to extend a welcome to ourselves and to those whom we love.

Families are like countries. They have their own language and jokes and secrets and assumptions about the right and wrong ways of doing things, and some of that always shows in the children, the way something of Germany or Australia always shows in a German or an Australian, no matter where they go. Outsiders like it or they don't, they feel at home there or they don't. It's like the taste of cilantro.

In the end, the only thing that really matters is family. -Jackson Freestone

Our powerful hunger for myth is a hunger for community. The person without a myth is a person without a home...To be a member of one's community is to share in its myths...

Everyone belongs to a society, whether he wishes it or not, whether he chooses it or not, whether he contributes constructively to its development or does the reverse. Community, on the contrary, implies one's relating one's self to others affirmatively and responsibly. Community in the economic sense implies an emphasis on the social values and functions of work. Community in the psychological sense involves the individual's relating himself to others in love as well as creativity.

It is getting late. Shall we ever be asked for? Are we simply Not wanted at all? {6}" What has been lost is the capacity to experience and have faith in one's self as a worthy and unique being, and at the same time the capacity for faith in, and meaningful communication with, other selves, namely one's fellow-men.

As for nationalism, it has no right to exist except in football matches.

Amo tutti i popoli, ma nessuna nazione. Sono un patriota, non un nazionalista." "Che differenza c'è?" "Il patriottismo è amare la propria gente; il nazionalismo è odiare gli altri.

Cities were always like people, showing their varying personalities to the traveler. Depending on the city and on the traveler, there might begin a mutual love, or dislike, friendship, or enmity. Where one city will rise a certain individual to glory, it will destroy another who is not suited to its personality. Only through travel can we know where we belong or not, where we are loved and where we are rejected.

I thought of the fifteen years I lived 'sans papiers' in France and how Paris had belonged to me. I was like a king in France. And now that suddenly I was French, Paris was gone for me. I had abdicated the throne the French people had given to me. All those people were gone. The whole city had changed. I left for five years: three spent wandering in Europe, while two years I spent living in Muslim Morocco; and now Paris had changed and there was no going back.

In Paris, one is always reminded of being a foreigner. If you park your car wrong, it is not the fact that it's on the sidewalk that matters, but the fact that you speak with an accent.

Are all humans human? Or are some more human than others?

Nations have to be built on an inclusive identity.

Nations are not easily forged since many identities have to be coalesced.

To categorize some people as indigenous and others as alien, to argue about the identity of the first inhabitants of the subcontinent, and to try and sort out these categories for the remote past, is to attempt the impossible.