Quotes About Belonging

I got something most women got, an experience of staring at women across a distance or being in worlds in which they barely existed, from Moby-Dick to Lord of the Rings. Being so often required to be someone else can stretch thin the sense of self. You should be yourself some of the time. You should be with people who are like you, who are facing what you're facing, who dream your dreams and fight your battles, who recognize you.

the outsiders stick together because their differences from each other are insignificant in the face of their differences from a hostile mainstream.

The utilitarian argument against fiestas, parades, carnivals, and general public merriment is that they produce nothing. But they do: they produce society. They renew the reasons why we might want to belong and the feeling that we do.

The two most basic goals of social utopias are to eliminate deprivation—hunger, ignorance, homelessness—and to forge a society in which no one is an outsider, no one is alienated.

We have, most of us, a deep desire for this democratic public life, for a voice, for membership, for purpose and meaning that cannot be only personal. We want larger selves and a larger world.

If you walk a city, if you love a city, if you put in your miles and years with open heart and mind, the city will reveal itself to you. Maybe it won't become yours, but you will become its - its chronicler, its pilgrim, its ardent lover, its nonnative son or native daughter or defender.

When I think back to why I was apolitical into my mid-twenties I see that being politically engaged means having a sense of your own power--that what you do matters--and a sense of belonging, things that came to me only later and that do not come to all.

Glorious theater. It creates family for all kinds of orphans.

Wade Coenen poured her a glass of brandy. 'Theater,' he said. 'Glorious theater. It creates family for all kinds of orphans.

social structure of Troop 55. There are

Glorious theater. It creates family for all kinds of orphans. -- Wade Coenen in Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood

In any class I feel at home, and I am never accepted, because of the traces I bear of my other origins. This does not, instance by instance, cause me any pain, but my experience of rejection has been an agony.

She'd also noted that the volume was stamped Property of the Longboat Hotel, Scarborough and the bookmark was a folded copy of a bill for a week's stay directed to the account of Mr. and Mrs. A.H. Dalziel.

I define myself as a seminomad, so my world consist of transient places, where being at home is not possible.

To be a member of such a crowd ... is not much to be far removed from solitude; the freedom of everyone is assured by the freedom to which everyone else lays claim.

No matter how far you have run, no matter how long you have been lost, it is never too late to be found.

Jesus, on the other hand, was America. He was the central figure in America's national drama. Accepting him into my heart was as close as I could get to feeling truly American.

I prefer to die of thirst in my own planet than to be a character more in this sad story.

Tipo increíble, dijo Renzi. Personaje local, le digo, como todos acá. Eso es lo que tiene de bueno vivir en un pueblo: todos somos personajes importantes.

Así somos él y yo, tal vez le sirva, le digo a Renzi, tipos sin arraigo, gente anacrónica, los últimos sobrevivientes de una estirpe en disolución.

people spend less time in the office and have more time to themselves. Their need to belong to a tribe can be satisfied with hobbies or in community activities and doesn't have to be met in the office.

My airplane is quiet, and for a moment still an alien, still a stranger to the ground, I am home.

Two things I do value a lot, intimacy and the capacity for joy, didn't seem to be on anyone else s list. I felt like the stranger in a strange land, and decided I'd better not marry the natives.

If you love somebody, set them free. If they return, they were always yours. If they don't, they never were