logo

Quotes About Belonging

They had something, that generation, he thought. They didn't doubt themselves. They knew what life was, and where they belonged in it. Not like us.
~ Helen Dunmore
Just because you can fit into something tight doesn't mean that you belong in it.
~ Helen Ellis
YA is about angst. Will I get that boy to like me? Will I lose the weight? Will I turn into a vampire if he just gives me a hickey? I'm an orphan! I'm a mind reader! I'm biracial! I'm gay! When I get out of high school, I'll move to New York City, where I'll find others like me, and then I'll be happy and I will have it all: a career, a family, good teeth, and takeout Chinese.
~ Helen Ellis
The man was staring directly at him now, a curious expression on his face, half smiling, half quizzical. Instantly Eager had a sense of certainty far deeper than anything he had experienced so far. "I have it too!" he exclaimed. "I am a part of this Earth, aren't I? Just like the birds and the trees and the people - I am." "Om." said his companion. Unseen by them, a blossom fell.
~ Helen Fox
It was all there. I wanted to live in this land. I had to live there, and master the language.
~ Helen Frankenthaler
Home is the place where we've felt the most, I will tell him. And that can be anyplace. Or anyone. It doesn't matter how long you lived there. It's what you'll always want to come back to.
~ Helen Humphreys
Each holy woman in this book made specific decisions based on her individual feelings, but her decisions represent universal impulses. In this sense, her private life translated into political and cultural statements. Whatever form it took, her mission was to end separation and restore connection. She opened her arms and brought others into the experience of love and belonging. Her actions sent the message that no person is excluded from the human family and the love of God.
~ Helen LaKelly Hunt
Perhaps you are thinking: I don't care about sport. Well, neither did I. But now I realise that's partly because sport did not seem to have a place for me.
~ Helen Lewis
Someone once told me that every writer has a subject that underlies everything they write. It can be love or death, betrayal or belonging, home or hope or exile. I choose to think that my subject is love, and most specifically love for the glittering world of non-human life around us.
~ Helen Macdonald
For years he'd lived by the maxim Henry Green put so beautifully in his public-school memoir Pack My Bag: 'The safest way to avoid trouble if one may not be going to fit is to take as great a part as possible in what is going on.'12 To gain approval, to avoid trouble, he had to mirror what was around him: it was how he had tried to win love from his mother as a child. It was a life of perpetual disguise.
~ Helen Macdonald
What I was doing wasn't just educating myself in the nuts and bolts of hawk-training: I was unconsciously soaking up the assumptions of an imperial elite. I lived in a world where English peregrines always outflew foreign hawks, whose landscapes were grouse moors and manor houses, where women didn't exist. These men were kindred spirits. I felt I was one of them, one of the elect. I
~ Helen Macdonald
Maine has given me a family for Christmas and shown me a hawk can be part of it too. It's shown me that you can reconcile the wild. You can bring it home with you.
~ Helen Macdonald
Not some sham family, politely avoiding having to care about one another, but people who would share a surname and the task of weaving a collective meaning into that name. People would support and protect and staunchly cherish one another.
~ Helen Oyeyemi
I've come to think that there's an age beyond which it is impossible to lift a child from the pervading marinade of an original country, pat them down with a paper napkin and then deep-fry them in another country, another language like hot oil scalding the first language away.
~ Helen Oyeyemi
Yes, but that's personal preference and our desire to honor what's ours, Day," Hilde said. "I know," said Day. "And I do. But I want to read everything. When it comes to books and who can put things in them and get things out of them, it's all ours. And all theirs too. So we go in, see what books they have, take a few and replace them with a few of ours." "No
~ Helen Oyeyemi
The Soul Selects Her Own Society (Chapter 12 title)
~ Helen Oyeyemi
Why do people go to these places, these places that are not for them?
~ Helen Oyeyemi
If her fingers touched the photograph it was hers. If it was out of her reach then it belonged to the room.
~ Helen Oyeyemi
Waking up to the suffering of people who are different from us is a long process, and has a whole lot to do with what community we belong to and whose consciousness and life experiences impact our own on a daily basis. I have a hunch I'm going to be waking up till the moment I die.
~ Helen Prejean
What's good about belonging to a religious tradition is that it embeds us in a community, which sustains us in spiritual practice.
~ Helen Prejean
Home is any four walls that enclose the right person.
~ Helen Rowland
being a part of a club helps you to be an active person, involved in community life and with a sense of responsibility for the collective. This is important for developing a society of trust.
~ Helen Russell
and a sense of being part of something bigger than yourself, like religion, or just being Danish for folk round these parts.
~ Helen Russell
So your question, are we happy here? I say how can we be happy when we are mere wanderers without a home?
~ Helon Habila