Quotes About Belonging

the Magnificent Seven consisted of one swimmer of color, a representative from each extreme of the educational spectrum, a muscle man, a giant, a chameleon, and a one-legged psychopath. When I envision us walking seven abreast through the halls of Cutter High, decked out in the sacred blue and gold, my heart swells.

Briana would hit the locker room, change into her New Goth Girl disguise/costume, and then try to find a seat at Elyssa Shapiro's table. It shouldn't be hard. Nobody much wanted to sit with Elyssa except her nose- and eyebrow-studded friend with the purple hair, Charlotte Edelman.

Being rejected] hurt, 'cause what turned me on in sex was believing that they knew me, that I'd found somebody to understand.

Somehow this redneck town allows the possibility of a middle-aged New York City woman bouncing round a house alone more generously than Woodstock or East Hampton. It's a community of exiles anyway. No one asks me any questions 'cause there's no frame of reference to put the answers in.

I'd never really found a place in the outside world, but had stayed away too long to fit in at home.

Books offered the promise of a world in which misfits like me could flourish.

A pastor can teach you on TV, but he can't pastor you on TV. There's so much to gain by belonging to a church.

'Ohana means family — no one gets left behind, and no one is ever forgotten.

There are people that I believe shouldn't like me, and if they did, I'd be sad. ~ Jon Stewart

Conveniently then he can forget it all exists. And, after a time only a general notion will remain in his mind, that there are places where he doesn't belong, and those where he seems to fall right in.

P]eople, who seek the companionship of like minds and bodies, cannot simply be thrown together and expect to thrive.

I have no sense of patriotism, but I do have a sense of community.

Du bist Nummer 55«, sagt Marga. Manuela blickt auf zu der Nummer über ihrem Schrank. Eine schwarze 55. »Deine Kleider tragen die Nummer 55. Deine Schuhe gehören in die Stiefelkammer in das Fach 55, dein Mantel und dein Hut kommen unten neben dem Hauseingang in die Garderobe, Abteilung 55. Deine Waschkabine ist Nummer 55, ebenso dein Bett.« Manuela fühlte, wie sie langsam zu Nummer Fünfundfünfzig wurde.

She was doubtful, amid our toxic swirl of new namegiving; what she doubted was the reality of names, though she had to deal with them; she certainly felt that naming is seldom accurate, name and thing coincide only for a short time. She shrank from stamping any name on herself, the brand mark which decides which herd you belong to and which stable you should occupy.

Where can I go. Is it possible to imagine a world, a time, where I would have a place. There's no one I could ask. That's the answer.

Home is not where you live, but where they understand you...

Nicht da ist man daheim, wo man seinen Wohnsitz hat, sondern wo man verstanden wird.

940Home is not where you live but where they understand you.

The fact that I am writing to you in English already falsifies what I wanted to tell you. My subject: how to explain to you that I don't belong to English though I belong nowhere else, if not here in English. —GUSTAVO PÉREZ FIRMAT, "BILINGUAL BLUES

I found it a condescending expectation—that my words and mannerisms would meld into the mainstream around me—but it was also a fair question: how do you retain so strongly strands of somewhere or something you have never lived? - Nour Malas

Syria: never the country I called home, but certainly my homeland. - Nour Malas

Every person you've ever cared about, and every place you've ever loved, is one of these shells. You're the thread that ties them together," she'd said, touching Mathinna's cheek. "You carry the people and places you cherish with you. Remember that and you will never be lonely, child.

As with Dutchy and Carmine on the train, this little cluster of women has become a kind of family to me. Like an abandoned foal that nestles against cows in the barnyard, maybe I just need to feel the warmth of belonging. And if I'm not going to find that with the Byrnes, I will find it, however partial and illusory, with the women in the sewing room.

In Kinvara, poor as we were, and unstable, we at least had family nearby, people who knew us. We shared traditions and a way of looking at the world. We didn't know until we left how much we took those things for granted.