Quotes About Belonging

Do what you please in the City, it is there to back and frame you no matter what you do.

I wonder if the person he wants to marry is me or a black girl? And if it isn't me he wants, but any black girl who looks like me, talks and acts like me, what will happen when he finds out that I hate ear hoops, that I don't have to straighten my hair, that Mingus puts me to sleep, that sometimes I want to get out of my skin and be only the person inside-- not American-- not black-- just me?

He wondered if there was anyone in the world who liked him. Liked him for himself alone.

How come everybody run off from Sweet Home can't stop talking about it? Look like if it was so sweet you would have stayed. Girl who you talking to? Paul D laughed. True, true. She's right, Sethe. It wasn't sweet and it sure wasn't home. He shook his head. But it's where we were, said Sethe. All together. Comes back whether we want it to or not.

Home is memory and companions and/or friends who share the memory.

Both of those conditions (my own awareness of being a native of a country and an alien in it) are of interest to me as a writer, and I'd like to talk about that expected and perhaps inevitable sense of separatedeness from the culture that pervades the country I live in.

Maybe it hadn't been a community, but it had been a place. Now there weren't any places left, just separate houses with separate televisions and separate televisions and less and less dropping by.

What is the nature of Othering's comfort, its allure, its power (social, psychological, or economical)? Is it the thrill of belonging - which implies being part of something bigger than one's solo self, and therefore stronger? My initial view leans toward the social/psychological need for a stranger, an Other in order to define the estranged self (the crowd seeker is always the lonely one).

I can never not have you have me.

if she wishes to be American—to be known as such and to actually belong—she must become a thing unimaginable in her home country: she must become white.

With you my body is pleasure is safe is belonging. I can never not have you have me.

It was there I learned how I was not a person from my country, nor from my families. I was negrita. Everything. Language, dress, gods, dance, habits, decoration, song - all of it cooked together in the color of my skin.

Borders, the porous places, the vulnerable points where one's concept of home is seen as being menaced be foreigners. Much of the alarm hovering at the borders, the gates, is stoked, it seems to me, by (1) both the threat and the promise of globalism and (2) na uneasy relationship with our own foreignness, our own rapidly disintegrating sense of belonging.

To what do we pay greatest allegiance? Family, language group, culture, country, gender? Religion, race? And if none of these matter, are we urbane, cosmopolitan, or simply lonely? In other words, how do we decide where we belong? What convinces us that we do? Or put another way, what is the matter with foreignness?

Our uneasiness with our own feelings of foreignness, our own rapidly fraying sense of belonging. To what do we pay greatest allegiance? Family, language group, culture, country, gender? Religion, race? And if none of these matter, are we urbane, cosmopolitan, or simply lonely? In other words, how do we decide where we belong? What convinces us that we do? Or put another way, what is the matter with foreignness?

clarity about who one is and what one's work is, is inextricably bound up with one's place in a tribe—or a family, or a nation, or a race, or a sex, or what have you. And the clarity is necessary for the evaluation of the self and it is necessary for any productive intercourse with any other tribe or culture.

Here is the house.

I just have the hunger for a permanent place.

for one's language, the one we dream in, is home.

Much of the alarm hovering at the borders, the gates, is stoked, it seems to me, by (1) both the threat and the promise of globalism and (2) an uneasy relationship with our own foreignness, our own rapidly disintegrating sense of belonging. Let me begin with globalization. In

Writers do not write about a place because they belong there, but because they want to.

Church is not for spectators.

Our citizenship is in heaven" (Philippians 3:20a). That's our home. That's the kingdom to which we belong. We just work down here. Understanding this key spiritual truth is fundamental to all we do on earth.

Who would have imagined that I would have to go a million miles away from the place where I was born to find the people who love me? And that I would go that distance and that I would find those people?