Quotes About Belonging

The belief when your mother gives you away is that there's something deeply wrong. Mothers don't give babies away. There's something wrong with me, something unlovable, something seriously flawed in me. It's a fundamental thing; it's precognitive. You feel it rather than think it. How could you not?

I was eight when I found out I was adopted. My step-brother told me. He'd overheard my mum and my stepdad at the time talking about it, and he threw it in my face. But I didn't really care. It didn't seem relevant, because I never once in my life felt unloved or like I was a burden.

Only the unloved hate; the unloved and the unnatural.

Maybe we are all prospective migrants. The lines of national borders on maps are artificial constructs, as unnatural to us as they are to birds flying overhead. Our first impulse is to ignore them.

I live in my house as I live inside my skin: I know more beautiful, more ample, more sturdy and more picturesque skins: but it would seem to me unnatural to exchange them for mine.

My singing voice had rescued me from the scene I was in at school - I was an unpopular, bookish kid who had an indeterminate ethnic background. I became fascinated with women sopranos because they had a future that I didn't as a singer.

I didn't mind being unpopular at school, because everyone else was a heathen.

A lot of what inspired many musicians is celebrating differences, and people relate to that - more people feel like the unpopular, freaky one than the one in the in-crowd.

At that age, feeling unpopular is difficult to handle. It's a hard feeling to shake off. Feeling comfortable in my own skin has never been easy for me.

I was never really unpopular in high school.

As far as I'm concerned, and this is a big theme of mine, I'm not interested in white people loving me. It's an unrealistic expectation. Black people don't love anybody but themselves.

In a world of oversharing, we don't want to be unknown or unseen. We don't want to be left out.

I want to connect with people that feel unseen.

The more unsettling the more I feel at home.

Politics feels, on what I have seen of it, like joining a tribe, and a lot of it is about unspoken ways of behaving.

I just feel like in society and in public, we have this unspoken expectation that we're all trying to meet. And there's so much pressure to try to fit in.

I tried to find a social niche at Harvard - a group, my group - but I was unsuccessful.

High school was hard for me. I tried really hard to fit in and said the things I thought people wanted to hear. But I was unsure of myself. I was self-conscious, and I didn't really know my place or where I fit in.

I've always felt like an alien trapped in a human form. We all do at some time or other; for me it's a permanent state, and I'm still unsure if Earth is a penance or a reward.

When I was a kid in my neighborhood, there was nobody that supported Belgium. It was impossible and unthinkable because there was nothing they could relate to.

I know from first-hand experience that separating transgender students from their peers can cause many to leave school, hide who they are, or even do the unthinkable.

My mother is black, from Grenada, so my blackness was always there, but It wasn't until I started hanging with the upperclassmen black actors at my high school that I really got my roots in being a black American, which is a distinctly different identity and experience.

I went to boarding school in the country, so there's no real differentiation between family and friends. I went there from when I was 8 until I was 17 - it was insane. If you earn my friendship, you are my family, and I'll do anything for you.

I'll live in Puerto Rico until the day I die.