Quotes About Belonging

social connections are often as important as medical treatment in preventing physical, mental, and functional decline.

And I had lots of problems with self-image, as many adopted kids do. We tend to feel unwanted and unworthy no matter how much love our adoptive parents give us.

A dog with two homes is never any good

Les autres gens ont au moins un peu d'ambition ou une petite étincelle d'illusion pour se réchauffer les mains. Moi je n'ai rien. Je voudrais me balader dans le vaste monde. Toujours plus loin. Un beau jour je tomberais peut-être sur un patelin ou sur un être et je pourrais dire: ça y est, je reste ici, je suis chez moi.

Each and every one of these leaders was a Negro citizen of the United States. They had earned the right to guide us, help us, not because their colored forebears helped free us and defend us in the Revolutionary War, in the War of 1812, in the Union Army of Lincoln and Grant, in the First and Second World Wars, in Korea, but because they were part of our whole, part of each of us, with the same stakes and goals.

Any planet is "Earth" to those that live on it.

Any planet is 'Earth' to those that live on it.

I imagined myself in the Jewish Self-Defence League

Even though I grew up as a Sephardic Jew in Brooklyn where we ate Syrian food and went to temple, it was still America.

The fact that I am a writer comes from the experience of being cut away from my roots and living in Venezuela, where I couldn't find a place for myself, for years and years.

The best-adjusted people are the 'psychologically patriotic,' who are glad to be what they are.

Love is being, not belonging. Giving and receiving, not possessing.

Adoption has the dimension of connection — not only to your own tribe, but beyond, widening the scope of what constitutes love, ties and family. It is a larger embrace. By adopting, we stretch past our immediate circles and, by reaching out, find an unexpected sense of belonging with others.

My mom's a Catholic, and my dad's a Jew, and they didn't want anything to do with anything.

our longing is our pledge, and blessed are the homesick, for they shall come home.

The ideal place for me is the one in which it is most natural to live as a foreigner.

Perhaps, for each of them, I also resembled someone who was dead. I had barely arrived at Adelma and I was already one of them, I had gone over to their side, absorbed in that kaleidescope of eyes, wrinkles, grimaces.

An outsider was taking my place, was becoming me, my cage with the starlings would become his, the stereoscope, the real Uhlan helmet hanging from a nail, all my things that I couldn't take with me remained to him; or, rather, it was my relationship with things, places, people, that was becoming his, just as I was about to become him, to take his place among the things and people of his life.

L'estraneità di ciò che non sei più o non possiedi più t'aspetta al varco dei luoghi estranei e non posseduti.

Al llegar a cada nueva ciudad el viajero encuentra un pasado suyo que ya no sabía que tenía: la extrañeza de lo que no eres o no posees más te espera al paso en los lugares extraños y no poseídos.

La ciudad se te aparece como un todo en el que ningún deseo se pierde y del que tú formas parte, y como ella goza de todo lo que tú no gozas, no te queda sino habitar ese deseo y contentarte.

Your relationship with objects is selective, personal; only the things you feel yours become yours: it is a relationship with the physicality of things, not with an intellectual or affective idea that takes the place of seeing them and touching them.

the presence of the others reassured me, created an inhabited zone around me, freed me from the fear of being an alarming exception, which I would have been if the fact of existing had been my fate alone, a kind of exile.

One need only remind oneself of all that we expect from life to see how very strange it is, and to arrive at the conclusion that man has found his way into it by mistake and does not really belong there.