Quotes About Belonging

Métis cultural stories play a crucial role in helping new Métis (those who have been denied their culture) to recreate their sense of self. (p. 37)

The more one realizes they are on a journey to find out who they are (where they come from, who their family is) when this information has been denied, the more it can be understood as a journey back to culture and identity... Stories can be a part of the glue that binds the personal with the social, allowing us to feel part of something greater. (p. 19)

Home isn't a place, its a feeling

It's not the job of this town to make me feel happy. It's not this town´s fault that I don't feel I fit in. It doesn't matter where you are in the world, because it's about where you are in your head. It's about the other world I inhabit. The world of dreams, hope, imagination, and memories. I'm happy up here, and because of that I'm happy up there too

There is absolutely nothing wrong with returning to the house you grew up in every now and again. It's good for the soul.

you are loved because I love you.

Like Rosaleen and Arthur's house, this had the feel of generations of people who had lived there before, families that had grown up, run and shouted through the hallways, broken things, grown things, fallen in love. Instead of the occupants owning the house, the house owned a part of each of them.

He aprendido que el hogar no es un sitio, es un sentimiento.

How can a place be a home if no one wants you there? This is not a home.

Were we lost and unaccounted for, or was this where we truly belonged and our normal lives the original error?

Children always want the same things because they all need the same basic things.

I've learned that home is not a place, it's a feeling. I can make the flat look as pretty as I can, put as many flower boxes on the window sill as I want, put a welcome mat outside the front door, hang a Home Sweet Home sign over the fireplace, and take to wearing aprons and baking cookies, but the truth is that I know I don't want to stay here forever.

Home is not a place. It is a feeling.

You both know where you want to be. I suppose that's because you have each other and anywhere Dad is feels like home to you. I've learned that home isn't a place, it's a feeling.

If we're all alone, then we're all together in that too.

Tenho uma doença que está além do alcance da medicina; mesmo meu bom amigo Graham não tem cura para ela. Assim que eu chegar em terra, vou querer partir de novo. Meu lar é o navio. Minha pátria é o mar.

Great artists make the entire world their home.

The constant cry is that you belong here, or you make yourself belong, or you must go. (1998: 319)

In America, he said, it's even hard to stay Korean.

Most of us can't accept that the gig is ours, so we lurk around, we tug and scratch at ourselves as if in borrowed skins, and never fully belong to the moments that can steadily add up to nothing a lot quicker than you think.

Everybody, she says, has been a good citizen. She will say the name, quickly write it on the sticker, and then have m press it to each of their chests as they leave. It is a line of quiet faces. I take them down in my head. Now, she calls out each one as best as she can, taking care of every last pitch and accent, and I hear her speaking a dozen lovely and native languages, calling all the difficult names of who we are.

I still imagine Mr. Kim's and Mr. Yoon's children, lonely for their fathers, gratefully eating whatever was brought home to them, our overripe and almost rotten mangoes, our papayas, kiwis, pineapples, those exotic tastes of their wondrous new country, this joyful fruit now too soft and too sweet for those of us who knew better, us near natives, us earlier Americans.

The question, then, is whether being an "individual" makes a difference anymore. That it can matter at all. And if not, whether we in fact care.

I wondered if anything would have turned out differently had a careless nurse switched the two of us in a hospital nursery, whether his family would be significantly changed, whether mine would have been, whether any of us Koreans, raised as we were, would sense the barest tinge of a loss or estrangement.