Quotes About Belonging

I think that one person's story is always part of other people's stories.

Houses are very important. Describe your house and I'll tell you who you are. Your world is there. It's what covers you, like a bird's feathers.

But I'm hesitant to introduce myself with this characterization, immediately reducing everything I am to my alcoholism. It's strange that the tendency in this global world is to accentuate identities, picking the one that most marginalizes you—sexuality, race, disability. I'm struck by the way we all rush to join our particular group, emphasizing what makes us different from everyone else, in order to make us all the same.

Mucho de lo suyo pudo desmoronarse, menos las cosas que le dieron identidad.

It's strange that the tendency in this global world is to accentuate identities, picking the one that most marginalizes you—sexuality, race, disability. I'm struck by the way we all rush to join our particular group, emphasizing what makes us different from everyone else, in order to make us all the same.

Es raro que la tendencia en el mundo global sea la de acentuar identidades, eligiendo la que más te margina —identidad gay, de raza, de discapacitado—. Me impresiona cómo corremos todos a adherirnos a nuestro grupo, haciendo hincapié en lo que más nos diferencia de los demás. Para hacernos iguales.

Do as Socrates did, never replying to the question of where he was from with, 'I am Athenian,' or 'I am from Corinth,' but always, 'I am a citizen of the world.'

Around here, I'm pretty sure 'us' means Texans, and 'them' means the other seven billion on the planet.

Belongs to a guy named Joseph Stiglitz.

I spent so much of my life on the outside that I began to doubt that I would ever truly be in with any one people, any one place, and one tribe. But Harlem is big enough, diverse enough, scrappy enough, old enough, and new enough to encompass all that I am and all that I hope to be. After all that traveling, I am, at last, home.

The first thought was this: that he was a foolish old man, because all his life he'd been looking for something and it was only when Anna joined him in the bar that evening that he realized that home is not something you find outside yourself; home is something you carry inside you, and it's made from the memories of the people you love, and the people who have loved you.

All he felt was that same feeling he'd always had, that he was looking for something, whose name he didn't even know, and yet now, in the dark of the night and with his father had gone to wherever his mother had gone before, with Anna sitting beside him, he suddenly knew its name. Home.

Home is not something you find outside yourself; home is something you carry inside you, and it's made of memories of the people you love, and the people who have loved you.

What is more agreeable than one's home?

We must conceive of this whole universe as one commonwealth of which both gods and men are members.

I am a Roman citizen.

There is no place more delightful than home.

Ik denk dat mama zich een gast heeft gevoeld in het leven. Ze deed altijd alsof het haar niets aanging, het leven, alsof het niet van haar was. Alsof ze er toevallig in terecht was gekomen, zoals je een huis binnen kan lopen wanneer je je in het adres hebt vergist, en dan per ongeluk in dat huis blijft hangen. Buiten stroomt het van de regen en je hebt geen paraplu bij je.

She finally said: 'I want to provide you with the opportunity to be free to make a choice of belonging with someone, but never to someone else'.

We are hungry, and we don't know for what. We want something, but we can't name it. The parish is taking good care of us, nourishing us with word and sacrament, just as the hospital made sure that Mrs. G was fed, nursed, and medicated. But we want something else, something more: we want to be touched, we want to be known as children of God.

the words from Aelred: "Here we are, you and I, and I hope a third, Christ, is in our midst.

We could have been anything we wanted, yet our free-floating individualism has taken us far from community, contribution or connection, the very things that truly give life meaning and purpose.

So we troop out to the coast, and every time we meet someone from back home we fall on their necks and weep. Stupid, eh? Neither of them think it is stupid. You Can't Go Home Again, said Thomas Wolfe. Morag wonders now if it may be the reverse which is true. You have to go home again, in some way or other.

One of the oldest human needs is having someone to wonder where you are when you don't come home at night.