Quotes About Belonging

I'm partly somebody else trying to fit in and say the right things and do the right thing and be in the right place and wear what everybody else is wearing. Sometimes I think we're all trying to be shadows of each other, trying to buy the same records and everything even if we don't like them.

A generous heart is always open, always ready to receive our going and coming. In the midst of such love we need never fear abandonment. This is the most precious gift true love offers - the experience of knowing we always belong.

Beloved community is formed not by the eradication of difference but by its affirmation, by each of us claiming the identities and cultural legacies that shape who we are and how we live in the world.

Queer' not as being about who you're having sex with (that can be a dimension of it); but 'queer' as being about the self that is at odds with everything around it and that has to invent and create and find a place to speak and to thrive and to live.

Living away from my native place I became more consciously Kentuckian than I was when I lived at home. This is what the experience of exile can do, change your mind, utterly transform one's perception of the world of home.

If we are lucky enough as children to be surrounded by grown-ups who love us, then our sense of wholeness is not just the sense of completeness in ourselves but also is the sense of belonging to others and to our place; it is an unconscious awareness of community, of having in common. It may be that this double sense of singular integrity and of communal belonging is our personal standard of health for as long as we live…we seem to know instinctively that health is not divided.

To me the family has always been that place of familiarity that holds and hurts us.

We can begin the process of making community wherever we are. We can begin by sharing a smile, a warm greeting, a bit of conversation; by doing a kind deed or by acknowledging kindness offered to us. Doing this we engage in love practice [...] we lay foundation for the building of community with strangers. The love we make in community stays with us wherever we go. With this knowledge as our guide, we make any place we go, a place where we return to love.

I dreamed about a culture of belonging. I still dream that dream. I contemplate what our lives would be like if we knew how to cultivate awareness, to live mindfully, peacefully; if we learned habits of being that would bring us closer together, that would help us build beloved community.

We can restore our hopw in a world that transcends race by building communities where self-esteem comes not from feeling superior to any group but from one's relationship to the land, to the people, to the place wherever that may be. When we create beloved community, environments that are anti-racist and inclusive, it need not matter whether those spaces are diverse. What matters is that should difference enter the world of beloved community it can find a place of welcome, a place to belong.

Rarely, if ever, are any of us healed in isolation. Healing is an act of communion.

Life without communion in love with others would be less fulfilling no matter the extend of one's self-love.

Home was the place where I was forced to conform to someone else's image of who and what I should be. School was the place where I could forget that self and, through ideas, reinvent myself.

Estar al margen es ser parte del todo, pero fuera del cuerpo principal.

Giving is the way we also learn how to receive. The mutual practice of giving and receiving is an everyday ritual when we know true love. A generous heart is always open, always ready to receive our going and coming. In the midst of such love we need never fear abandonment. This is the most precious gift true love offers -- the experience of knowing we always belong.

Craig is not yours that you should demand to keep him. He doesn't belong to you, Susan. He is mine.

In the church, we think of ourselves as all part of God's family. That means that we think of the people of where we worship as brothers and sister--part of our family. The church people have been treating us as the family members we are.

I had fought so long and so hard for my home. It had been stolen from me when I was a child, and I had fought the length and breadth of Britain to regain it. And now I must fight for Bebbanburg again. We would ride for home.

I had learned to hide my soul, or perhaps I was confused. Northumbrian or Dane? Which was I? What did I want to be?

Thomas nodded towards Keane. 'He doesn't want to be a priest and you don't want to be a monk. Now you're both Hellequin.' Brother Michael looked disbelieving. 'I am?' He asked excitedly. 'You are,' Thomas said. 'So all we need now is a pair of ripe young girls who don't want to be nuns,' Keane said cheerfully.

I was born a Saxon, but raised by Danes, my daughter had married a Norseman, my dearest friend was Irish, my woman was a Saxon, the mother of my children had been Danish, my gods were pagan, and my oath was sworn to AEthelflaed, a Christian. Whose side was I on?

What binds a man to his land? What power within allows him to give his life to preserve his land and the lives of the families who work it? It can only be love.

I'm like mistletoe," she said, "I need a branch to grow on. Without the branch, I'm nothing.

I had never thought it all through before, but suddenly, on that cold day, I understood that among the Danes I was as important as my friends, and without friends I was just another landless, masterless warrior. But among the Saxons I was another Saxon, and among the Saxons I did not need another man's generosity. "You