Quotes About Belonging

We need to walk, just as birds need to fly. We need to be around other people. We need beauty. We need contact with nature. And most of all, we need not to be excluded. We need to feel some sort of equality.

casual encounters (such as, say, the kind that might happen around a volleyball court on a Friday night) are just as important to belonging and trust as contact with family and close friends.

For a society of immigrants such as ours, the core knowledge is our shared identity that makes us Americans together rather than hyphenated Americans.

The human impulse behind the isolation of class is as basic as impulses get: People like to be around other people who understand them and to whom they can talk.

The community is the body of Christ in which every single member is guided by his Spirit.

Social man is not a being secure in the given nexus of familial, ritual, and political ties that hold his life together but rather a being continually engaged in creating that nexus.

He who cannot howl will not find his pack.

Think about the comfortable feeling you have as you open your front door. That's but a hint of what we'll feel some day on arriving at the place our Father has lovingly and personally prepared for us in heaven. We will finally - and permanently - be 'at home' in a way that defies description.

Having is estranged being.

Maybe some find that so, but Joseph Sobran better expresses my feelings: "It can be exalting to belong to a church that is five hundred years behind the times and sublimely indifferent to fashion; it is mortifying to belong to a church that is five minutes behind the times, huffing and puffing to catch up."1

Who gets to be an American? What does an American look like?

He is asking to be treated like an American. A real american. Cuz honestly, when you think about American, what color do you see? white? black? We (the Chinese) have been here 200 years....the German, the Dutch, the Italian, they came here in the turn of century; they are Americans. Why doesn't this face ("yellow") register as American? Is it because we make the story too complicated?

This is it. The root of it all. The real history of yellow people in America. Two hundred years of being perpetual foreigners.

You wish your face was more—more, something. You don't know what. Maybe not more. Less. Less flat. Less delicate. More rugged. Your jawline more defined. This face that feels like a mask, that has never felt quite right on you. That reminds you, at odd times, and often after two to four drinks, that you're Asian. You are Asian! Your brain forgets sometimes. But then your face reminds you.

Willis is] asking to be treated like an American. A real American. Because, honestly, when you think American, what color do you see? White? Black? We've been here two hundred years. Why doesn't this face register as American?

He's asking to be treated like an American. A real American. Because, honestly, when you think American, what color do you see? White? Black? We've been here two hundred years. The first Chinese came in 1815. Germans and Dutch and Irish and Italians who came at the turn of the twentieth century. They're Americans. (points at himself) Why doesn't this face register as American? Is it because we make the story too complicated?

because the idea was you came here, your parents and their parents and their parents, and you always seem to have just arrived and yet never seem to have actually arrived. You're here, supposedly, in a new land full of opportunity, but somehow have gotten trapped in a pretend version of the old country.

Able to pass in any situation as may be required," she says. "I get it all. Brazilian, Filipina, Mediterranean, Eurasian. Or just a really tan White girl with exotic-looking eyes. Everywhere I go, people think I'm one of them. They want to claim me for their tribe.

And you think: no. It won't be somewhere else. It will be here, again, in Chinatown, next year, same place. To be yellow in America. A special guest star, forever the guest.

Once that gets going, doors start opening until they're all open, the whole building buzzing until sunrise, as if nothing matters because nothing does matter because the idea was you came here, your parents and their parents and their parents, and you always seem to have just arrived and yet never seem to have actually arrived. You're here, supposedly, in a new land full of opportunity, but somehow have gotten trapped in a pretend version of the old country.

He allowed it to happen, allowed himself to become "generic", so that no one could even tell what was happening. He is guilty, Your Honor and ladies and gentlemen of the jury. Guilty of wanting to become a part of something that never wanted him. The defense rests.

He's asking to be treated like an American. A real American. Because, honestly, when you think American, what color do you see? White? Black?

But the experience of Asians in America isn't just a scaled-back or dialed-down version of the Black experience. Instead of co-opting someone else's experience or consciousness, he must define his own.

But the one that Wu can never quite get over was the original epithet: Chinaman, the one that seems, in a way, the most harmless, being that in a sense it is literally just a descriptor. China. Man. And yet in that simplicity, in the breadth of its use, it encapsulates so much. This is what you are. Always will be, to me, to us. Not one of us. This other thing.