Quotes About Belonging

Everyone else has gone away. And now coming back home isn't really coming back home at all.

Thing about white people," Jeremiah's father tells him, "they know what everybody else is, but they don't know they're white" - "Maybe some know it" His father eyed him and smiled "When they walk into a party and everyone's black, they know it. Or when they get caught in Harlem after nightfall, they know it. But otherwise...

And as we stood half circle in the bright school yard, we saw the lost and beautiful and hungry in each of us. We saw home.

we looked, we saw the people trying to dream themselves out. As though there was someplace other than this place. As though there was another Brooklyn.

What did it sound like...having someone call your name across a crowded school yard? How did it feel to turn to the sound of your name, to see some smiling face or waving hand and know it was for you and you alone?" —Staggerlee

Chapter 1 JEREMIAH WAS BLACK. HE COULD FEEL IT. THE WAY THE sun pressed down hard and hot on his skin in the summer. Sometimes it felt like he sweated black beads of oil. He felt warm inside his skin, protected. And in Fort Greene, Brooklyn—where everyone seemed to be some shade of black-he felt good walking through the neighborhood. But one step outside. Just one step and somehow the weight of his skin seemed to change. It got heavier. Light-skinned

Before, you used to hear the word immigration and it sounded like everything you ever believed in. It sounded like feliz cumpleaños and merry Christmas and welcome home . But now you hear it and you get scared because it sounds like a word that makes you want to disappear. It sounds like someone getting stolen away from you.

I know in my heart , Tiago whispered, the language we like to speak is music and poetry and even cold, sweet piraguas on hot, hot summer days. But it feels like this place wants to break my heart. It feels like every day it tries to make my mom feel tinier and tinier, like the size of Perrito's head in my hands.

And it's not even strange that it feels the way it's always felt like the place we belong to. Like home.

We knew Down South. Everyone had one. Jamaica, Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico.

Everyone else has gone away. And now coming back home isn't really coming back home at all.

She said she'd chosen Santa Cruz because when se walked around the campus, she blended somehow, no one asking if she was part Negro, no one accusing her of passing for white.

You the first in your tribe to go to college? Iris shook her head. It was a question about class. She knew that now. It was the what-are-you question. The where and what and who do you come from.

Jacqueline Woodson

the South is so heavy in her mouth my eyes fill up with the missing of everything and everyone I've ever known.

we looked, we saw the people trying to dream themselves out. As though there was someplace other than this place. As though there was another Brooklyn. August

Don't even know they're in the presence of royalty when they ask, How come you all sit together? without checking their own all-white tables.

I knew I was lost inside the world, watching it and trying to understand why too often I felt like I was standing just beyond the frame - of everything.

Once I asked Miah if he ever forgot he was black. No. I never forget, he said. But sometimes it doesn't matter-like I just am. Then he asked me if I ever forgot I was white. Sometimes, I said. And when you're forgetting, what color are you? No color. Then Miah looked away from me and said, We're different that way.

I speak only one language, and it is not my own.

Man finds his home in a point situated in the Other beyond the image of which we are made and this place represents the absence where we are.

Pourquoi donne-t-on? Pour se relier, pour rompre la solitude et faire partie de la chaîne à nouveau, pour se brancher sur la vie, pour faire circuler les choses dans un système vivant, pour sentir qu'on fait partie de quelque chose de plus vaste et notamment de l'humanité chaque fois on fait un don à un inconnu.

I only now understand why it is that people lie about their past, why they say they are one thing other than the thing they really are, why they invent a self that bears no resemblance to who they really are, why anyone would want to feel as if he or she belongs to nothing, comes from no one, just fell out of the sky, whole.

I never wanted to live in that place again, but if for some reason I was forced to live there again, I would never accept the harsh judgments made against me by people whose only power to do so was that they had known me from the moment I was born.