Quotes About Belonging

Because I have never separated myself from my home neighborhood, I cannot identify myself to myself apart from it. I am fairly literally flesh of its flesh. It is present in me, and to me, wherever I go. This

But if nobody can ever quite be nothing to you in Port William, then everybody finally has got to be something to you.

The more local and settled the culture, the better it stays put, the less the damage. It is the foreigner whose road of excess leads to a desert.

he gave up the idea that there is a better place somewhere else. There is no better place than this, not in this world. And it is by the place we've got, and our love for it and our keeping of it, that this world is joined to Heaven.

You can't know who you are until you know where you are.

And I, through woods and fields, through fallen days Am passing to where I belong: At home, at ease, and well, In Sabbaths of this place Almost invisible, Toward which I go from song to song.

The way we are, we are members of each other. All of us. Everything. The difference ain't in who is a member and who is not, but in who knows it and who don't. Burley Coulter

I had made a significant change in my relation to the place: before, it had been mine by coincidence or accident; now it was mine by choice. My return, which at first had been hesitant and tentative, grew wholehearted and sure. I had come back to stay. I hoped to live here the rest of my life. And once that was settled I began to see the place with a new clarity and a new understanding and a new seriousness.

I began to take for granted that I was somewhere, and somewhere that I knew, but I never quite felt that I was somewhere I wanted to be.

Reading literature is a way of reaching back to something bigger and older and different. It can give you the feeling that you belong to the past as well as the present, and it can help you realize that your present will someday be someone else's past. This may be disheartening, but it can also be strangely consoling at times.

can give you the feeling that you belong to the past as well as the present

Oh! why was I born with a different face? why was I not born like the rest of my race? when I look,each one starts! when I speak, I offend; then Im silent & passive & lose every friend. Then my verse I dishonour, my pictures despise, my person degrade & my temper chastise; and the pen is my terror, the pencil my shame; all my talents I bury, and dead is my fame. Im either too low or too highly prized; when elate I m envy'd, when meek Im despis'd

he needed the security of other bodies.

those who belong properly to books, and to whom books, perhaps, do not quite so properly belong.

Your outside is just what you live in, sleep in, and has little connection with who you are and even less with what you do.

when she spoke even now, after forty years, among the slurred consonants and the flat vowels of the land where her life had been cast, New England talked as plainly as it did in the speech of her kin who had never left New Hampshire

This world is not his world; this life his life.

And so at least we will all be together where we belong, since even if only he went there we would still have to be there too since the three of us are just illusions that he begot, and your illusions are a part of you like your bones and flesh and memory.

When we lose contact with the beloved one, we lose contact with the whole world.

He was seized with longing so intense it ached in his chest, he wanted it always to keep, to drag out secretly and study it like a yellowed photograph, and he thought I am home, this is me, this is where I have been rambling down to all these years.

If you fancy resenting the tedious, I recommend intentional communities, particularly those led by charismatics." "You

Sometimes, at dawn, perched on the edge of his unmade bed, drifting into sleep—he never slept lying down, now—he thought about her. Antoinette. And them. The belonging kind. Sometimes he speculated dreamily. . . . Perhaps they were like house mice, the sort of small animal evolved to live only in the walls of man-made structures.

No,' [Angie] said, 'not like mine. Do you know anything about Africa religions, Porphyre?' He smirked, 'I'm not African.' 'But when you were a child...' 'When I was a child,' Porphyre said, 'I was white.

Coretti didn't know how to dress. Clothing was a language and Coretti a kind of sartorial stutterer, unable to make the kind of basic coherent fashion statement that would put strangers at their ease. His ex-wife told him he dressed like a Martian; that he didn't look as though he belonged anywhere in the city. He hadn't liked her saying that, because it was true.