Quotes About Belonging

I want to share all of my New York with you, Melissa. My house, my friends, my life. It's not just about where you live, what you have. It's about who you are with. I know you get that, and I can't tell what it means to me.

For one's native place is the shell of one's soul, and one's church is the kernel of that nut.

When you have lost your inns, you may drown your empty selves. For you have lost the heart of England.

We were all like a gaggle of hermit crabs without shells, flopping around trying to find ourselves. Instead we found each other, and that's just as good, I guess.

the real achievement isn't getting out of the place where you were born to build a new identity for yourself. It's better to stay put and change the culture—genuinely transform—where you are.

But they could neither of them persuade me, for there is nothing dearer to a man than his own country and his parents, and however splendid a home he may have in a foreign country, if it be far from father or mother, he does not care about it.

Humans are much the same.20 Children whose gifts or disabilities make them seem bizarre, for example, manage to find each other and to congregate.21 Among our kind it's called validation. Without others on our wavelength the strangeness of our emotions can make us feel we're losing our minds.

As time went on, the meaning of "tribe" was no longer clamped entirely to birth. Newcomers to a Greek city were often assigned a tribe at random—no matter who their forefathers might have been. But once you had your tribal label, it was unchangeable. Despite vocational liberties, preordained identities still stuck to you like glue.

Nations are not communities and never have been.

I bear the signature of my homeland, and I feel surrounded by it everywhere I go.

Maybe your country is only a place you make up in your own mind. Something you dream about and sing about. Maybe it's not a place on the map at all, but just a story full of people you meet and places you visit, full of books and films you've been to. I'm not afraid of being homesick and having no language to live in. I don't have to be like anyone else. I'm walking on the wall and nobody can stop me.

We are the brack children. Brack, homemade Irish bread with German raisins. We are the brack people and we don't just have one briefcase. We don't just have one language and one history.

dream in Irish. We laugh in Irish and we cry in German. We are silent in German and we speak in English. We are the speckled people.

My blood is too thick for California: I have never been able to properly explain myself in this climate.

For all his Caribbean clothes and his Madison Avenue manners, even with his surfside apartment and his Alfa Romeo roadster, there was so much Kansas in Sanderson that it was embarrassing to see him deny it.

The word my always implies a distinction between the possessor and what is possessed; when I speak of my book or my jacket, I do not suppose that I am those things. But I also speak of my body, my mind, or my personality, giving evidence thereby that in some sense I consider myself as distinct from them as well. What is this I that possesses my body and mind, but is not their equivalent?

You don't belong to her and she doesn't belong to you, but you're both part of each other; if she got up and left now and walked away and you never saw each other again for the rest of your lives, and you lived an ordinary waking life for another fifty years, even so on your deathbed you would know she was part of you.

I don't think you really belong here, Aviger. Xoxarle nodded wisely, slowly. Aviger shrugged, and did not raise his eyes. I don't think any of us do. The brave belong where they decide. Some harshness entered the Idiran's voice.

And now she was back in the world, not one she could make, but the one that had made her, and she felt herself shrinking under the early evening sky. She was weary of being outdoors, but she was not ready to go in. Was that really all there was in life, indoors or out? Wasn't there somewhere else for people to go?

Beyond all their hopes for a sane, just world free of war and class oppression, they feel that belonging to the Party associates them with all that is youthful, lively, intelligent and daring.

Now here at last were the beginnings of desire, precise and alien, but clearly her own; and beyond, as though suspended above and behind her, just out of sight, was relief that she was just like everyone else... It was undeniable: she was not a separate subspecies of the human race. In triumph, she belonged among the generality.

However withered, I still feel myself to be exactly the same person I've always been. Had to explain that to the young. We may look truly reptilian, but we're not a separate tribe.

In one lifetime it wouldn't be possible to find another woman with whom he can learn to be so free, whom he can please with such abandon and expertise. By some accident of character, it's familiarity that excites him more than sexual novelty. He supects there's something numbed or deficient or timid in himself (...) [M]ight look like virtue or doggedness, but it's neither of these because he exercises no real choice. This is what he has to have: possession, belonging, repetition.

Curran shrugged and pulled me back to him. 'You don't pick the family you're born into. You pick the one you make. I already chose my mate and glued her ass to the chair to make sure she knew it.