Quotes About Belonging

At school, I was a tomboy, and it would be me and all my guy friends.

I was an avid tomboy, and as long as I could ride my bike just as fast, hit the ball just as hard, and catch just as many garter snakes, I was accepted as one of the boys and enjoyed all the perks of superiority.

If I have a tombstone when it's all over, it will say, 'He tried to connect.'

Being a Muslim in America, I've noticed that there's a ton of crossover between the Muslim community and geekdom.

As a kid, you don't have a ton of spaces where you are honored, where what you think is honored and what you say is revered.

I toned down my accent at school; otherwise, people would pick on me.

My mother tongue is Telugu. I was born and brought up in Tamil Nadu.

I don't know Bengali perfectly. I don't know how to write it or even read it. I have an accent, I speak without authority, and so I've always perceived a disjunction between it and me. As a result, I consider my mother tongue, paradoxically, a foreign language.

Spanglish is a creative way also of saying, 'I am an American, and I have my own style, my own taste, my own tongue.'

Hindi is my mother tongue. Even though I do not get to use it as often, it's still a part of me.

I'm a 'tweener,' man! I couldn't march with Dr. King and them. And I'm too old to be a hip-hopper. But I've been granted honorary status in each generation... I see my tongue as a bridge over which ideas can travel back and forth.

My mother tongue is German.

Being Scottish is something you have in your heart not something that comes off your tongue.

We are Jesus Christ's; we belong to him. But even more, we are increasingly him. He moves in and commandeers our hands and feet, requisitions our minds and tongues. We sense his rearranging: debris into the divine, pig's ear into silk purse. He repurposes bad decisions and squalid choices. Little by little, a new image emerges.

I pledge tonight to be Mayor for all of the people of this city - for one Chicago.

Growing up in the suburbs of Chicago and living in New York, it didn't even strike me as a possibility that a place could really exist without tons of Jews.

My way of connecting to the community that I imagined was out there somewhere for me, but wasn't there right now was to download tons and tons of discographies of famed divas. So I had Christina Aguilera's discography, Whitney Houston's discography, Mariah Carey's discography, all of that.

The NHL's got tons of players from different backgrounds from different places around the world. That's what makes this league so special and that's what makes sports so special; it brings everybody together.

I didn't even drink until I was in college. While other people were out partying, I'd be home watching the Tony Awards and Bob Fosse movies... I so badly wanted to be part of the club.

When I'm in Brazil, I'm not Brazilian at all; I am a gringo. And then when I'm in England, I'm not really English, but when I lived in Canada, I was considered too English. So I never really felt like I clicked somewhere or that I belonged to one place.

My mother told me Homer Ditto was not my father. Nope. Mom had had a fling with some other guy who was my dad. Some dude who didn't stick around too long who Mom was happy to get rid of. She chose Homer, and Homer chose me, so he lent me his name even though I didn't have his blood.

I am an American citizen and it is my home now. I like the U.S.A., which is not a place too many people have liked since Bush. The U.S. has a young population, and everything can change within a year.

People don't contest that I'm British as a black man, but they do contest that I'm English. Too many people are going back to an ethnocentric idea of what being English means.

When I joined Google, it was 1,000 people. It took me two and a half years to look around and realize there weren't a lot of people like me.