Quotes About Belonging

Where Thou art – that – is Home... Where Thou art not – is Wo...

You are my Avis," he said, "and you are also some one else. You are two women, and therefore you are my harem. At any rate, we are safe now. If the United States becomes too hot for us, why, I have qualified for citizenship in Turkey.

Her always is mine

No two sacrifices are the same, and yet all are, in the end. It is the commitment to belong, wholly, to that which claims one.

But kin is not the same as family." Raising my hand to his lips, he kissed it. "Rogier Courcel, Duc de Barthelme, is kin to me. You are family.

You should embrace your freedom, my lady. Lay down your long burden. You belong to the world of the living. Return to it.

It's true,' she agreed. 'You are the only one of us who belongs to this country.' 'No, this country belongs to me. I will be its sole owner and everything here will be mine.

And that's what we are all looking for, isn't it? A home. We're looking for where we belong.

And she will be with children who come from a real mix of places and who have moved around a bit. They're used to it. They're all . . . well, I guess they're habituated to being different. Which means they're accustomed to finding out all the things that make them the same as one another, and yet they take their individuality in their stride.

in a society in which power is so abstract that it can no longer be seized, in which the worst threat people feel is solitude and not alienation, conformity to the norm becomes the pleasure of belonging, and the acceptance of powerlessness takes root in the comfort of repetition.

Every text participates in one or several genres, there is no genreless text; there is always a genre and genres, yet such participation never amounts to belonging.

We often take for granted the notion that some people are insiders, while others are outsiders. But such a notion is a social contrivance, that, like virtually every public construct, is a legacy of a primordial and tribal mentality.

this phrase was meaningless, for no matter where the Jew wandered, if he took with him the Talmud he was

When you are a citizen, the earth feels different.

Patriotism is not a matter of the skin's color. It is a matter of the heart.

you choose your family, your friends, your colleagues, your tribe, your life.

But once you divide the world into categories, into an "us" versus "them," then you immediately become a "them" and lose touch with who you really are. And

Perhaps, as we say in America, I wanted to find myself. This is an interesting phrase, not current as far as I know in the language of any other people, which certainly does not mean what it says but betrays a nagging suspicion that something has been misplaced. I think now that if I had any intimation that the self I was going to find would turn out to be only the same self from which I had spent so much time in flight, I would have stayed at home.

The place in which I'll fit will not exist until I make it.

Whose little boy are you?

We cannot discuss the state of our minorities until we first have a sense of what we are, who we are, what our goals are, and what we take life to be.

He smiled, Why, you will go home and then you will find that home is not home anymore. Then you will really be in trouble. As long as you stay here, you can always think: One day I will go home. He played with my thumb and grinned. N'est-ce pas ? Beautiful logic, I said. You mean I have a home to go to as long as I don't go there? He laughed. Well, isn't it true? You don't have a home until you leave it and then, when you have left it, you never can go back.

A person does not lightly elect to oppose his society. One would much rather be at home among one's compatriots than be mocked and detested by them. And there is a level on which the mockery of people, even their hatred, is moving, because it is so blind: It is terrible to watch people cling to their captivity and insist on their own destruction.

He wanted me to come home--to come home, as he said, and settle down, and whenever he said that I thought of the sediment at the bottom of a stagnant pond.