Quotes About Belonging

Still, though no one is an island, most are peninsulas. Our lives wouldn't make sense without personal memories pinned like butterflies against the velvet backdrop of social history.

The farther afield you go, the more you are going home ... as if the gods put us down with a certain arbitrary glee in the wrong place and what we seek is who we had really ought to be.

Everybody has a story. It's like families. You might not know who they are, might have lost them, but they exist all the same. You might drift apart or you might turn your back on them, but you can't say you haven't got them.

Do you mean to tell me, Aurelius, that you are a foundling?" "Yes. That is the word for what I am. A foundling.

We have problems all over the world today, because men cease to be individuals. We like to identify with everything other than ourselves. We like to identify with groups, races, religions, you hear it every day. 'I'm Italian! I'm German! I'm Negro! I'm Jewish!' So what? Do you realize that when you identify with anything other than yourself, first as an individual, you have a cheap way out a lot of your own shortcomings?

I am not nostalgic. Belonging does not interest me. I had once thought that it did. Until I examined the underpinnings. One is mislead when one looks at the sails and majesty of tall ships instead of their cargo.

They were born in the city from people born elsewhere.

Cities collect people, stray and lost and deliberate arrivants.

I am not nostalgic for a country which doesn't yet exist on a map." [...] I am not nostalgic. Belonging does not interest me. I had once thought that it did. Until I examined the underpinnings. One is mislead when on looks at the sails and majesty of tall ships instead of their cargo.

You come to this, here's the marrow of it, not moving, not standing, it's too much to hold up, what I really want to say is, I don't want no fucking country, here or there and all the way back, I don't like it, none of it, easy as that. I'm giving up on land to light on, and why not, I can't perfect my own shadow, my violent sorrow, my individual wrists

And suddenly all the puppies were her puppies; she was their mother—just as Pongo had felt he was their father.

slightly older men and women, they had professions and soft slacks with knife pleats and a certain ease of bearing and belonging, the package of attitudes and values known as lifestyle

A surface separates inside from out and belongs no less to one than the other.

I want to put your voice back inside your body, where it belongs.

We are not native. We have no generations of Americans behind us. We have roots elsewhere. We are looking in from the outside. To me, that seems to be perfectly natural.

How do we stand with others when the things that separate us are imposed at birth, when the separation haunts us and follows us day and night?

Exile in a real place, a place of few bodies and many stones, is just an extension (a packaging) of the other exile, the state of being separated from whatever is left of the center of one's own history

They seemed to shine together at the center of things. They made things theirs. A certain bench in the park, near the chess players, ordinary things, not unusual in any way.

Murray says it is possible to be homesick for a place even when you are there.

He was half-white and half-Korean, but when asked about his ethnicity, he always said Hawaiian, a declaration of racial neutrality that, more often than not, let him avoid further inquest.

If you tell someone you love him, and that person says 'Well, I don't love you, is that a reason for you to suffer? Just because someone rejects you doesn't mean you have to reject yourself. If one person doesn't love you, someone else will love you. There is always someone else. And it's better to be with someone who wants to be with you than to be with someone who has to be with you.

the truth is that most people buy a home because it uniquely reflects their personality and their values.

If I have a hope, it's that God sat over the dark nothing and wrote you and me, specifically, into the story, and put us in with the sunset and the rainstorm as though to say, enjoy your place in my story. The beauty of it means you matter, and you can create within it even as I have created you.

THINGS JESUS NEVER SAID: You should come with me to church.