Quotes About Belonging

Without selfish partiality—to people you are deeply attached to, your family and friends, to place—we are nothing. We are creatures of kinship and loyalty, not blind servants of the world.

Nenet always insisted she was Mediterranean

Yazz wondered if sharing the same corridor in halls and being one of the few brown girls on a white campus was really enough to keep the Unfunkwithables together post-university, or even into their second year, come to think of it

Megan was part Ethiopian, part African-American, part Malawian, and part English which felt weird when you broke it down like that because essentially she was just a complete human being

it felt like she was coming in from the cold

If there's one thing she's learned in the past forty-eight hours, anyone can be a relative

The moment my father arrived in Britain as a young man, he was brutally stripped of his self-image as an individual and had to assume an imposed identity - as the visual embodiment of centuries of negative misrepresentations.

Alle pogingen om cultuur terug te brengen tot opvattingen over authenticiteit kunnen alleen het omgekeerde bewerkstelligen en de onderlinge verbondenheid van onze culturen openbaren.

Collective fear stimulates herd instinct, and tends to produce ferocity toward those who are not regarded as members of the herd.

So long as you feel yourself separate from others, so long are you shut out from the realisation of the unity; so long as you say "my" and "mine," so long the realisation of the Spirit is not yet possible for you.

A piece of rusty pump and a pile of stones,--all that was left of the place he and Marthy had called home. Home. What a big word that was. Lots of attempts made lately to belittle it. Plenty of fun poked at it. Young folks laughed about it,--called it a place to park. Everybody wanted to get some place else, seemed like. They'd find out. They'd understand some day. When they got old, they'd know. They'd want to go home. sometimes in their lives everybody wanted to go home.

once you make yourself a freak and special any bastard starts to use you. That's half of the fierce fight in Africa' — Elizabeth

I don't remember what we ate or drank or discussed, I remember only the long table filled with high-spirited bohemians—intellectuals, internationals, the great unwashed—and how I yearned to be one of them.

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 thought about that old saying, how we can never go home again. But I think it's more like a piece of us stays behind when we leave -- a piece we can never reclaim, one that awaits our next visit and demands that we remember.

The self is woke and abnegating, line crossing and navigating, more-or-less list making, marked by the immediate and bent by the scene, the superimposition of other people's dreams, and I remembered the essence of a note I had written to a former student, now a man: But might your happiness be more than all the ways you work to make other people happy? Might you soon belong to you?

Might you soon belong to you?

Fear not, for I have redeemed you; I have called you by name, you are mine. ISAIAH 43:1

"If only I'd known that one day my differentness would be an asset, then my early life would have been much easier."

Knowledge of and definite relationship to his genealogy is therefore necessary for a child to build up his complete body image and world picture. It is an inalienable and entitled right of every person. There is an urge, a call in everybody to follow and fulfill the tradition of his family, race, nation, and the religious community into which he was born.

Something in his voice stopped her from asking any more questions and he went on: 'So you see, Octavia, we need you and you need us. Between us we can be a family instead of three lonely people.

No two families are alike," he said.

My heart knew that all the dear ones God had placed in my path had been part of His beautiful plan, one that had brought me to this remarkable season of thanksgiving . . . and led me home.

India's post-independence leadership eschewed parochial nationalism in favor of civic nationalism where the rights and privileges of being Indian were conceived as arising not from some pre-existent modes of belonging—religion, race, or ethnicity—but instead from participation in a collective political endeavor.