Quotes About Belonging

Because this is the other thing about immigrants ('fugees, émigrés, travellers): they cannot escape their history any more than you yourself can lose your shadow.

And then you begin to give up the very idea of belonging. Suddenly this thing, this belonging, it seems some long, dirty lie... and I begin to believe that birthplaces are accidents, that everything is an accident. But if you believe that, where do you go? What do you do? What does anything matter?

And underneath it all, there remained an ever-present anger and hurt, the feeling of belonging nowhere that comes to people who belong everywhere. It

I think I was strange to my mother and to my father, a changeling belonging to neither one of them, and although this is of course true of all children, in the end—we are not our parents and they are not us—my father's children would have come to this knowledge with a certain slowness, over years...whereas I was born knowing it, I have always known it, it is a truth stamped all over my face

We felt we had our place in time. What person on the earth doesn't feel this way?

She was never home. Irie was stuck between a rock and a hard place, like Ireland, like Israel, like India.

A clear and unified voice. In that context, this business of being biracial, of being half black and half white, is awkward.

In that huge game of musical chairs, I turned round one day and found I had no place to sit. At a loss, I became a Goth—it was where people who had nowhere else to go ended up.

In a vision, Irie has seen a time, a time not far from now, when roots won't matter any more because they can't because they mustn't because they're too long and they're too tortuous and they're just buried too damn deep. She looks forward to it.

It was nostalgia for an era and a culture that had meant nothing to me in the first place, and perhaps because of this I was, in the eyes of my colleagues, cool, by virtue of not being like them.

Everybody's got their tribe. Whose tribe are you in anyway?

Irie verdrehte die Augen. Manchmal möchte man anders sein. Und manchmal würde man die Haare auf seinem Kopf hergeben, um so zu sein wie alle anderen.

Othering whoever has othered us, in reverse, is no liberation — as cathartic as it may feel. Liberation is liberation: the recognition of somebody in everybody.

When you are not at home in your self, as a child, you don't experience your self as 'natural' or 'inevitable' – as so many other people seem to do – and this, though melancholy at the time, can come with certain distinct advantages.

O dor picioarele È™i trebuie s? se aÈ™eze, dar cafenelele ticsite o sperie, tot ce era pl?cut ziua a devenit amenin??tor noaptea, È™i ea coteÈ™te de pe strada principal? pe o strad? l?turalnic? È™i intr? într-una dintre curÈ›i, trebuie s? g?seasc? un ad?post, ea nu aparÈ›ine acestui loc, e înc?rcat? de jalea trecutului È™i de spaima de viitor, exact ca oraÈ™ul ei de baÈ™tin?.

Lonely people are terrible snobs about one another, I've found. They're afraid that consorting with their own kind will compound their freakishness.

I feel most colored when I am thrown against a sharp white background........Beside the waters of the Hudson I feel my race. Among the thousand white persons, I am a dark rock surged upon, and overswept, but through it all, I remain myself. When covered by the waters, I am; and the ebb but reveals me again. How It Feels to Be Colored Me

Make the attempt if you want to, but you will find that trying to go through life without friendship, is like milking a bear to get cream for your morning coffee. It is a whole lot of trouble, and then not worth much after you get it.

All my skinfolk ain't kinfolk

So when we looked at de picture and everybody got pointed out there wasn't nobody left except a real dark little girl with long hair standing by Eleanor. Dat's where Ah wuz's s'posed to be, but Ah couldn't recognize dat dark chile as me. So ah ast, 'where is me? Ah don't see me.' … 'Aw, aw! Ah'm colored!' Den dey all laughed real hard. But before Ah seen de picture Ah thought Ah wuz just like the rest.

Our lives are so diversified, internal attitudes so varied, appearances and capabilities so different, that there is no possible classification so catholic that it will cover us all, except My people! My people!

My name, is not Cudjo Lewis. It Kossula.

I do not always feel colored. Even now I often achieve the unconscious Zora of Eatonville before the Hegira. I feel most colored when I am thrown against a sharp white background. For instance at Barnard. Beside the waters of the Hudson I feel my race. Among the thousand white persons, I am a dark rock surged upon, and overswept, but through it all, I remain myself. When covered by the waters, I am; and the ebb but reveals me again.

Ah was wid dem white chillun so much till Ah didn't know Ah wuzn't white till Ah was round six years old.