Quotes About Belonging

Karl Johnson, my first piano player at Milt Trenier's, he just swung really hard and gave me a sense of really belonging to the jazz scene.

Everyone picked on me in school because I was in foster care.

I wanted to be like some of the other young ladies that were in my school. I used to get picked on in church. Nobody wants to hang out with me. I want to hang out with the cool girls, and I started to take the wrong turn and do things I knew wasn't right.

I wasn't picked for the improv group in college - not because I wasn't good, but because I was told I didn't fit the group, didn't gel with their dynamic.

I was the worst-dressed person in Scranton. I was a total nerd. Obviously, I got picked on, but I was also able to find my own cluster of friends, and I think when that happens, you get by just fine.

I am who I am, and I think that's why I'm very grateful to be an Arizona Cardinal: because the team that picked me, they picked me.

I didn't know what a boy was until I was about 18. I wasn't in the cool group at all. We weren't cool, but we weren't nerdy enough to be picked on. So we were just in our own little bubble.

I used to live with my grandmother. I used to wonder why the other kids in school went home with their mothers and fathers. I wanted to be the guy that got married. I wanted to be the guy with the children and the white picket fence. I never had that.

My mother birthed three children and she adopted myself and another African-American son. My adoptive parents were Finnish. I grew up in a white picket neighborhood.

It was a difficult decision picking Nigeria over England.

I'm as American as apple pie.

Language, identity, place, home: these are all of a piece - just different elements of belonging and not-belonging.

Christmas... is not an external event at all, but a piece of one's home that one carries in one's heart.

No matter where I've been or where I go, a piece of Missouri is always with me because this is where I'm from and where I grew up.

When you really are country, and you don't just wear it like a piece of clothing or something, you really can't get away from it. It just is who you are.

I love guys who have roots. Paul Pierce has roots embedded in Boston.

Everyone always says, 'We don't want to be pigeonholed.' But sometimes, your pigeonhole is a great place to be.

I just want a home anywhere. I want my own home and my own pillow!

I think being a Pink Lady, for me, meant that I was in the 'In Crowd.' I was one of the cooler kids.

Napoli fans saw themselves in me. I knew I was not alone when entering the pitch, but I was there with a whole city.

Since I moved to Blackpool, I've met a lot of great people, and if it wasn't for them, I wouldn't be as successful as I was because I'm settled off the pitch.

When I think of high school, stills are so important: it's all about the wallet with the kids - they define themselves with pictures, who they know, whose pictures they have. Yearbook pictures.

Home is any four walls that enclose the right person.

I was always the misfit jock who was with people painting on walls.