Quotes About Belonging

That the end of loneliness is when someone needs you.

You're not a wave, you're part of the ocean.

That the end of loneliness is when someone needs you. And the world is so full of need.

A military chaplain told me the following story: 'A soldier's little girl, whose father was being moved to a distant post, was sitting at the airport among her family's meager belongings. The girl was sleepy. She leaned against the packs and duffel bags. A lady came by, stopped, and patted her on the head. 'Poor child,' she said. 'You haven't got a home.' The child looked up in surprise. But we do have a home,' she said. 'We just don't have a house to put it in.

Strangers, the Blue Man said, are just family you have yet to come to know.

Look and see, for everyone is coming home. Your sons are coming from distant lands; your little daughters will be carried on the hip. Your eyes will shine and your hearts will thrill with joy.

That's the way it worked between the two of them. Long periods of absence—then crazy, intense romance. I do believe she and Frankie belonged together, even if they rarely stayed together. It was as if they had a secret they were bound to, which made them joyful most of the time and insane the rest.

Now you know how badly someone wanted you Charley. Children forget that sometimes. They think of themselves as a burden. Instead of a wish granted.

I'd had books published in foreign languages. I'd had many addresses over the years. But you can touch everything and be connected to nothing.

If you don't have the support and love and caring and connection that you get from a family, you don't have much at all.

You knew you were an Arab if your ride form the airport was two dozen people.

L'esilio più lungo è l'esilio del cuore L'unico passaggio per il ritorno è l'amore

The longest exile is exile of the heart The only passage for return is love

In a subway car, my skin would typically fall in the middle of the color spectrum. On street corners, tourists would ask me for directions. I was, in four and a half years, never an American; I was immediately a New Yorker.

It is possible to adore those newly come into your world, to envision, no matter how late in the day, a happily entwined future with those who have not been part of your past.

All sorts of strange people were around, people who looked more at home than she was, even the homeless ones who spoke no English, more at home maybe because they were younger, and when she went out it seemed to her that she too had migrated, that everyone migrates, even if we stay in the same houses our whole lives, because we can't help it. We are all migrants through time.

He was drawn to people from their country, both in the labor camp and online. It seemed to Nadia that the farther they moved from the city of their birth, through space and through time, the more he sought to strengthen his connection to it, tying ropes to the air of an era that for her was unambiguously gone.

Our civilizations do not cause us to clash. No, our clashing allows us to pretend we belong to civilizations.

I can understand it," she said. "Imagine if you lived here. And millions of people from all over the world suddenly arrived." "Millions arrived in our country," Saeed replied. "When there were wars nearby." "That was different. Our country was poor. We didn't feel we had as much to lose.

and all sorts of strange people were around, people who looked more at home than she was, even the homeless ones who spoke no English, more at home maybe because they were younger, and when she went out it seemed to her that she too had migrated, that everyone migrates, even if we stay in the same houses our whole lives, because we can't help it. We are all migrants through time.

and the more he looked the less white he seemed, as though looking for his whiteness was the opposite of whiteness, was driving it further away, making him seem desperate

But then around her she saw all these people of all these different colors in all these different attires and she was relieved, better here than there she thought, and it occurred to her that she had been stifled in the place of her birth for virtually her entire life, that its time for her had passed and a new time was here.

shame, for the displaced, was a common feeling

most of the battle. We are all refugees from our childhoods. And so we turn, among other things, to stories. To write a story, to read a story, is to be a refugee from the state of refugees.