Quotes About Belonging

The world doesn't belong to us, we belong to it. Always have, always will. We belong to the world. We belong to the community of life on this planet--it doesn't belong to us. We got confused about that, now it's time to set the record straight

I've never been one of the cool people at school, but then again, I don't get the people who are cool. It's not that I don't like them, it's just that they don't interest me.

You know where everything is. You practically live here now." Shamron muttered something in Polish about the ingratitude

A community, a family, is a group of people who share common stories. The health of any community depends directly on the health of the stories the community embraces.

It reinforced my sense of living in a coherent universe, of belonging to something important that stretched over time, of being a link in a chain - indebted to many in the past, mostly unknown to me, and responsible to many in the future, who likewise will not know who I was.

I shall know but one country. The ends I aim at shall be my country, my God & Truth. I was born an American; I live an American; I shall die an American.

Ree sat chilled inside her squat tent. To occupy her mind, she decided to name all the Miltons: Thump, Blond, Catfish, Spider, Whoop, Rooster, Scrap… Lefty, Dog, Punch, Pinkeye, Momsy… Cotton, Hog-jaw, Ten Penny, Peashot…

I reckon I always had been huntin' for a place to plant my feet and go down swinging.

It was nice to be invited to eat with another family. The Garretts didn't have a dad either, but I never asked why. I liked the feeling of not having to explain that part of myself to someone else and thought Erin might feel the same way.

At eight years old, I already felt the imbalance of a world that never wanted me to forget that I had nothing.

Those who came before us, with their family names and genetic legacies, with their physical peculiarities, whether it be albino skin or brown eyes—none of this mattered. Family was who we loved and who we protected. Family was the tribe we created here and now.

Because isn't to be pursued, to be thought of as special, to be needed by someone somewhere, whether we know them yet or not, all any of us actually want?

Die Menschen, die dich umgeben, sind ein Teil von dir. Ihr habt eine gemeinsame Geschichte. Sie können sie sogar mit dir gemeinsam schreiben. Und wenn du einen verlierst, verlierst du damit ein Stück von dir, egal wie du ihn verloren hast.

on n'est pas forcément du pays où l'on est né. Il y a des grains que le vent aime semer ailleurs.

I realize I didn't write those books to describe a landscape, but to continue being part of it.

Un Québécois: C'est un individus prêt à mourir pour une langue qu'il ne cherche pas à bien écrire.

Ce qui est sûr c'est que je n'aurais pas écrit ainsi si j'étais resté là-bas. Peut-être que je n'aurais pas écrit du tout. Écrit-on hors de son pays pour se consoler? Je doute de toute vocation d'écrivain en exil.

It's funny. When you leave your home and wander really far, you always think, 'I want to go home.' But then you come home, and of course it's not the same. You can't live with it, you can't live away from it. And it seems like from then on there's always this yearning for some place that doesn't exist. I felt that. Still do. I'm never completely at home anywhere.

When there is a gap—between your face and your race, between the baby and the mother, between your body and yourself—you are expected, everywhere you go, to explain the gap.

I wondered if whiteness were contagious. If it were, then surely I had caught it. I imagined this "condition" affected the way I walked, talked, dressed, danced, and at its most advanced stage, the way I looked at the world and at other people.

She looked at the people around her and felt not just that she was surrounded by strangers, but that she herself was strange, somehow, that something kept her from ever fully bridging the gap between who she was and who all these other people, making their way through the very same day, were.

she immediately became the person they believed her to be: a peculiar, impatient girl, attractive enough yet too old and odd for the village boys who had once been her friends.

Your problem is that you're Russian - you don't know how to be happy.

The only word for love is everybody's name.