Quotes About Belonging

They never discussed it, but both came to understand it as a promise: he would always make sure there was a place for her. She would always be able to say, Someone is coming. I am not alone.

She smelled of home...as if home had never been a place, but had always been this little person whom she'd carried alongside her.

Every time she kissed him, every time he opened his arms and she crawled into them, felt like a miracle. Coming to her made him feel perfectly welcomed, perfectly at home, as he had never in his life felt before.

At the Richardson house were overstuffed sofas so deep you could sink into them as if into a bubble bath. Credenzas. Heavy sleigh beds. Once you owned an enormous chair like this, Pearl thought, you would simply have to stay put. You would have to plant roots and make the place that held this chair your home.

They never discussed it, but both came to understand it as a promise: he would always make sure there was a place for her. She would always be

To have such a deep taproot in a single place, to be immersed in it so thoroughly that it had steeped into every fiber of your being: she couldn't imagine it.

For moving would never have been enough; he sees that now. It would have been the same anywhere. Children of Mixed Backgrounds Often Struggle to Find Their Place.

this was the first reason he came to love her: because she had blended in so perfectly, because she had seemed so completely and utterly at home.

The average American, one judge ruled, cannot reasonably be expected to visually distinguish between various varieties of persons of Asian origin. As if they were types of apples, or breeds of dogs; as if those persons of Asian origin did not count as average Americans themselves.

This was what would haunt Mrs. McCullough most: that Mirabelle hadn't cried out when Bebe had reached into the crib and lifted her up and taken her away. Despite everything—despite the homemade food and the toys and the late nights and the love, so much love, more love than Mrs. McCullough could have imagined possible—despite it all, she still had felt Bebe's arms were a safe place, a place she belonged.

Only when he's left Chinatown, and the faces around him become Black and white instead of Asian, do the flags become more sporadic, the people here apparently more confident that their loyalty will be assumed.

as if home had never been a place, but had always been this little person whom she'd carried alongside her.

Once you owned an enormous chair like this, Pearl thought, you would simply have to stay put. You would have to plant roots and make the place that held this chair your home.

Now, when Marilyn says this—If she were a white girl—it proves what James has feared all along. That inside, all along, she'd labeled everything. White and not white. That this thing makes all the difference in the world.

Proof, she told herself, that I'm just as smart as the others. That I belong.

He has never been in a place like this, where no one gives him a second glance. If his father was here, he'd be the one standing out, not Bird, and Bird laughs. For the first time in his life, he is unremarkable, and this feels like power.

She smelled, Mia thought suddenly, of home, as if home had never been a place, but had always been this little person whom she'd carried alongside her.

Sometimes you almost forgot: that you didn't look like everyone else.

Hers had been just one of the pale, pretty faces, indistinguishable from the next, and though he would never fully realize it, this was the first reason he came to love her: because she had blended in so perfectly, because she had seemed so completely and utterly at home.

You saw it in photos, yours the only black head of hair in the scene, as if you'd been cut out and pasted in. You thought: Wait, what's she doing there? And then you remembered that 'she' was 'you'. You kept your head down and thought about school, or space, or the future, and tried to forget about it. And you did, until it happened again.

So concerned about wearing the right things, saying the right things, being friends with the right people.

In Chinatowns, the lives of all those paper sons were fragile and easily torn. Everyone's name was false. Everyone hoped not to be found out and sent back. Everyone clustered together so they wouldn't stand out.

Yet after seven years at Harvard—four as an undergrad, three and counting as a graduate student—nothing had changed. Without realizing why, he studied the most quintessentially American subject he could find—cowboys—but he never spoke of his parents, or his family. He still had few acquaintances and no friends. He still found himself shifting in his seat, as if at any moment someone might notice him and ask him to leave.

The Good Life in Shaker Heights," Cosmopolitan, March 1963