Quotes About Belonging

Yes, she was a mess, but she wasn't fragile. She would not be broken. So many times in her life, she'd felt powerless, but once she grabbed hold of her power, she realized it had been there all along, waiting for her to find it. And Jerome seemed to know that. He was her safe harbor. He defined, at long last, who she belonged to, who was there for her, who saw her and cherished her.

To Sonnet, wearing castoff clothing was just another way to make her different from the other kids at school. As if she needed one more thing to make her different.

You will never be completely at home again, because part of your heart always will be elsewhere. That is the price you pay for the richness of loving and knowing people in more than one place. —Miriam Adeney

but in a town full of nobodys, she's practically somebody.

The World feels Complete and Whole, and I, its Child, fit into it seamlessly. Nowhere is there any disjuncture where I ought to remember something but do not, where I ought to understand something but do not.

The World feels complete and whole, and I, its Child, fit into it seamlessly.

For this is England where a man's neighbours will never suffer him to live entirely bereft of society, let him be as dry and sour-faced as he may.

At long last he was her's

living to make, and he wanted to make it here in these parts, where

It's almost like that's the definition of being American: You love becoming Irish for a day, or becoming Italian… Or becoming a Negro for four years.

High school, college, the office, evil cults, everywhere you go, there's that social hierarchy to contend with.

The only thing I'm sure of is wherever you are is where I belong.

How the hell could you be homesick for a place that had never been home?

He'd been doing crap like this for me since we were both five, the outsiders at a milk-white elementary school in a so-white-it-was-practically-Wonder-Bread county. I was the only half-a-Jew for miles, and Walcott was the sperm-donated product of a pair of lesbians who left Atlanta to grow organic veggies and run a mountain bed-and-breakfast

A whole slew of them lived outside Immita on a big piece of trailer-dotted land everyone called Ducktown, and they were all cousins and brothers and aunts with one another so many times over that it was hard to tell who was exactly related and how. Growing up, I'd had six or so in school right around my grade, but I was a sophomore now, and only one was left. Either the rest had failed so many times I'd left them behind by middle school or they had plain dropped out. OMG

Maybe that's what true love looked like, at its best. It looked like this to Julian, an adopted kid who talked to me of teams and rescues.

No one here talks like me or gets my references or knows the songs I know. I don't look like any of them. Even my bond with Joya was based on not belonging here.

Love is bobbing with the unconcerned weave of the current and particularly I feel this way when I am around you. Sometimes, in the night, the earth will change for a man the earth will open up for him and his belonging. When I am out in the world and the air does its little displacement with my body, I think of you moving with the horizon in and out of view. — Joshua Beckman, from "Block Island," Something I Expected to be Different (Verse Press, 2001)

In Phoenix, they were called illegal aliens and pegged as criminals. They were alternately viewed as American, Mexican, or neither. Now, for a moment, they were simply teenagers at a robotics competition by the ocean.

as the Links, the Knickerbocker, and the New York Athletic Club continued to exclude Jews from membership.

I'm not a Democrat, I'm not a Republican, and I don't even consider myself an American. If you and I were Americans, there'd be no problem. Those Hunkies that just got off the boat, they're already Americans; Polacks are already Americans; the Italian refugees are already Americans. Everything that came out of Europe, every blue-eyed thing, is already an American. And as long as you and I have been over here, we aren't Americans yet.

we're a "lower order of people" in one breath we are damned for being "unassailable" and the next there is fear that we'll assimilate. ... If we are educated, the complaint is that we will cease being the "ideal servant".

To be Jewish is to be specifically identified with a history. And if you're not aware of that when you're a child, the whole tradition is lost.

If you call a gypsy a vagabond, I think you do him wrong, For he never goes a-travelling but he takes his home along. And the only reason a road is good, as every wanderer knows, Is just because of the homes, the homes, the homes to which it goes.