Quotes About Belonging

We'll get you out, don't cry, you're ours now. We have you.

You seek a family, always and everywhere.

What did Ethan care? _He_ had no trouble navigating. This was because he'd lived all his life in one house, was Macon's theory; while a person who'd been moved around a great deal never acquired a fixed point of reference but wandered forever in a fog — adrift upon the planet, helpless, praying that just by luck he might stumble across his destination.

Sometimes she felt like a tiny gnat, whirring around her family's edges

You belong," he told her. "You belong just as much as I do, or, who, or Bitsy or Ã¢â'¬Â¦ It's just like Christmas. We all think the others belong more.

If we had been any different, would they have loved us?

My whole life, I always thought that I was the only impostor. That everyone else was certain they were real in some way that I could never understand. But what if they're all just faking too? Maybe none of us know who we really are.

But I feel more real when I'm around her. Like I'm not fading.

It helps to be with people who remember you, and who still think about you.

she'd felt from David was crushed by it. Every day of her life she'd insulted other uglies and had been insulted in return. Fattie, Pig-Eyes, Boney, Zits, Freak—all the names uglies called one another, eagerly and without reserve. But equally, without exception, so that no one felt shut out by some irrelevant mischance of birth.

Tally's journey from ugly to pretty to special and then out the other side is not just a physical journey. It's also a journey through language, as Tally takes on the slang of her various new cliques and then slowly comes to realize that when your body keeps changing, sometimes the way you speak is the only piece of you that you can hold on to.

You don't need some whitefella's permission to adapt your own culture." "But what if it's not mine?" Darcy stared at her plate. "I eat meat. I don't pray. It feels weird, erasing a god and using him as a mortal.

And in that history you're trying to connect to something that once was yours - to something purer, better, something that you lost or something, maybe, that you never knew but that you feel you knew.

in keeping with something called self-determination theory, which holds that human beings need three basic things in order to be content: they need to feel competent at what they do; they need to feel authentic in their lives; and they need to feel connected to others.

We are not good to each other. Our tribalism is to an extremely narrow group of people: our children, our spouse, maybe our parents. Our society is alienating, technical, cold, and mystifying. Our fundamental desire, as human beings, is to be close to others, and our society does not allow for that.

Today's veterans often come home to find that, although they're willing to die for their country, they're not sure how to live for it.

Modern society has perfected the art of making people not feel necessary. It's time for that to end.

three pillars of self-determination—autonomy, competence, and community

When you throw trash on the ground, you apparently don't see yourself as truly belonging to the world that you're walking around in.

Even if he or she is part of a family, that is not the same as belonging to a group that shares resources and experiences almost everything collectively.

What I liked about the encounter was that it showed how very close the energy of male conflict and male closeness can be. It's almost as if they are two facets of the same quality; just change a few details and instead of heading toward collision, the men head toward unity. There seemed to be a great human potential out there, organized around the idea of belonging, and the trick was to convince people that their interests had more in common than they had in conflict.

It may say something about human nature that a surprising number of Americans—mostly men—wound up joining Indian society rather than staying in their own. They emulated Indians, married them, were adopted by them, and on some occasions even fought alongside them. And the opposite almost never happened: Indians almost never ran away to join white society.

Robert Frost famously wrote that home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in. The word "tribe" is far harder to define, but a start might be the people you feel compelled to share the last of your food with.

there is no survival outside group survival, and that creates a social bond that many people sorely miss.