Quotes About Belonging

a woman without love for her origins is lost.

Carracci's possessions, she, too, was Carracci's possession.

I am therefore Italian, completely and with pride. But if I could, I would descend into all languages and let myself be permeated by them all. Even the terrible Google Translate consoles me. We can be much more than what we happen to be.

The drive to change one's state must face countless obstacles. One can act on genetic conditioning but not ignore it. Belonging to one class or another can be camouflaged but not canceled out. The individual is in the end only a battlefield, in which privileges and disadvantages war fiercely. What counts in the end is the collective flow of generations. Even when there is both merit and luck, the efforts of a single individual are unsatisfying.

Me sentiré muchísimo menos extranjera contigo que en cualquier otra tierra.

The stolen body, the reclaimed body, the body that knows itself and the world, the stone and the heat which warms it: my body has never been singular.

How did you separate where someone was from, from who they were?

Harvard Square looked both new and familiar. I felt like I would have been able to tell just from looking that this configuration of buildings and streets was familiar and meaningful to lots of people, not just me. It was weird to visit a suburb that nobody else every visited or went to, and then to return to these widely known halls and buildings where famous statesmen and writers and scientists had been coming for hundreds of years.

What was the relationship between leaving the country and an aesthetic life? What was it about America in particular that seemed to make one's life unaesthetic?

I felt dissatisfied, as if I was failing to capitalize on some advantage I had from "being" Turkish—one that would compensate for the hassle of having a name and appearance that had always required explanation. It had, I realized, been a real disappointment to get to Turkey and to discover that my name and appearance still required constant explanation

Everyone needs a house to live in, but a supportive family is what builds a home.

He was a man caught between two places, one where he would always be a stranger, one where he was no longer a native. Time and change had made him a perpetual traveler, never comfortable again, like many who had lost their homes or those who had traveled across the world, always searching for them.

Like my grandmother, I understood questions of identity, how being torn in two often leaves something less than one.

What befalls a trained soldier during combat between nations is one thing; what occurs at home—on our street, in our yard, and on our land, to family—is not the same. In Qana, those who died would not flee, would not leave their homes. That is what bayt means.

The arms of love encompass you with your present, your past, your future, the arms of love gather you together.

One is a member of a country, a profession, a civilization, a religion. One is not just a man.

Jeff was called "dawg," "bro," "dude," and "Holmes," and

The air of ones native country is the most healthy air.

MALLORCA.- Hijos del mar se llaman los hijos de las islas".

A long time ago, I read in a book that a woman's homeland is wherever she fell in love.

A sharp awareness of the other, invisible world to which he could return soon made more tolerable the painstaking ugliness of the one where he now found himself and where, in spite of the passage of years, he'd never stopped being a stranger, an intruder.

Some things become so completely our own that we forget them.

originally we were Lusitanians, and then came the Romans and the Celts, and then came the Arabs, so what sort of race are we Portuguese in a position to celebrate?

As a gay Jewish white South African, I belong to quite a lot of minority groups. You constantly have to question who you are, what you are and whether you have the courage to be who you are.