Quotes About Belonging

Having someone wonder where you are when you don't come home at night is a very old human need.

I still think of myself as a broken place, a drifting isle with no home. —Quebrado

Seventh grade. Eleven years old. A bookworm-misfit with long black braids, childish white socks, pointy pink glasses, and no courage for flirting. It's doesn't take long to learn that I'm ridiculous.

All women are misfits. We do not fit into this world without amputations.

For westerners, the tattoo has always been a metaphor of difference.

Being an Other, in America, teaches you to imagine what can't imagine you.

What about the world do you most love? The fact that I'm not here by myself. -from interview by Jeff Vandermeer in Clarkesworld magazine

Home is home, no? - whatever layabouts you live with, whatever tempers and timidities. I was glad to glimpse them, and glad to go to my own bed among them, with the right smell and the right hollows holding me . . .

He was fine, and foreign, and he did not belong here. I held him close, not crushing, not waking him, letting him sleep, and I suffered. I had never felt such feelings before. I would do anything for him; I would do anything. Anything that was asked of me, that would increase his happiness or health, I would do, and willingly. So I told myself, rocking him, the winter sky white at the window.

Ginger is now called Jack, and utterly adored in a home of his very own. Blending

The woman is the home. That's where she used to be, and that's where she still is. You might ask me, What if a man tries to be part of the home -- will the woman let him? I answer yes. Because then he becomes one of the children.

The woman is the home. That's where she used to be, and that's where she still is. You might ask me, What if a man tries to be part of the home -- will the woman let him? I answer yes. Because the he becomes one of the children.

Becoming American meant rejecting one of the two worlds. It meant trying to hide the grease stains saturating the paper in which your school lunch of a fried potato and egg sandwich on crusty bread was wrapped, while the rest of your classmates ate ham on white bread with mayonnaise.

Becoming American meant hearing slurs that now defined you and your people: dago, wop, guinea, spaghetti bender.

I love where I'm from. I don't live there because of the circumstances, but all my family is there. It's what's inside, it's not what's outside that determines the culture and the feeling.

En realidad le importaba poco integrarse: el concepto de grupo le parecía más bien de "rebaño". Miraba a sus compañeros de facultad o de residencia y sentía que eran todos iguales. Bueno, quizá por grupos, pero iguales. De un solo vistazo podías saber si leían o no y qué, qué música escuchaban y hasta el tipo de chico o chica con que les gustaría salir. A Laura aquello le parecía aburrido. ¿Qué interés podría tener la gente en parecerse?

Was it her imagination, or did everyone in town have roots that went back to the beginning of time, complete with ancestral home and pedigree? Was one of those pedigrees hers? Were some of her roots here in this bayside town? Jamie

I had spent my whole life feeling homesick. The only difference between the two of us was that I didn't know what or where home was.

People are a chain of souls, sometimes so entangled, that they forget who, where they have to go, to be home.

He was a man who did not properly exist in any single world, but he seemed to have found a place between them, and that, more than his past, was who he was.

There are people who cannot risk loneliness with the experience. They always have to be in a flock and have human contact.

Never make your home in a place. Make a home for yourself inside your own head. You'll find what you need to furnish it—memory, friends you can trust, love of learning, and other such things. That way it will go with you wherever you journey. —Tad Williams

I say I'm Metis like it's an apology and he says, 'mmh,' like he forgives me like he's got a big heart and mine's pumping diluted blood

Conformity begins the moment you ignore how you feel for acceptance.