Quotes About Belonging

We must remember that loneliness is not the real enemy - alienation from ourselves is. We are never lonely because we have lost contact with others. We are lonely because we have lost contact with ourselves.

Social rejection—or the feeling of not belonging, of being less than others, unwanted, and an outcast—activates the same brain regions as physical pain.

Human beings are not meant to live in isolation. We are here to have relationships.

Humans are designed to be with other humans, even those with mixed blood. They need each other's laughter. They require each other's sorrows.

Nosotros somos paisanos. We are fellow countrymen. We come from the same soil.

There's something to be said for visibility, something about being easier to love.

To those of us who are alienated from home, marginalized, cast out, or lost, God is crying out: I am your Father! I will do anything to buy you back, restore you to my family. Or as Jeremiah 29:11 says, "to give you hope and a future.

Peace — that was the other name for home.

For me, walking in a hard Dakota wind can be like staring at the ocean: humbled before its immensity, I also have a sense of being at home on this planet, my blood so like the sea in chemical composition, my every cell partaking of air. I live about as far from the sea as is possible in North America, yet I walk in a turbulent ocean. Maybe that child was right when he told me that the world is upside-down here, and this is where angels drown.

By the time a town is 75 or 100 years old, it may be filled with those who have come to idealize their isolation. Often these are people who never left at all, or fled back to the safety of the town after a try at college a few hundred miles from home, or returned after college regarding the values of the broader, more pluralistic world they had encountered as something to protect themselves and their families from...

The adoptee benefits because his collective parents are permitted to grow secure in their particular roles in his life. His adoptive parents are not unwittingly encouraged to compete to possess him. Nor are his birth parents punished and banished from a place in his life.

Loneliness isn't relieved in a crowd.

They're just weeds, love, they don't belong anywhere.' Her granddaughter stuck out her bottom lip and furrowed her brow. 'That doesn't seem very nice. Everything belongs somewhere.

I'm just pulling up these weeds.' 'Why?' She thought about this for a second. 'Well, they don't belong here.' 'Oh. Where do they belong, then?' 'They're just weeds, love, they don't belong anywhere.' Her granddaughter stuck out her bottom lip and furrowed her brow. 'That doesn't seem very nice. Everything belongs somewhere.

Here are some reasons kids join gangs. You tell me which might be applicable here." The list included: looking for a sense of respect and power; gangs become family, when kids have real or imagined problems at home; encroachment from a larger city nearby, sometimes engendered by transfer students; for self-protection from other gangs; to make money, have nice things.

Our invitation to community, which we read at the beginning of our gatherings, includes this important line: "At The Refuge, everyone gives, everyone receives.

I think that food ties us to our community and our traditions, and it's the thing that makes us feel good and connected.

Jason's my friend," I said quietly, "but he's not a Viral. He's not part of my pack. He'll never mean as much to me as you do." Ben's eyes snapped to meet mine. He started intently. I felt my cheeks burn.

cultural rituals exist to reinforce the unity of those performing them.

I see you, Ben. I always have. You're in my pack." He pulled away. "What if being packmates isn't enough for me?

You are mine, Aisling. You are mine today, tomorrow and five hundred years from now. You will always be mine. I do not give up my treasures, kincsem. You would do well to remember that.

One thing we've learned this summer is that a house is not an end in itself, any more than "home" is just one geographic location where things feel safe and familiar. Home can be anyplace in which we create our own sense of rest and peace as we tend to the spaces in which we eat and sleep and play. It is a place that we create and re-create in every moment, at every stage of our lives, a place where the plain and common becomes cherished and the ordinary becomes sacred.

I was a hop-around. I hung out with the rockabilly crew, the guys who were trying to be rappers, the funny kids.

Santa Barbara is my hood. I mean, it's not much of a hood, but it is definitely like my hood. I claim Santa Barbara like I claim my family. I'm going to be married and buried there.