Quotes About Belonging

One does not inhabit a country; one inhabits a language. That is our country, our fatherland - and no other.

All my life, I have lived with the feeling that I have been kept from my true place. If the expression "metaphysical exile" had no meaning, my existence alone would afford it one.

The satisfaction we take from performing a task (especially when we have no belief in the task and even disdain it) shows to what degree we still belong to the rabble.

Each of us is entitled to claim the forebears who suit him, who explain him in his own eyes. How often have I not changed ancestors!

It is no nation that we inhabit, but a language." "Make no mistake; our native tongue is our true fatherland.

I feel completely detached from any country, any group. I am a metaphysically displaced person

A strange island, the ghetto, a tiny universe without roots, to the measure of its inhabitants, as remote from the life of the soil as angels or ghosts.

The feeling of being ten thousand years behind, or ahead, of the others, of belonging to the beginnings or to the end of humanity...

If he changes his country, his drama merely begins again: exodus is his seat, his certainty, his chez soi.

Belirli bir gruptaki intihar vakalar?n?n kayda deÄŸer bir ÅŸekilde artmas?, bu grup içindeki toplumsal dayan??man?n zay?flad???n? ve üyelerin, varoluÅŸsal krizlere kar?? grup taraf?ndan art?k yeterince korunamad???n? gösterir.

Man cannot become attached to higher aims and submit to a rule if he sees nothing above him to which he belongs. To free him from all social pressure is to abandon him to himself and demoralize him.

Social man...is the masterpiece of existence.

I try--without success--to stop finding reasons for vanity in anything. When I happen to manage it nonetheless, I feel that I no longer belong to the mortal gang. I am above everything then, above the gods themselves. Perhaps that is what death is: a sensation of great, of extreme superiority.

I am black - and I am brown, too: Brown is the body I was born into. Black is the body of the stories I tell.

I'm nobody! Who are you? Are you nobody, too? Then there 's a pair of us—don't tell! They 'd banish us, you know. How dreary to be somebody! How public, like a frog To tell your name the livelong day To an admiring bog!

People, in all but the most favored times and places, are rooted to the places where they were born, think the thoughts of those places, can endure no other thoughts. The next parish even is suspected.

The conundrum of color is the inheritance of every American, be he/she legally or actually Black or White ... I was trying to locate myself within a specific inheritance and to use that inheritance, precisely, to claim the birthright from which that inheritance had so brutally and specifically excluded me.

To be at ease is better than to be at business. Nothing really belongs to us but time, which even he has who has nothing else.

Very early on, I understood that I secretly and mysteriously belonged to the world of cats.

When things get really bad, you take comfort in the placeness of a place.

I wonder what it felt to move to a country where you didn't grow up. I had thought about that often since my sister got married. Do you become a character in a story native to that land, or do you, somewhere in your heart, want to return to your homeland.

Thanks so much for seeing, the first time you met us, that even though we're like ghosts, the two of us, even though we're not supposed to exist, we are alive.

When things get really bad, you take comfort in the placeness of a place. I

Tutto intorno a me era come un anello d'amore, innumerevoli anelli, tanto da sembrare di essere al centro di un arcobaleno. Qualcosa di grande mi avrebbe protetto, ovunque mi fossi trovata e in qualsiasi momento, e se anche la superbia me l'avesse fatto dimenticare, se la sensazione di stare vivendo da sola mi avesse fatto agire con imprudenza, quel qualcosa lo avrebbe accettato e accolto.