Quotes About Belonging

People have to identify with their own stories, with their own lives, so a movie belongs to a country and to a culture. Sometimes we can share, but it's very rare.

Writers, especially those of us with roots in other countries, are rarely left to ourselves. We are asked to declare our allegiances, or they are determined for us.

Food is not just what we put in our mouths to fill up; it is culture and identity. Reason plays some role in our decisions about food, but it's rarely driving the car.

People spend their entire lives trying to construct something to grab onto: a family, a home, a business. Rarely does anyone seem to manage to get much ground under their feet.

I'm not Hollywood. I'm a Quarter Rat. I belong here.

We inhabit a language rather than a country.

I'd rather be hated for who I am than loved who I am not. Even if you're not accepted, at least you are still yourself.

I'm a lot happier on RAW. I actually can't overthink how much better I think I am on RAW than I was on Smackdown. And I don't really know the reason why that is. I feel like I look more at home here, and I feel like I look like I belong here. It's pretty obvious that RAW's the place for me.

I didn't grow up seeing faces of patriots, emotional and raw and gritty, who looked like me.

I was one of I think three white girls in my school. So, I was very much an outsider. And plus I was Jewish and all of my friends were black and Baptist because they listen to the coolest music. We were all listening to Ray Charles and what was then called race music.

I'll always be a member of the Rays in my heart, absolutely. Just like with the Angels. It's no different.

When I reached adulthood, even now, I could afford to belong to a country club. But I could never belong to a private club because of my experience as a child, because it would isolate me from the whole of humanity.

When I first came out, holidays were hard. I reached a point where I didn't go home anymore. I constructed my own, kind of like, family group around Christmas.

By the time I reached middle school, I fully identified myself not even as biracial but just as black.

We have all had the experience of finding that our reactions and perhaps even our deeds have denied beliefs we thought were ours.

I have a profound resistance to the idea that a reader could say, 'Oh, well, that's her story.' We should all be interested, no matter where we come from, or who our parents are. It's not my province; it's ours. These questions concern us all.

Octavia Butler often described herself as an outsider, but within science fiction, she was loved as an insider, someone who was a fan first and came to S.F. writing as an enthusiastic reader.

Through my fiction, I make mainstream readers see the new Americans as complex human beings, not as just 'The Other.'

I like the idea of readers feeling a familiarity, whether it's with Africa or childhood.

I'm really into reading books right now about India. You reach a certain age where you start missing your home history.

I went to something like six different schools before the age of 12, so I was always the new girl and had to make friends quickly. It was difficult at the start because I was very bookish - I was literally sat in the corner reading books, with no friends.

Everyone reads Harper Lee personally. For me, 'Mockingbird' was about admitting my own hyphenated identity - about loving and hating my world, about both belonging and not belonging to the community I came from.

I have been a Republican since I came to this country, fleeing communism when I was eight years old and Ronald Reagan was president.

I have very few real friends because I don't really feel like I fit in with a lot of people.