Quotes About Belonging

People are always yearning for a bigger story to be part of, it's not enough to live our own private lives.

Gang violence in America is not a sudden problem. It has been a part of urban life for years, offering an aggressive definition and identity to those seeking a place to belong in the chaos of large metropolitan areas.

I was born in Orange County - in Santa Ana. My dad is from California. I was raised on the East Coast. My first two years were in California, but I claim East Coast. I'm sorry, I don't rep California.

I was a Vietnamese kid with a mullet hair cut. I had all Westie mates, and, geez, a Vietnamese guy with a mullet doesn't work; no wonder I couldn't get a girlfriend for so many years.

A poet clings to his own tradition and avoids internationalism.

One of the problems that comes up time and time again seems to be this notion of being 'pure' Irish. If you are Protestant, born in the Northern part of the island and deeply into the Protestant tradition, that somehow does not make you a legitimate Irish person. Yet there is a huge British influence in parts of the South.

In the true sense one's native land, with its background of tradition, early impressions, reminiscences and other things dear to one, is not enough to make sensitive human beings feel at home.

I really wasn't raised with much religion. I mean we practice kind of the basic tradition, but for me it was always more of a cultural thing and that's a part of me and my ancestry that I always loved. I mean, I think that a lot of my humor is 'Jewish humor' at its root. And so culturally I love that part of myself.

I noticed that people were craving a way of reinterpreting tradition and of being Jewish without joining a synagogue.

One of the things that's really, really present in 'Between the World and Me' is, I am in some ways outside of the African-American tradition.

I have an Indian father, and when you grow up in a house with an Indian father, culturally, that's what becomes dominant in the house. So that's the tradition we grew up with.

While I'm Jewish, the Hasidic world is still foreign to me. But I do understand some of the ideas of tradition and family and faith of our shared culture.

A thing that happens to migrants is that they lose many of the traditional things which root identity, which root the self.

I had no interest in sports so I didn't make friends in that traditional way where kids are in public school and they go and they join clubs, and play sports. So I kind of had to find my own way to make friends and get attention and so I just was the class clown.

I went to Northwestern because I had gone to a really nontraditional high school. I was like, 'It'd be cool to have a traditional college experience.' Then I was like, 'Oh, but none of these people understand what's cool about me. My specialness is not appreciated in this place.'

Traditional models of work only let us cross out the needs on the very bottom of the pyramid - basic sustenance. On the flipside, independent employment within the network of the new sharing economy addresses our needs for a sense of community and belonging, autonomy and respect, creativity and problem solving.

I'm the only one in my family - I'm a practicing Jew - who has attached themselves to religion in a more traditional way.

The body of work I create combines traditional storylines and postmodern narrative strategies to approach themes such as belonging, identity politics and conflict, as well as the push towards - and resistance against - modernization.

I would not call my family 'traditional Chinese.' We were more what I would term the Colonial Chinese.

I'm a small-town boy who comes from a traditional family on a tiny island called Belitung. I may not know where I'm going, but I'll always know where to come home to.

Yes, I was slightly outside everything when I was growing up. My mother jokes that I was exchanged at birth. She brought us up to have traditional values. She was absolutely not part of the '60s generation.

In 'The Sopranos,' these guys know their best years are behind them. They have nostalgia for their old traditions. In their minds, they're looking for a time when loyalty mattered, community mattered. E Street is about community, too. People are looking for something real.

That's why we're doing this, to defend our traditions a little. I don't have anything against it (Halloween), but it's not our tradition.

I never felt that I belonged. When I was at school... First I went to a Jewish school, when I was very little. But when I was 12, they put me in a school with a lot of traditions, and they were educated people and they were talking about Greece and the Parthenon and I don't know what.