Quotes About Belonging

I am half Bengali and half Marathi.

I'm like half Brazilian and half American now.

Part of me feels it's better we're not in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

I'm always happy to get folded into the Hallmark family.

It feels special to me to be a West Ham player.

It wasn't until 'Hamilton' that I began to be considered an actor of color, and I really don't know what to make of it.

All the best of you is in the old tongue, but when you speak your best in America you become a yokel, a dumb Norskie, and when you speak English, an idiot.

Churches are just clubs for people who like to join things.

She fought back the tears in her eyes, because though she no longer felt she was one of the Clayr, she still felt she was a librarian and always would be, no matter what else she had become as well.

Lirael left in a daze of happiness. She had survived the ordeal. She had been accepted. She was going to be a librarian!

We are relational creatures. All humans live in community and most people seek social interaction. In western culture, isolation is seen as one of the most stringent of punishments. Even criminals do not aspire to solitary confinement.

The euphoria of the in-love state gives us the illusion that we have an intimate relationship. We feel that we belong to each other. We believe we can conquer all problems.

Among those emotional needs, none is more basic than the need for love and affection, the need to sense that he or she belongs and is wanted.

Child psychologists affirm that every child has certain basic emotional needs that must be met if he is to be emotionally stable. Among those emotional needs, none is more basic than the need for love and affection, the need to sense that he or she belongs and is wanted. With an adequate supply of affection, the child will likely develop into a responsible adult. Without that love, he or she will be emotionally and socially challenged.

Each of us needs to feel important, even special, to at least one other person in order to be whole.

See how very much our Father loves us, for he calls us his children, and that is what we are! —1 John 3:1

The Lord who created you says: "Do not be afraid, for I have ransomed you. I have called you by name; you are mine." —Isaiah 43:1

Homosexuals are... widely consigned to the same category of things as drugs, the category of illicit dirty things that people have to be protected from... since the homosexual is continually taught by the world around him that his natural home is the sewer, the homosexual is uniquely equipped to discover what truly belongs and doesn't belong in the sewer.

When he mentioned family, I could only think of my father, my real father, the Long Island janitor with the impenetrable accent and true-to-life smells. My mind returned away from what Joshie was saying and I pondered my father's humiliation. The humiliation of growing up a Jew in the Soviet Union, of cleaning piss-stained bathrooms in the States, of worshipping a country that would collapse as simply and inelegantly as the one he had abandoned.

There, I was ridiculed for being an inauthentic American, and now I am being charged with being an inauthentic Russian. I do not yet understand that this very paradox is the true subject of so-called immigrant fiction.

Every author who straddles culture is inauthentic in a way.

Needless to say, she grew up with the parents Senderovsky could only dream of, the kind that did not watch the state television of their adopted land with its screaming chyrons and grim blond hosts and unimaginative, murderous lies. Masha loved her parents, loved the language of her parents, and wanted Natasha to know the "gift" of her country's culture. But Senderovsky, despite his Petrogradsky affectations, was still the man from Elektrosila.

In her bones, this may still be her country. But she will not touch it with her hands the way I do, trying to lyricize the filth and the decay.

And you never felt like becoming an American? She didn't know why she was pressing him on this one point. That's for people without options, Ed said. Sorry, I mean... He trailed off. No, I get it. Nation in free fall.