Quotes About Belonging

writers never felt they belonged anywhere. That was one of the reasons they became writers.

By the early seventies I had become an Englishman – that is to say, I hated England just as much as half of my compatriots seemed to do.

We wrote about whatever we wanted, and we ended up with eighteen million people watching us. That's the thing about television comedy, isn't it? It makes us all a part of something. That's what I love about it.

She and Duncan had ended up together because they were the last two people to be picked for a sports team, and she felt she was better at sports than that.

you need people around you, things going on, otherwise life is like some film where the money ran out, and there are no sets, or locations, or supporting actors, and it's just one bloke on his own staring into a camera with nothing to do and nobody to speak to, and who'd believe this character then?

You need as much ballast as possible to stop you floating away; you need people around you, things going on, otherwise life is like some film where the money ran out, and there are no sets, or locations, or supporting actors, and it's just one bloke on his own staring into the camera with nothing to do and nobody to speak to, and who'd believe in this character them? I've got to get more stuff, more clutter, more detail in here, because at the moment I'm in danger of falling off the edge.

This thing about looking for someone less different… It only really worked, he realized, if you were convinced that being you wasn't so bad in the first place.

Is it so wrong, wanting to be at home with your record collection?

So putting on my faded black jeans and my old Drive-By Truckers T-shirt was my way of being heard by the right people.

It was strange, however, failing to belong even at a party full of outsiders.

You need as much ballast as possible to stop you from floating away; you need people around you, things going on, otherwise life is like some film where the money ran out, and there are no sets, or locations, or supporting actors, and it's just one bloke on his own staring into the camera with nothing to do and nobody to speak to, and who'd believe in this character then? I

You need as much ballast as possible to stop you from floating away; you need people around you, things going on, otherwise life is like some film where the money ran out, and there are no sets, or locations, or supporting actors, and it's just one bloke on his own staring into the camera with nothing to do and nobody to speak to, and who'd believe in this character then?

The identity of the Filipino today is of a person asking what is his identity.

Before 1521 we could have been anything and everything not Filipino; after 1565 we can be nothing but Filipino.

She was privileged enough to feel at home anywhere, and to equate squalor with authenticity.

She liked time at the edges of things -- the edge of the crowd, the edge of the pool, the edge of the wood -- where all must pass but none quite belonged.

They were connected: the world, her body, her face. Perhaps she should not be asking who she was but, rather, of what she was a part.

If at large gatherings or parties, or around people with whom you feel distant, your hands sometimes hang awkwardly at the ends of your arms - i you find yourself at a loss for what do with them, overcome with sadness that comes when you recognize the foreignnes of your own body - it's because your hands remember a time when the division between mind and body, brain and heart, what's inside and what's outside, was so much less.

I opened my mouth, but nothing came out. It took seven languages to make me; it would be nice if I could have spoken just one.

Sometimes, waking early before the others, wandering the rooms wrapped in a blanket or drinking my tea in the empty kitchen, I had that most rare of feelings, the sense that the world, so consistently overwhelming and incomprehensible, in fact has an order, oblique as it may seem, and I a place within it.

The little boy I watched throwing pebbles into the empty fountain, he wasn't too old to climb trees. You could tell he had too much wisdom for his age. Probably he believed that he wasn't made for this world. I wanted to say to him: If not you, who?

Once or twice a year I attended the English Romantic conferences held throughout Europe, brief gatherings perhaps not dissimilar in feeling for the participants than the feeling Jews have when they get off the plane in Israel: the relief of at last being surrounded on all sides by your own kind--the relief and the horror.

A place belongs to anyone who has a use for it.

ultimate in respectability: not only received back into the ranks of the people but also