Quotes About Belonging

I became something I had no name for in solitude and only later discovered the word for what I was and realized there were others like me.

Although I was the one cast out alone onto a transcontinental bus, home was running away from me

This is our climate. We have grown up in this air, this light, and we grasp it on our skin, where it grasps us. We know this earth, this grass, this polished red stone with the soles of our feet. We will never be ourselves anywhere else. Happier, perhaps, healthier, less burdened, more secure. But we will never be closer to who we are than this.

I'd been taught not to like myself,because the people around me didn't, for whatever reason like me.

Your ancestral homeland is Queens, fuckface.

Soms gaan de gedachten zo razendsnel dat ik ze bijna niet meer kan denken, ze spoelen door mij heen en dan moet ik huilen. En dan opeens staat alles weer stil, verstard als op een toverlantarenplaatje en lijkt niets ooit meer van zijn plaats te kunnen komen en moet je weer gaan lopen om je omgeving op gang te krijgen. Zomaar lopen omdat je anders niet meer kunt voelen dat je ergens thuishoort, dat er tijd verstrijkt.

Cause all these people livin are brothers and sisters and cousins. All these beautiful different colors! We! … We the human Family. God said so! FAMILY!

In many ways, home is an image for the power of stories. With both, we need to live in them if they are to take hold, and we need to stand back from them if we are to understand their power

Nobody's ever asked me to a party before, as a friend. Is that why you dyed your eyebrow, for the party? Should I do mine too?

Whether you come back by page or by the big screen, Hogwarts will always be there to welcome you home.

Paradise was always over there, a day's sail away. But it's a funny thing, escapism. You can go far and wide and you can keep moving on and on through places and years, but you never escape your own life. I, finally, knew where my life belonged. Home.

Aunque me temo que nos sentimos atraídos por aquello que nos abandona, y por lo que parece más probable que vaya a abandonarnos, finalmente creo que nos define lo que nos acoge.

Sources of collective effervescence—ceremonies, musical performances, sports, dances, rituals within churches—shift the rhythms of our bodies to a shared biological rhythm, breaking down that most basic barrier between self and other, the idea that we are physically separated by the boundaries of our skin.

Feeling part of something much larger than the self is music to our ears. This transformation of the self brought about by awe is a powerful antidote to the isolation and loneliness that is epidemic today.

This wish to wander, to meet different kinds of people, is there something arrogant about it, something a little frivolous and perverse? Where will she go to make a home for herself when every home seems too sunk in its roots, too predictable

Home is where you feel at home and are treated well.

There's no place like home. No place safer. No place scarier.

I'm not an American, but I have this weird connection to America in different ways through my dad living here for five years, my godfather being an American who I'm very close to.

showed him strangenesses in his own nature that partly alarmed him, but partly pleased him too – because they confirmed what he hoped about himself: that he did not belong, not quite, in the deadly properness around him. No, there was a whole aspect of his character that was an unmentioned half-brother to his civilised side: drunk and disorderly and primitive, closer to the woods than the city.

She herself has been taken by surprise at how much it matters to her, this buried question from long ago. She has thought of Salome many times over the years, of course she has. Whenever her mind has strayed in the direction of home, or no, that is, the farm, not her home any more, whenever her mind strays to the farm there lots of stones to turn over, and Salome is one of them. But that particular stone never seems to find a resting place, no matter how often it's turned.

My father's tongue, forever foreign to me.

The Indians were inside their bodies, he decided, in a way that the British were not. His own flesh impeded his spirit.

But the part of ourselves we hate the most is our longing to be wanted and enjoyed.

In every story, in every life, there are moments of death that take away our name and rename us as strangers, orphans or widows. At the moment of being unnamed, we are thrown into our story. We lose the name Friend and are given the name Reject.