Quotes About Belonging

Who do you see when you look at them? You know the ones I mean: the others, the olders, the youngers, the ones who are not you, not like you or your friends, who wear the labels you give them until they give them back, saying, I believe these belong to you.

Maybe this is what it's like for all only children: To love the family that isn't almost as much as the one that is.

Kids who get called the worst names oftentimes find each other. That's how it was with us. Skeezie Tookis and Addie Carle and Joe Bunch and me. We call ourselves the Gang of Five, but there are only four of us. We do it to keep people on their toes. Make 'em wonder. Or maybe we do it because we figure that there's one more kid out there who's going to need a gang to be part of. A misfit,like us.

A nation is the same people living in the same place.

I am a pisces, a fish out of water, searching for a way back home.

Way I see it, there's two kinds of family. There's the one you're born into and there's the one you gather around you as time goes by. The first kind you've got no say about, and sometimes it ain't quite right for you. You try to be a part of it but you just can't. The second kind, though, you choose.

Church has to be about helping people discover what they can't get anywhere else.

Finding God often happens in the midst of a community—with a "we" as often as an "I.

My friend's experience reminded me that the search for a perfect religious community is a futile one. As the Trappist monk Thomas Merton wrote in The Seven Storey Mountain, "The first and most elementary test of one's call to the religious life—whether as a Jesuit, Franciscan, Cistercian or Carthusian—is the willingness to accept life in a community in which everybody is more or less imperfect." That holds for any religious organization.

We're Englishmen. For us the road always goes home again.

A society is defined by its boundaries, a culture is defined by its horizon.

NO ONE CAN PLAY a game alone. One cannot be human by oneself. There is no selfhood where there is no community. We do not relate to others as the persons we are; we are who we are in relating to others.

Middle School," Griffin repeated. "Where did they come up with that, anyway? We're in the middle of what, exactly? too old for elementary school, but not big enough for high school. So they shove us here. Look around. There's not an interesting person in sight, just a bunch of clones who want to be like everyone else.

You are not alone. You are instead lonely. There is loneliness as can exist only in the midst of numbers and numbers of people who don't know you, who don't care about you, who won't let you care about them.

He wasn't much, mind you—just family

You call me a freak. You say that I'm different and that I don't belong. Well okay. I accept that.

We are all freaks. Yes! Alone in our rooms at night, we are all weirdoes and outcasts and losers. That is what being a teenager is all about! Whether you admit it or not, you are all worried that the others won't accept you, that if they knew the real you, they would recoil in horror. Each of us carries with us a secret shame that we think is somehow unique…And if we are, each of us, freaks – then can't we accept what's different in each other and move on?

1940s Jersey City childhood, "I grew up thinking America was an Italian country governed by the

Only later did other scholars, notably Nathan Glazer and Daniel Moynihan in their perceptive book Beyond the Melting Pot (1963), highlight the enduring power that ethnic identifications—what one eats, who one marries, where one lives, how one votes—had in the lives of the American people.53

The primary movement in the text is not from unity to differentiation, but from the isolation of an individual to the deep blessing of shared kinship and community.

It is a terrible thing to learn as a child that one is a being separate from all the world, that no one and no thing hurts along with one's burned tongues and skinned knees, that one's aches and pains are all one's own. Even more terrible, as we grow older, to learn that no person, no matter how beloved, can ever truly understand us. Our own selves make us most unhappy, and that's why we're so anxious to lose them, don't you t

My name is Adnan Nassar and I am Palestinian-American," he said in a rush. "I came to this country from Syria nine years ago and have since then earned American citizenship and am assistant manager of the Pizza Pad on Highway 6.

It is a terrible thing to learn as a child that one is a being separate from all the world, that no one and no thing hurts along with one's burned tongues and skinned knees, that one's aches and pains are all one's own. Even more terrible, as we grow older, to learn that no person, no matter how beloved, can ever truly understand us. Our own selves make us most unhappy, and that's why we're so anxious to lose them, don't you think?

but somehow, despite my efforts, I am never able to blend myself in entirely and remain in some respects quite distinct from my surroundings, in the same way that a green chameleon remains a distinct entity from the green leaf upon which it sits, no matter how perfectly it has approximated the subtleties of the particular shade.