Quotes About Belonging

You know, God has some really weird kids, and I find it hard to be in their company most of the time.

I search and can't find myself. I belong in chrysanthemum time, sharp in calla lily elongations. God made my soul into an ornamental thing.

We are on the cusp of this time where I can say, "I speak as a citizen of the world" without others saying, "God, what a nut."

It was possible to feel superior to other people and feel like a misfit at the same time.

The trouble with me is that for a long time I have just been an I person. All people belong to a We except me. Not to belong to a We makes you too lonesome.

When we live our lives authentically, we discover our true place in the world for the first time.

Therefore one should speak at the same time of national citizenship and wider European citizenship.

For the majority of the time, I may as well have been just a really tan white kid. You know, I may as well have just been, like, a fat kid.

I was a tried seaman when, for the first time, I set foot upon the soil of my country, and took up my residence where my people had lived for over two hundred years.

When you feel like an outsider - for whatever reason - you spend a lot of time alone.

Maybe you won't find a place where you fit in for a very long time, but you eventually will.

A city man is a home anywhere, for all big cities are much alike. But a country man has a place where he belongs, where he always returns, and where, when the time comes, he is willing to die.

I carry my roots with me all the time rolled up, I use them as my pillow.

But no one ever leaves the town where they grew up, not really, even if they go.

Perhaps home is not a place but simply an irrevocable condition. —JAMES BALDWIN

My home was in that pleasant place outside Philadelphia, but I really lived somewhere else. I lived within the covers of books and those books were more real to me than any other thing in my life.

There were three types of people in New York: people like Nora, who had found their home there; people who talked about how much they hated it and would always live and eventually die there; and people who always had one foot over the border, to Scarsdale or Roslyn or Boca Raton.

She knew any reasonable person would say she should downsize, downgrade, sell her apartment, but that was if you thought of an apartment as real estate instead of a home. She didn't want to sell her home. She thought of it as the last link to the self she had once been.

The most memorable books from our childhoods are those that make us feel less alone, convince us that our own foibles and quirks are both as individual as a fingerprint and as universal as an open hand.

I flatter myself, at times, that though among them, I am not of them

It must be a great consolation to you to have a home, Miss Grey," observed my companion after a short pause: "however remote, or however seldom visited, still it is something to look to.

It took some time for acceptance to be reached, and at first she was bitterly lonely ('It is not all a bed of roses to live in a strange country and I am as strange to the people and their ways as they are to me')

It is well known that involuntary migrants, no matter what pot they are thrown into, tend not to melt.

You know Anne,' he said quietly, 'when I am with a Hmong or a French or an American person, I am always the one who laughs last at a joke. I am the chameleon animal. You can place me anyplace, and I will survive, but I will not belong. I must tell you that I do not really belong anywhere.