Quotes About Belonging

I realize that I will always find respite amongst the migrants, the refugees, the expatriates, the homeless, the pirates. I will always be the fence-sitter. I will pass as I see fit and fail to pass when I was really hoping I would and refuse to pass when it serves my purposes.

This was Betsy and Tacy's private corner. Betsy's mother was a great believer in people having private corners, and the piano box was plainly meant to belong to Betsy and Tacy, for it fitted them so snugly.

It was clearly one of those mornings when I was particularly American.

Her parents had no idea that you could meet people outside of school and it wasn't freaky and the internet was the way of finding your people.

David had a way of walking - a way that suggested that he belonged anywhere he went. In this, he had his father's manner, which was gross and horrific. But there was something else, something of the rake in a casino movie, who has come in to knock the place over, or an entertainer who might at any point somersault into the center of the room. Or maybe he was just walking in and her brain chemistry was telling her stories.

It's good to be home," Iris said, putting her head on Albert's shoulder. "We've been gone so long." "We are all home," Albert said. "And here we will stay.

He belonged in the countryside, she thought—he belonged everywhere—he was a man who belonged on earth—and then she thought of the words which were more exact: he was a man to whom the earth belonged, the man at home on earth and in control.

He seemed casually at home, as if he felt that the place belonged to them, as they always felt wherever they went together.

One cannot hate the earth in their name. The earth is beautiful. And it is a background, but not theirs.

the expression which, for both of them, meant that they felt at home with each other: an expression of contempt

When I walked down the streets, I asked myself, are these my people?, is this my hometown, am I who I am?

One cancels the other, and yet without one, the other is incomplete. In the first photograph, standing there in our black robes and scarves, we are as we had been shaped by someone else's dreams. In the second, we appear as we imagined ourselves. In neither could we feel completely at home.

Primo Levi once said, "I write in order to rejoin the community of mankind." Reading is a private act, but it joins us across continents and time.

our true home, our true history, was in our poetry.

Whoever we were—and it was not really important what religion we belonged to, whether we wished to wear the veil or not, whether we observed certain religious norms or not—we had become the figment of someone else's dreams.

wrote on the board one of my favorite lines from the German thinker Theodor Adorno: "The highest form of morality is not to feel at home in one's own home.

Col senno di poi, sono contenta di non essermi resa conto di quanto fossi vulnerabile: ero come l'ambasciatore di un paese inesistente, venuta a reclamare, con la mia piccola collezione di libri e la mia sporta di sogni, un paese che credevo mi appartenesse.

standing there in our black robes and scarves, we are as we had been shaped by someone else's dreams. In the second, we appear as we imagined ourselves. In neither could we feel completely at home.

Wigger: a young white who wants desperately to be down with hip-hop, who identifies more strongly with Black culture than white. (What's disturbing about this expression is its racist implications: if white kids down with hip-hop are wiggers, what does that make Black kids down with hip-hop?)

A lot of shelter dogs are mutts like me.

My heart is filled with love for this country.

Have I told you that they are all part of you? Have I told you that you are part of them and that you are the future?

Finally, I wanted to tell a more personal story that might inspire young people considering a life in public service; how my career in politics really started with a search for a place to fit in. A way to explain the different strands of my mixed up heritage and how it was only by hitching my wagon to something larger than myself that I was ultimately able to locate a community and purpose for my life.

It wasn't that Europe wasn't beautiful; everything was just as I imagined it. It just wasn't mine. I felt as if I was living out someone else's romance; the incompleteness of my own history stood between me and the sites I saw like a hard pane of glass.