Quotes About Belonging

I continue to admit that Italian is not my language, that it's an adopted language I love and use without possession. But I also ask myself: Who possesses a language, and why? Is it a question of lineage? Mastery? Use? Affect? Attachment? What does it mean, in the end, to belong to a language?

Once back on Pemberton Road, in the modest house that is suddenly mammoth, there is nothing to remind them; in spite of the hundred or so relatives they've just seen, they feel as if they are the only Gangulis in the world. The people they have grown up with will never see this life, of this they are certain.

In a sense I'm used to a kind of linguistic exile. My mother tongue, Bengali, is foreign in America. When you live in a country where your own language is considered foreign, you can feel a continuous sense of estrangement. You speak a secret, unknown language, lacking any correspondence to the environment. An absence that creates a distance within you.

Our meals, our actions, were only a shadow of what had already happened there, a lagging ghost of where Mr. Pirzada really belonged. At

Celui qui n'appartient à aucun lieu spécifique ne peut, en réalité, retourner nulle part.

Quando la lingua con cui ci si identifica è lontana, si fa di tutto per tenerla viva.

She has the gift of accepting her life; as he comes to know her, he realizes that she has never wished she were anyone other than herself, raised in any other place, in any other way. This

Imparare una lingua straniera è il modo essenziale per integrarsi con gente nuova in un nuovo Paese. Rende possibile un rapporto. Senza la lingua non ci si può sentire una presenza legittima, rispettata. Si rimane senza voce, senza potere.

L'inglese rimane il presente: permanente, indelebile. la matrigna non mi abbandona. Per quanto sia una lingua imposta, mi ha regalato una voce pulita, corretta, per sempre.

Grazie a questo progetto di scrittura spero che un pezzo di me possa restare qui, ed è consolante, anche se mi auguro che ogni libro al mondo appartenga a tutti, oppure a nessuno, da nessuna parte.

Those who don't belong to any specific place can't, in fact, return anywhere. The concepts of exile and return imply a point of origin, a homeland. Without a homeland and without a true mother tongue, I wander the world, even at my desk. In the end I realize that it wasn't a true exile: far from it. I am exiled even from the definition of exile.

He has no ABCD friends at college. He avoids them, for they remind him too much of the way his parents choose to live, befriending people not so much because they like him, but because of a past they happen to share.

Writing in another language reactivates the grief of being between two worlds, of being on the outside. Of feeling alone and excluded.

as they near his apartment, he leans toward the plexiglass and says to the driver, in Bengali, 'It's that one, up on the right.' The driver turns around, surprised, smiling. 'I didn't realize,' he says. 'That's okay,' Gogol says, reaching for his wallet. He tips the driver excessively and steps out of the car.

And for the first time in his life, another man's name upset Gogol more than his own.

James Joyce wrote the definitive work about Dublin while he was living in Switzerland. We're all where we come from. We all have our roots.

It's always good to work where you're wanted. The times I've been where I wasn't wanted - that's just never a good experience.

The people I work with, the people I photograph, become a kind of family for me.

I just don't feel like - I've never felt like - part of the entertainment industry. I still just feel like I'm trying to work my way in. And that's weird.

I love being in the business I'm in-I do love being a part of a group of people that work well together. I love it when there's a connection.

New York was a place I wanted to live and work all along. If I wasn't going to live in Israel, I had to live in New York.

Superior writers, videographers and other content makers want to work with their own kind and for their own kind.

What was transformative was being at the inauguration, reading my poem, and realizing that the quest for home and identity had always been part of my work, but that I'd been home all along.

The French hold onto their traditions. I was always so alienated in America. My work was this constant reaction to that.