Quotes About Belonging

Zarathustra: Do you have words? Do your words belong to you? Giannina: No, my answer is no. I have no property in the dictionary. Words are anonymous like the disenfranchised masses that haven't been weighed - or named - or framed. My words belong to those who don't belong.

At times of disorientation people need to go back to identity, purpose, and context.

home is where the hated is

Scotland might as well be a foreign country to one such as myself. But then I often felt like that in England, too, as did many of us who had grown up in the colonies. It was as if we had returned to a home different from the one we had been holding in our heads all that time.

Algerian-born writer Albert Camus elegantly expressed this notion in the famous quotation, "Ma patrie, c'est la langue française" ("My homeland is the French language").

Mon pays ce n'est pas un pays, c'est l'hiver.

For her uncles, she realizes, it is as if ever since she left the country for New York City—for nothing! not to send money home but just to "galavant!"—ever since she left she has relinquished her right to her memory of home, and she should not be left to her devices or she will bumble through the nation like a witless tourist who cannot speak its languages, though in fact she code-switches in three of them, puns in five, makes money in two, and dreams in one.

For those who are lost, there will always be cities that feel like home. Places where lonely people can live in exile of their own lives—far from anything that was ever imagined for them. —SIMON VAN BOOY, Everything Beautiful Began After

What happens when self-erasure has been the norm for so long that the You cannot find its way back to I?

But our children are never ours. We belong to them, but they belong to themselves. They belong to people not yet born.

When we establish human connections within the context of shared experience we create community wherever we go.

If you are feeling constrained by a group that you belong to, ask yourself, "How can I participate in this community and still be who I am?

In 2006 I had begun the discernment process for locating my rightful geographic home. By the time my corporate pink slip arrived I had spent two years researching and taking recon trips to five different cities in southern California. Having crossed them off my list, in February 2008 I visited Sarasota, Florida, at the urging of a friend who winters in a neighboring town. Though Florida had never been on my radar, only minutes in Sarasota I knew I'd found home.

No need to queue up; step forward and count yourself in.

Stay open. You may find your tribe where you least expect it.

Quisiera ser extranjero para irme a mi país".

One of the most odious forms of anti-Semitism was precisely this: to complain that Jews aren't sufficiently like other people, and then, the opposite, once they've become almost totally assimilated with their surroundings, to complain that they're just like everybody else, not even a fraction distinguished from the average.

La luna è di tutti e ognuno di noi ha il diritto di ululare

Il mare non ha paese nemmeno lui, ed è di tutti quelli che lo stanno ad ascoltare, di qua e di là dove nasce e muore il sole

The worst thing,' Mena said, 'is to have to leave your hometown where everyone, even the stones, know who you are. It must be heartbreaking to leave them all behind and head off down the road. The bird that's most blessed has a home for his nest.

The family is the country of the heart.

always felt like an outsider, ever since I was a child and my family moved around so much. Some people thought I was privileged, maybe even spoiled, but really I wasn't. I was just lonely, and never truly felt at home anywhere. Until I met Sean. For the first time in my life I felt connected to another human being." She hesitated, emotion welling in her. "There's an old Irish saying: 'May I know you until the end of my days.' That was how I felt about him.

Having someone who looks like us but thinks like them is worse than having no one at all.

This balance between tribe and individuality, community and uniqueness, was a surprise in a world that makes us think we have to make a choice between them.