Quotes About Belonging

Prior to the rebellion the great mass of the people were satisfied to remain near the scenes of their birth. In fact an immense majority of the whole people did not feel secure against coming to want should they move among entire strangers. So much was the country divided into small communities that localized idioms had grown up, so that you could almost tell what section a person was from by hearing him speak.

National identity is the last bastion of the dispossessed. But the meaning of identity is now based on hatred, on hatred for those who are not the same.

The people of God cannot be changed until the outcasts are restored to its body.

A coloro che sono privi di una qualunque identità sociale, l'Ur-Fascismo dice che il loro unico privilegio è il più comune di tutti, quello di essere nati nello stesso paese.

Sürü yeniden toplanacaksa, sürü d???na itilmiÅŸlerin yeniden bulunmas? gerekliydi.

P?i, unde s? m? g?siÈ›i? Fac parte dintr-o generaÈ›ie pierdut? È™i m? reg?sesc numai când asist, în tov?r??ia altora, la singur?tatea semenilor mei.

La letteratura, contribuendo a formare la lingua, crea identità e comunità.

I belong to a lost generation and am comfortable only in the company of others who are lost and lonely.

When I invest my money in an American company, I become an American, don't I?

That's why I always say being a Cuban is an incurable disease that you get in your blood, and sometimes it's even contagious.

Cuba is painful for me, too. It hurts to always feel like a foreigner, with your roots exposed, with this feeling that everything is temporary, that life is back there in a future that never seems to get here. What has happened to us is very hard, but there are so many who have it so much worse.

In everyone there is some willingness to merge with the anonymous crowd and to flow comfortably along with it down the river of pseudo-life. This is much more than a simple conflict between two identities. It is something far worse: it is a challenge to the very notion of identity itself.

For the first time in his life he began to experience a kind of true pride. He felt himself, so to speak, taking up space when he walked in the streets; and he wondered whether this was how other people felt all the time, without effort, all the secure people he met in London and Africa.

How terrible it would have been, at this time, to be without it; to have died among the Tulsis, amid the squalour of that large, disintegrating and indifferent family; to have left Shama and the children among them, in one room; or worse, to have lived without even attempting to lay claim to one's portion of the earth; to have lived and died as one had been born, unnecessary and unaccommodated.

Though it was a comfort on occasion to play with the idea that outside this place a whole life waited for me, all the relationships that bind a man to the earth and give him a feeling of having a place.

I knew there was something that separated me from Ferdinand and the life of the bush about me. And it was because I had no means in my day-to-day life of asserting this difference, of exhibiting my true self, that I fell into the stupidity of exhibiting my things.

More than England to the British West Indian or even Holland to the Surinamer, France is the mother country to the Martiniquan.

India is for me a difficult country. It isn't my home and cannot be my home; and yet I cannot reject it or be indifferent to it; I cannot travel only for the sights. I am at once too close and too far.

We should have known from the first day that the country wasn't for us, and we should have taken our courage in both hands and gone back home.

The body needs food, but the mind needs people

History also is mostly the story of noncitizenship.

If you ask the great city, 'Who is this person?,' she will answer, 'He is my child.

La suprema dicha de la vida, es la convicción de que se es amado; amado por sí mismo, digamos mejor, ama¬do a pesar de sí mismo.

Ne soyons plus anglais ni français ni allemands. Soyons européens. Ne soyons plus européens, soyons hommes. - Soyons l'humanité. Il nous reste à abdiquer un dernier égoïsme : la patrie.