Quotes About Belonging

I understood that going where I would actually be foreign might distract people from the more intimate nature of my defining otherness.

No one had forewarned me, however, that if you live abroad any good while, the notion of home is permanently compromised.

We like categories and clubs as much as we ever have, it's only that the ones we thought were inviolable turn out not to be, and others that we never imagined are taking their place.

You can't fit in with people by pretending to be just like they are; you fit in by engaging in a dialogue about your differences, and by putting aside the assumption that your way of life is in any way preferable to theirs.

I hate the loss of diversity in the world, even though I sometimes get tired of embodying that diversity. I don't wish for anyone in particular to be gay, but the idea of no one being gay makes me miss myself already.

So the question is whether people prefer to be marginal in a mainstream world, or mainstream in a marginal world, and many people quite understandably prefer the latter.

M? simt tot timpul ca ?i cum fiecare ar vrea o buc??ic? din mine.

Poverty is the absence of linkages, the absence of connections with others

If you are looking for a single proximate cause of the loneliness that is epidemic in our world, it is the dearth of households.

There are three things that always look very beautiful to me: my same good pair of old shoes that don't hurt, my own bedroom, and U.S. Customs on the way back home.

Each house has its own signature, unknown to all except the grown children who go back to visit.

Maybe I grew up too fast, maybe that's my trouble. I feel so lost out here...hung up between two worlds; half-kid and half-adult, half-boy and half-girl. And sometimes it seems like I get the dirty side of both.

We aren't in high school. We aren't really in our families and we aren't in our houses. Those are the places we grew up and the times we spent together, but they aren't us. If we think they are, then we're lost, because times end and places are lost. We aren't any place or any time . . . We are everywhere.

She existed in her friends; there she was. All the parts of herself she'd forgotten. She knew herself best when she was with them.

Tibby sat on the outside of a group of kids in the film program. There was a lot of dark clothing and heavy footwear, and quite a few piercings glinting in sunlight. They had invited her to sit with them while they all finished up their lunches before film seminar. Tibby knew that they had invited her largely because she had a ring in her nose. This bugged her almost as much as when people excluded her because she had a ring in her nose.

Lena studied the faces of the girls on the sidelines. She could tell that Kostos owned the lust of what few local teenage girls there were in Oia, but instead he chose to dance with all the grandmothers, all the women who had raised him, who had poured into him the love they couldn't spend on their own absent children and grandchildren.

Not everyone got a close family. Not everyone needed one.

We're the Septembers now. The real ones. We are everything to one another. We don't need to say so; it's just true. Sometimes it seems like we're so close we form one single complete person rather than four separate ones. We settle into types- Bridget the athlete, Lena the beauty, Tibby the rebel, and me, Carmen, the...what? The one with the bad temper. But the one who cares the most. The one who cares that we stick together.

When you belonged nowhere, you sort of belonged everywhere.

Lena remembered herself in all the old familiar things they said. She existed in her friends; there she was. All the parts of herself she'd forgotten. She knew herself best when she was with them.

Why couldn't it belong to him anymore? Why couldn't he belong to it? Because he gave it up. He held on to himself, and he threw the other things away.

She existed in her friends; there she was. All the parts of herself she'd forgotten. She knew herself best when she was with them.

She was already lost - she couldn't really get more lost, could she? When you belonged nowhere, you sort of belonged everywhere

Together or apart, no matter ow far apart, we live in one anther. We go n together.