Quotes About Belonging

The old country. That phrase came up now and then. A phrase that seemed to have a lock on it. I knew it meant Armenia, but it made me uneasy. If I asked about the old country, the adults would change the subject. Once my mother said, 'It's an ancient place, it's not really around anymore.' Where had it gone? I asked myself.

How could there be any part of space that belonged to any specific species, because space had always been and would always be, long after the races that had staked their claims had vanished.

People are not being reached in the context of the body of Christ--they're like newborn babies being left on a doorstep somewhere to feed and care for themselves.

Is not literature meant to speak of our being a thousand different kinds of things, at times creating even this diversity? If literature gives up this purpose, this duty, it renounces all claim to legitimacy. I am Hungarian. I I am Slovene. I am Serbian. You do not need literature for sentences like that. A bureaucrat will do, and a rubber stamp. A border guard. An Army.

people's community.

But we were Germans; the gangsters who had taken control of the country were not Germany—we were.

When I reach the head of the line, I hand my passport to the black official and greet him in Shona, Zimbabwe's main vernacular. He ripens in smile and demands, "Why don't you stay here? We need people like you." By "people like you," he means white Zimbabweans.

Y el mundo se convirtió en un país extranjero donde ya no había necesidad de huir ni de volver a casa.

Y al fin: feliz aquel que tiene sus lugares de duración; ya no será, aunque se haya trasladado para siempre a un país extraño, sin perspectivas de volver a su mundo, nadie a quien han expulsado de su patria.

Maybe it's a kind of freedom too. To stay home.

College students, couples, people covered with eagle tattoos, boat captains, white-haired folks—we were all singing, waiting especially for the chorus

You're…normal." "That's the first time anyone's called me that in my life

We were family," Cass said softly. "We were all we had. And now we have nothing.

One of the deepest desires underlying shared vision is the desire to be connected, to a larger purpose and to one another. The spirit of connection is fragile. It is undermined whenever we lose our respect for one another and for each other's views. We then split into insiders and outsiders—those who are "true believers" in the vision and those who are not.

Home was that lone house on its great bend of Chatham River, no destination anymore but only the source of a vague sadness he thought of as "homegoing," a returning to the lost paradise of true belonging.

Let us all unite, and...declare that we will not leave our own country...this is our...country; ...our forefathers have planted trees in America for us and we intend to stay and eat the fruit.

about how we are all "emigrants from a country we remember too little of," how important to us are the fragments we do remember clearly and how we spend our time trying to reconstruct ourselves from these.

A long time ago, when we all lived in the forest and none of us lived anywhere else

Home. But this isn't home. May it become so.

Yes, he admitted to himself for the thousandth time, he did like it here. It went against his principles and his politics and probably the puritanism of his long-vanished religion too, but Sears's library – Sears's whole splendid house – was a place where a man felt at ease.

I liked the place I came from, but a lot of what I liked about it was that I had come from there.

Bowling Alone

That's the essence of what it means to bring individuals together and connect them to something greater than themselves.

Community is more important than faith. Belonging is more important than belief. Gathering is more important than God. As the similar findings of American social psychologists Jesse Graham and Jonathan Haidt have confirmed, bonding with other humans is the driving engine of increased charity and generosity, not believing in a deity.