Quotes About Belonging

There's a lot of hope and comfort and nurturing in the ballroom scene.

All the clothes in my closet are Oakland, California, clothes. You can't wear those anywhere else. The barometric pressure drops and then where are you?

The city of Oakland, since I got here, has been like my second family. They've taken me in and had my back through the hard times and they've celebrated with me through the good times. And so, I love Oakland.

The warmest place I've ever been is my home here in Chapel Hill. It's an oasis of comfort and joy for me.

I used to object to being called an Indian writer, and would always say I was a writer who happened to be an Indian, and who happened to write about Indians.

No one in my family has been observant for generations, but we all identify with being Jewish.

The good Jew is ritually observant and resists assimilation, in some sense living apart, never fitting comfortably into American or any other society.

I was always the only black in the movie theater, the only black in class, the only black in the library, the only black in the discotheque. I always felt observed and judged.

Most of the Jewish writer friends I have are American, and I feel closer to them because they're always obsessed with one issue - identity: what does it mean to be an American Jew?

I believe that public space should be intentional: it should be obvious that you belong.

I'm obviously an American citizen. My parents are American citizens. But I'm not looked at as an American.

As for my country, I don't live there, but obviously I'm very proud to be Canadian.

My fiction occupies, actually, the very heart of American culture: this eternal question and struggle of what it means to be an American.

When the time comes, they won't ask what kind of a Jew you are.

A story has to stick with those who tell it. It belongs to them. Just like the October Boy, it's got nowhere else to go.

It is impossible to think of an ideal human life except as an alternation of individual and social life, as equally a belonging and an escape.

God wants you to know who you are in Him. He wants you to know you have inherited everything in the New Testament.

Incarnación Felipe de la Cruz y Monte Piedras

El mexicano no quiere ser ni indio, ni español. Tampoco quiere descender de ellos. Los niega. Y no se afirma en tanto que mestizo, sino como abstracción: es un hombre. Se vuelve hijo de la nada. Él empieza en sí mismo.

Otherness is what constitutes us.

La historia de México es la del hombre que busca su filiación, su origen.

you have always been as my own. I am perplexed

Nothing can bring the hurt of loneliness upon a man so swiftly as to pass a strange house in the dark and witness, in the lamplight from within, a family breaking evening bread together.

but as he no longer stands on his native soil, his art can't possibly have roots. An artist creates true art for his people only as long as he lives, and suffers, among them.