Quotes About Belonging

For me, however, it was a mix of the two, this constant push and pull. I loved it here. But I'd been in that circle and star for my entire life, and I so wanted to know what it would feel like to claim another distant spot as my own, if only for a little while. Someday.

No matter where I was, or what got me there, I would always feel at home when I touched sand.

What is family? They were the people who claimed you. In good, in bad, in parts or in whole, they were the ones who showed up, who stayed in there, regardless. It wasn't just about blood relations or shared chromosomes, but something wider, bigger. Cora was right—we had many families over time. Our family of origin, the family we created, as well as the groups you moved through while all of this was happening: friends, lovers, sometimes even strangers.

We all need to lose ourselves in a crowd once in a while.

El hogar no era una casa concreta, ni una ciudad en el mapa, sino el lugar donde están las personas a las que quieres, siempre que están juntos. No es un espacio, sino la suma de los momentos que se van construyendo, uno sobre otro, como ladrillos, un refugio sólido que llevas contigo toda tu vida, vayas donde vayas.

He moved through our house now with the ease of someone who no longer considered himself a guest, no sidestepping knickknacks and perching on the edges of furniture but walking easily across the floors as if he belonged there.

We were not always freaks. Sure, most of us occasionally exhibited freakish behaviour. But that's not the same thing.

We were not always freaks. Sure, most of us occasionally exhibited freakish behavior. But that's not the same thing. This is the story of how we became freaks. It's how a group of Is became a we.

Loyalty to your school means loyalty to every member of our community.

You're not user-friendly. You're too needy. You have no social currency. You're a freak. Without a normative side, you can't get in. That's it. Sorry.

As a Frenchman who represented neither North nor South, East nor West, left nor right, Yankees nor Red Sox, Lafayette has always belonged to all of us.

I have intimate knowledge of what it was like to be young and uneasy and outraged under Reagan. My high school was 1980s America in miniature--you either belonged or you didn't, you learned to seek relief where you could find it.

more Irish than French).

Maybe Dillon Samreen will decide to pick on this new kid with the weird name and the funny accent instead of me.

Every man realizes that he has to love something or somebody. He feels that he must go outward. 'If thou canst not love, what art thou?

Americans find it hard to believe that foreigners are unalterably foreign, for they have seen generations of immigrants who became Americans. But old cultures are impermeable and exclusive—none more so than the French.

The very Orthodox Professor Harold Fisch, bearded and wearing a skullcap, tells me that "the liberated territories" must be colonized and reclaimed by the Jews. The West Bank is Promised Land. For that matter the East Bank is, too. Professor Fisch, English by birth and dean of something or other at the new university in Beersheba, has no patience with the objections I offer. He tells me fiercely in his Oxbridge voice that we American Jews are not Jews at all.

Well, we were here, first-generation Americans, our language was English and a language is a spiritual mansion from which no one can evict us.

Cualquier tarugo miserable que no tiene nada en el mundo de lo que pueda sentirse orgulloso, recurre al último recurso, vanagloriarse de la nación a la que casualmente pertenece.

When you identify as part of a group, your opinions tend to be biased toward the group consensus.

For his part, Frank Wisner never truly regarded himself as a Southerner except, his middle son, Ellis, recalled, on those occasions when outsiders denigrated the region. "That's when he got his back up," Ellis Wisner recalled. "If people made fun of it, that's when he became a Southerner.

In communion with Christ, you and I are members of his body, his Church, together with our fellow Christians

But we're not a family.

Donne had declared that no person is an island. He had it exactly wrong. We all are.