Quotes About Belonging

Sometimes I miss Boston', I said. It was a timid confession. I missed it every day - its space, its familiar streets and smells. I missed the laughter, I missed the feel of American money which was like the feel of flesh. Reality for me was the past, and it was elsewhere. This - London - was like a role I had been assigned to play, and I was still yet unsure of my lines.

I don't want to go to the United States," Mario, another of the old men, said, and he pointed—four blocks north was the fence. "My family is here. I was born here. This is my home.

the echo chamber that most expat communities become

the great theater of belonging.

An implication in all books about the country is that, though Europeans successfully emigrate to Mexico and become Mexican, no American can follow suit: the gringo remains incorrigibly a gringo.

The contemporary sedentary is someone who feels at home everywhere, thanks to cellphones, and the nomad is someone who does not feel at home anywhere, someone who is excluded, ostracized.

This is what we call love. When you are loved, you can do anything in creation. When you are loved, there's no need at all to understand what's happening, because everything happens within you.

You are someone who is different, but who wants to be the same as everyone else. And that in my view is a serious illness. God chose you to be different. Why are you disappointing God with this kind of attitude?

Fashion is merely a saying: I belong to your world. I'm wearing the same uniform as your army, so don't shoot.

Men dream more about coming home than about leaving.

phone is no longer simply a method of communicating with others, but a thread of hope, a way of believing that you're not alone, a way of showing others how important you are.

if you're not in touch with your roots, you feel as if you've lost touch with the world

He recognized that he was feeling something he had never experienced before : the desire to live in one place forever. With the girl with the raven hair his days would never be the same again

He recognized that he was feeling something he head never experienced before: the desire to live in one place forever.

He was part of a whole, a people scattered over the earth and yet eternally one and indivisible. Wherever a Jew lived, in whatever safety and isolation, he still belonged to his people.

He lived in the rich city as alien as a rat in a rich man's house that is fed on scraps thrown away, and hides here and there and is never a part of the real life of the house.

As for their child, I am moved in two ways. He will have his own world to make. Being of neither East nor West purely, he will be rejected of each, for none will understand him. But I think, if he has the strength of both his parents, he will understand both worlds, and so overcome.

When I return to that house it will be with my son in my arms. I shall have a red coat on him and red-flowered trousers and on his head a hat with a small gilded Buddha sewn on the front and on his feet tiger-faced shoes. And I will wear new shoes and a new coat of black sateen and I will go into the kitchen where I spent my days and I will go into the great hall where the Old One sits with her opium, and I will show myself and my son to all of them.

He lived in the rich city as alien as a rat in a rich man's house that is fed on scraps thrown away, and hides here and there and is never a part of the real life of the house.

To belong to one was to deny himself the privilege of belonging to all.

The SOUL of a NATION is found in its PEOPLE.

The country she had taken for granted as her own, where she had been born, whose language alone she spoke, had rejected her and despised her.

There in that land of mine is buried the first good half of my life and more. It is as though half of me were buried there, and now it is a different life in my house.

Consciously or unconsciously, we carry around concepts of "us" and "them," "right" and "wrong," "worthy" and "unworthy." In this framework, there's not much room for a middle ground; everything is at one pole or another. When groups of people or whole nations get together around these concepts, they can become hugely magnified, which may result in large-scale suffering: discrimination, oppression, war.