Quotes About Belonging

After all, the wool of a black sheep is just as warm.

'Hiraeth' means homesickness to a home to which you cannot return: the grief of the lost places of your past. I fell in love with the word and instantly connected to it. It reminded me of the days when I had left my home in Gwalior, and I had that strange pull in my stomach, and now I can so relate to this word.

Language and identity are so fundamentally intertwined. You peel back all the layers in terms of what we wear and what we eat and all the things that mark us, and in the end, what we have are our words.

There are certain words which are nearer and dearer to a man than any others.

What does 'home' really mean? Is it merely geography, where you were born? Could it include straddling two continents and cultures? Or perhaps it's a place with a spiritual magnetism - a feeling toward a culture or people - that's tough to put into words?

I always felt really alone because no one wanted to talk about the things that I enjoyed, and that was really rap music and hip-hop as a culture. You know, having the shoes, using the words, buying the magazines, seeing the videos. And I had nobody to share it with, so I feel like I lived a lot online.

I had no words for these feelings. And then people started using the word Ms. Suddenly, there was this handle with which I could identify myself and understand why I felt so out of whack with the culture around me.

Basic human contact - the meeting of eyes, the exchanging of words - is to the psyche what oxygen is to the brain. If you're feeling abandoned by the world, interact with anyone you can.

I feel a great kinship with my origins, even though I only learned a few words of Arabic.

After 'Rent,' I tried to make a record, and it didn't work out, and it was the Broadway community that welcomed me back. It's where I feel the most understood, most at home.

Yet there are thousands of Indigenous people searching for family members.

My children are mixed race. I want them to think: 'This is our country, our father's family has been here for thousands of years.'

Our shared vision of belonging is the thread that weaves through every touchpoint on Airbnb.

I never had a moment of realization about my blackness - I just was. Blackness was a central thread of my experience as a child and as an adolescent, as it is now that I'm an adult.

Japan functions on the basis of everyone sharing certain assumptions, where each person knows his part in a larger whole. The foreigner sits outside and is threatening. If he comes in, that's the most threatening of all.

You can't sit down and write 300 compositions in a three-month period and think that you're doing it all by yourself. Obviously, there's something going on here. And whether you want to call it channeling or being connected to a creative force or knowing your history and knowing where you belong, that's, you know, maybe a personal thing.

I'm three-quarters Russian, so I've always felt an outsider. But I don't think you can be in a play with John Of Gaunt's 'This sceptred isle' speech and not feel proud to be British.

It was weird being a kid in the Midlands where outside everybody is white and speaks in a certain way but when you go home nobody speaks that way and everybody looks like you. Every day was this weird threshold crossing.

I didn't get to go to school functions growing up. I didn't get to go to dances. I was never invited to a party ever. Until I got to college and threw a party, I had never even been to one.

I threw my 20th birthday party at Brown, and I didn't even have to say to anyone not to put pictures on Facebook. Not a single picture went up. That was when I knew I'd found a solid group of friends, and I felt like I belonged.

Bearing an eternal longing for Jewishness, I threw myself in all directions and left to work for another people. I am not one of those lucky ones raised in their own environment, whose work is normal.

School is a scary place for kids. So I didn't like it, and I didn't want to be there. And it was a great day for me when they threw me out.

Just because you have a chosen family doesn't mean that your family threw you out.

The self was a very strange concept to me until I came to America, and my child was born with that entitlement, and that just thrilled me.