Quotes About Belonging

In their universe, nobody shuts you down for being different and wanting the moon. In ours, you live on a tether: to family, parents if you're lucky, older people raising you if less so, that you yourself will end up looking after by and by.

To be here was to be known. If Lee County isn't that, it's nothing.

I needed no snake to tell me I didn't belong in that family or house, or life. I was the tree of knowledge.

I wanted to go home. Which was nowhere, but it's a feeling you keep having, even after that's no place anymore.

Some people say religion is finding yourself, and some people say it's losing yourself in a crowd.

The only useful generalization I'd hazard about rural politics is that they tend to break on the line of "insider" vs. "outsider." When my country neighbors sit down with a new social group, the first question they ask one another is not "What do you do?" but rather, "Who are your people?

It's hard to explain how you can miss a place and want it with all your heart, and be utterly sure it will obliterate you the instant you touch down.

You wind up meeting in the middle on this follow-your-heart thing, at a place everybody can live with. Show me that universe on TV or the movies. Mountain people, country and farm people, we are nowhere the hell. It's a situation, being invisible. You can get to a point of needing to make the loudest possible noise just to see if you are still alive.

Golden children ran wild over a field of dead great-grandmothers and great-grandfathers, and the bones must have wanted to rise up and knock together and rattle with joy. I have never seen a town that gave so much—so much of what counts—to its children. More than anything else I wished I belonged to one of these living, celebrated families, lush as plants, with bones in the ground for roots. I wanted pollen on my cheeks and one of those calcium ancestors to decorate as my own.

people's complaints about their siblings only as a primal form of bragging. They had a tribe. They belonged.

meant well, and they had all been very good to her. Mrs Thornton was forever telling her to consider The Meadow her home, and she had even turned the little box room at the end of the second-floor landing into a bedroom for her. Mrs Thornton had insisted she keep a few clothes there, and when she had visited Gwen in November she had left behind

People put out signals—body language, gait, clothes, facial expression, posture, attitude, speech, mannerisms—that can tell you where they're from, what they do, who they are. Most importantly, do they fit in.

And ceremony also functions as an antidote to loneliness.

Identity is much less a thing people "inherit" than it used to be.

Time belongs to the Tower.

Coming back to where you grew up is like doing some crazy yoga trick, putting your feet in your own mouth and somehow swallowing yourself so there's nothing left; it can't be done, and any sane person ought to be fucking glad it can't . . .

She was just a year old, but she had wanted me to stay longer. That's how you know you're home, I think, no matter how far you've gone from it or how long you've been in some other place. Home is where they want you to stay longer.

The core of any family is what is changeless, what is going to be there??shared vision and values.

FRIEND/ENEMY CENTEREDNESS. Young people are particularly, though certainly not exclusively, susceptible to becoming friend-centered. Acceptance and belonging to a peer group can become almost supremely important. The distorted and ever-changing social mirror becomes the source for the four life-support factors, creating a high degree of dependence on the fluctuating moods, feelings, attitudes, and behavior of others.

FRIEND/ENEMY CENTEREDNESS. Young people are particularly, though certainly not exclusively, susceptible to becoming friend-centered. Acceptance and belonging to a peer group can become almost supremely important. The distorted and ever-changing social mirror becomes the source for the four life-support factors, creating a high degree of dependence on the fluctuating moods, feelings, attitudes, and behavior of others. Friend

I like to include you in the definition of me . - Danny Daniels

I can think of hardly anything that will kill your joy and freedom more than wearing a mask geared to get others to accept you because you are acting like them.

The range of what is human is vast, ranging from the saintly to the monstrous. When we speak of other human beings as belonging to another species, we ignore the reality of our very nature.

it's not just the people we love, but the people we let love us back who show us how high we can really soar.