Quotes About Belonging

When I joined a baseball club, the boys of my own age, and a little older, played in the first nine, those younger than myself played in the second, and those still younger in the third, and I played with them.

When you get into the third or fourth generation of Latino immigrants to the United States, you see the kids speaking more English than Spanish, and it's important that we don't lose our identity, our language.

I like to be called a Nigerian rather than somebody from the Third World or the developing or whatever.

There was a point in school when I was, like, thirteen, that I didn't feel comfortable at all.

I've lived in New York for thirty years now, but I'm a proud Pittsburgher, and home is home. My family's still in Pittsburgh.

I'm not of this generation.

I've worked with David Lynch since I was 17, and working with him is home and family; being around Alexander Payne is home and family, Jonathan Demme. There are directors... Robert Altman, Paul Thomas Anderson... They are directors where I create homes.

When I come to England, I don't claim England; I don't own it. I feel a great kinship because of the literature and the landscape. I have great affection for Edward Thomas and Philip Larkin, but there's still this distance: looking on at what I'm admiring, separate from what I am. And that's OK.

I have been inspired by Martin Luther King and how he inspired a movement. I have learned that a cause must be organic; if it is to have an impact it must belong to those who join the movement and not those who lead it.

In a lot of my films, the biggest theme is family, making families out of those around you.

Thou art not for the earth, nor for the Heaven the world is for thee, thou art not for the world.

Let's face it. No kid in high school feels as though they fit in.

Though I read and speak Malayalam, Malayalis won't accept outsiders speaking their language.

Even though Puerto Rico will always be my hometown, I feel Miami is my second home.

My father was a headmaster in England and then the dean of a college in Australia. We moved there when I was about five, so my education was in Australia, and I always felt I was Australian even though my passport was British.

When people put labels on us, it doesn't always enclose everything that we are. So even though I'm proud to be Somali, I'm proud to be American, at the end of the day, I'm still Halima, and I take things from both sides and combine them, and I make my own little category. I'm me!

Rey's parents left her at 5, and we meet her when she's late teens or early 20s, and for someone to keep hopeful that there's a better life to come, I think, is astounding. Though she starts off alone, she very much finds her place in a group of people, and that's lovely.

There is no simple answer for what it means to be Canadian. There are a thousand answers that come together. But part of that is that there is a national mythology.

More than once in the orphanage, I'd been asked if I wanted to look different. Truth is, I never did. I knew who I was when I looked into the mirror, my mother's daughter.

He could go back to all that now, to the hills and the people among whom he had been bred, and for whom he had been so bitterly homesick, here in the North. But if he did, would there not be another hunger on him all his life? For other scents and sights and sounds; pale and changeful northern skies and the green plover calling?

It's only a house, she thought. But it was more, too. It was Tibby's elaborate, respectable shrine to a family life that had long ago ebbed out of it.

I have no sense of nationalism, only a cosmic consciousness of belonging to the human family.

dazzling band of sea. Twenty or thirty miles out, a string of brown hunchbacked islands lay on the bright horizon like basking tortoises. The woman looked at the Pacific and its islands as if they belonged to her. I found out later that one of them did.

If God wants [my] company, musn't we say that God wants the company of all those who have made [me] to be [me]?