Quotes About Belonging

The word family is derived from the word famulus, meaning a servant, and in its early usage, familia, it literally meant the servants of a household. In its essence, the longing for family, and the ravenousness that the loss of family creates in us, isn't just for belonging: it's for the grace that abides in serving those we love.

I'd lost my family, the friends of my youth, my country and its culture—all the things that had defined me, and given me identity.

It's the right place for me, if you understand what I mean, and I knew that on the first day, in the first hour that I came here. So, in a sense, I was comfortable from the beginning.

In its essence, the longing for family, and the ravenousness that the loss of family creates in us, isn't just for belonging: it's for the grace that abides in serving those we love.

Every object was significant; in my hunted exile, the windowsill had become my home, and the talismans were my nation.

Don't you have someone waiting for you somewhere, or someone you should go to?

In the end I realised that it was the heart, the Indian heart that Vikram had talked about—the land where heart is king—that held me when so many intuitions told me I should leave.

There were people everywhere but no one was mine, and I was no one's.

You can take the boy out of Philly but not the Philly out of the boy. It shapes my world view. It was a great place to grow up.

I feel like the people from Iceland have a different relationship with their country than other places. Most Icelandic people are really proud to be from there, and we don't have embarrassments like World War II where we were cruel to other people.

I don't feel I was 'born American,' but my homeland was denied to me after the end of World War II, and I craved something I could identify with. When I became a student at Harvard in the 1950s, America very quickly filled the vacuum. I felt I was American, but I think it's more revealing of America how quickly others here accepted me.

When I would go to the barrio, people saw me as a rich person, but when I'm around rich people, they see me as someone from the ghetto. It's all perceptions. I like moving between worlds. I feel equally comfortable in both.

My mother is black and my father is Filipino. I got the best of both worlds.

I think that Mexican-American kids live in a global world. It's not even bi-, it's multi-. You know, for those of us who grew up with different countries on our block, different nationalities, you know, we moved into multiple worlds.

I made 'The Farewell' for me, for my family, and for other immigrant children, or children of immigrants, who feel caught in-between two worlds.

My school was 90 percent white, but 90 percent of the kids I played with were black. So I got the best of both worlds. I think that is where my comedy developed.

I have spent my years since Princeton, while at law school and in my various professional jobs, not feeling completely a part of the worlds I inhabit. I am always looking over my shoulder wondering if I measure up.

We're a migrant nation made up of people who've been torn out of other worlds, and you'd think we would have some compassion.

I'm half Puerto Rican and half Jewish and so, in some ways, living in many worlds at once is where I feel most at home.

Being South Asian in the U.K. is like being Latino in the U.S., I would guess. It's a bit more hood. You see things; things happen. I was bouncing between worlds. You're acting from a very early age, when you have to code-switch like that. I'm a hybrid, a mongrel. I think many people live that life.

I was raised in a Jewish family, but since I was adopted, my parents sent me to Hebrew school and Bible chapel, so I got the best of both worlds - singing in both a choir in Bible chapel and a chorus in Hebrew school. It shaped me and my voice.

I think I am kind of put on this Earth to speak of being between worlds in my films.

To start, I wasn't really interested in acting at all, and I didn't make much impact. The first play I was in was on for five nights and I didn't show up for two of them and nobody noticed. But I stayed because that's where my friends were, and after a while I found myself wanting to inhabit other people's worlds and lives.

I always felt that sci-fi and fantasy were my thing. Bit of a geek, I'm afraid. But I like creating worlds, and I felt it was a genre that gave me more freedom. It just seemed like I belonged there.