Quotes About Belonging

If I lived in a big house and had rooms full of different things, if I had big cars and a library full of books, if I had pulled out all the flowers and medicine plants and made a lawn that looked like a rug, people would come to me and ask me about everything because they would say I am a 'good' Indian. All it would mean is that I am an Indian with lots of possessions, just like a white man. That would make me good and important in your eyes. Admit it.

Every once in a while I would have to go to a powwow and put on some feathers so you could believe I was a real Indian. But other than that you would think I was smarter and more important if I lived in a big house and owned lots of things. That's just the way white people are. It's the way you are trained.

For them, us first-gen Pakistani girls were a forest of green cards. We were groomed like Christmas trees, thinking we were in the beautiful woods, thinking we were growing, but we were just being readied to be cut down. They were coming for us.

Out on Ocean Avenue in Flatbus, where I was a poor Black girl, living in someone else's apartment in an all-white neighborhood, where my family was seen as "the help". And at eight in the morning, on that street with all of its white faces staring down at me or not seeing me at all, I walked with my head high and made it to the bus stop without flinching. It was my armor, too.

There's this trope that repeats itself in the books you and I read to save our lives: that if where you grew up is killing you, you can leave and make a chosen, identity-based fam that takes up where your bio-fam left off.

She didn't belong anywhere and she never really belonged to anyone. And everyone else belonged somewhere and to someone. People thought she was too wonderful. But she only wanted to belong to someone. People always thought she was too wonderful to belong to them or that something too wonderful would hurt too much to lose. And that's why she liked him-- because he just thought she was crazy.

Before, I wanted to say: "I found love!" But now, I want to say: "I found a person. And he belongs to me and I belong to him.

I have come home at last! This is my real country! I belong here. This is the land I have been looking for all my life, though I never knew it till now...Come further up, come further in!

To think otherwise than our contemporaries think is somehow illegitimate and disturbing; it is even indecent, morbid or blasphemous, and therefore socially dangerous for the individual. He is stupidly swimming against the social current.

no man can know himself unless he know what and not who he is,51 on whom he depends and whose he is (for by the law of truth no one belongs to himself), and to what end he was made.

Cuando un hombre sabe más que los demás se queda solo. Pero la soledad no surge necesariamente en oposición a la comunidad, puesto que nadie siente más la comunidad que el solitario, y la comunidad florece tan sólo allí donde cada individuo rememora su propia singularidad

There were things in the images which concerned not only myself but many others also. It was then that I ceased to belong to myself alone

Independence is a fine thing. But having people in your life who love you and need you is a hell of a lot better.

Together, we remain comfortable. Alone, we remain unique.

I suppose we were drawn to each other because neither of us quite fitted in.

having someone I could belong to was a lure I'd always both fought against and gravitated to. I did not like the idea of being owned,

a strange disorientation, as though I no longer knew where I belonged.

The most difficult problem is not that of wanting to learn. It is time. With enough time you might learn to listen and to walk. And with enough time I would listen to you, and walk your way without undoing mine. With sufficient time everything will again belong to everybody. We will be able to exist in our life, and at the same time in the life of all persons who were once things, and in the life of things that later are to be persons.

Er passte nicht in ihre Küche oder in ihre Stadt, doch er passte perfekt in ihre Arme und ausgesprochen perfekt in ihren Körper.

Sometimes, two people are made for each other. They may come from opposite ends of the earth. Their nations may be sworn to destroy one another. They may be avowed enemies from the very beginning. And it doesn't matter. They belong together.

Autonomy: the feeling that you have control over your day, and that your actions are important Competence: the feeling that you are good at what you do Relatedness: the feeling of connection to other people

People come to church with their hearts on their sleeves. They are longing to be told that God loves them.9 They want to be told that they are special to God and the very fact that he loves them means they have significance.

A home is a place one's heart creates and so recognizes as its own. A place it enters of its own free will. All others are merely dwelling places.

I may not know where you come from, but that's not the same as not knowing who you are.