Quotes About Belonging

The boys are caught between a private conversation among themselves, a world only they can understand, and their awareness of the artist, the adult observer looking and listening. They remind me of us, of me and my fellow patients, the garments of the adult world not quite fitting us, the jumbled machinery of the day-to-day not quite belonging to us, asked to give an account of ourselves and unsure quite what to say.

In this totally dark world, you can't live unless you're needed by someone.

The individual is a cell in the social superorganism. When he feels he is no longer necessary to the larger group, he, too, begins to wither away. As

What happens to a wanderer?" Moses asked Neph. "Does he ever come home?" And Neph answered ruefully that wanderers were those who sought their home – not those who left it. The cryptic intent was not lost on Moses, and when Neph asked him how he felt, he replied, "I am a stranger here.

In my experience people who can't stop making jokes about their identity aren't easy with it. The man of the world accepts who he is and the influences which have made him, and then gets on with living in the world.

Look at the Sad Lonely People Who Didn't Join a Book Group,

There is a dialectic between common humanity and particular ways of being human.

I bet he's hightailed it into Canada. Somewhere into Canada." "Let me put it this way. Basically, there's Canada and there's the United States of America, and Orkney, since he was a boy, never had one spark of interest in going to the latter.

I've never thought of the third place just as a physical environment. For me, the third place has always been a feeling. An emotion. An aspiration that all people can come together and be uplifted as a result of a sense of belonging. This is the cornerstone of our business, yes, but "belonging" is also a basic human right, which should be afforded all members of a society.

For me, the idea of a "third place" is not just something that exists between four walls. It is a mind-set. A way to exist in the world. That's why I set out to build a profitable business that also expressed a core ethos: that people of all kinds can come together and uplift one another.

The quiet, even the danger, of the woods provided my rather lonely spirit with a sense of belonging that did not depend on human relationships.

But you cant shut everyone out. I mean you have to have someone to love. . .someone to hold on to. . . someone--

All the hipsters with cars, clothes, and money had rejected the family relationship that I valued so highly.

We need not worship the nation to which we belong.

Thoughts are apples on the tree, Not meant for anyone in particular, But they end up belonging To the one who takes them.

We're all outsiders in a way. We're all alone and can become very lonely.

I don't think I'll ever escape the fact that I don't belong anywhere in particular. I've often dreamed about going back to Nigeria, but that's a very romantic notion. It's a hideous country to go to in reality.

Pakistan's young median age today means that an overwhelming majority of its current inhabitants were born in a country called Pakistan and, therefore, do not need an explanation other than their birth to be its citizens.

Anyway, you can't leave her like that. You can't do that to the woman. She doesn't deserve it; nobody does. You don't belong to her and she doesn't belong to you, but you're both part of each other; if she got up and left now and walked away and you never saw each other again for the rest of your lives, and you lived an ordinary waking life for another fifty years, even so on your deathbed you would still know she was part of you.

Choosing the way of Christ not only means identifying with Christ, however; 'it also means identifying with the stubborn, recalcitrant, and frequently offensive flock that he calls his own. . . .Yet as flawed as the people of God are, if the Lord is to be our God then his people must be our people too.

Exile. It is not simply being homeless. Rather, it is knowing that you do have a home, but that your home has been taken over by enemies. Exile. It is not being without roots. On the contrary, it is having deep roots which have now been plucked up, and there you are, with roots dangling, writhing in pain, exposed to a cold and jeering world, longing to be restored to native and nurturing soil. Exile is knowing precisely where you belong, but knowing that you can't go back, not yet.

Even though I decided to leave Japan, I knew that Japan would never leave me. I arrived in Tokyo when I was still unformed, callow and eager for experience. I can only hope that this eagerness will never be entirely dissipated. To be fully formed is to be dead. But Japan shaped me when the plaster was still wet.

That the notion of 'national community' gained its definition by those it excluded from it...

I'm not a religious person, and I'm not too interested in being a part of a religion, but I do like having some sort of communal gathering, and having some sense of peoples.