Best 306 quotes in «belonging quotes» category

I had come alive here...this was my home, and though one day it would all trickle through my fingers like so much red dust, for as long as childhood lasted it was a heaven fitted exactly to me. A place I knew by heart. The one place in the world I'd been made for.

I hate feeling like I don't belong.

I have an idea that some men are born out of their due place. Accident has cast them amid certain surroundings, but they have always a nostalgia for a home they know not. They are strangers in their birthplace, and the leafy lanes they have known from childhood or the populous streets in which they have played, remain but a place of passage. They may spend their whole lives aliens among their kindred and remain aloof among the only scenes they have ever known. Perhaps it is this sense of strangeness that sends men far and wide in the search for something permanent, to which they may attach themselves. Perhaps some deep-rooted atavism urges the wanderer back to lands which his ancestors left in the dim beginnings of history.

I have no definable history before I was abandoned and taken in by the orphanage in Hong Kong. I truly am a blank sheet. I have been disconnected from my ancestors. I don't know who they are, where they came from or whether any of their line still exists. The ancestral umbilical cord that would have connected me to my past and linked me to my future, was permanently severed. It cannot be reattached

I have sometimes sacrificed freedom in order to belong, but more often I have given up all hope of belonging.

I know what it's like not to have friends. People need friends. Life's not much fun without them.

I lean back and tilt my head so all I see are the clouds in the sky. I'm looking back inside my head with my eyes wide open. I still don't know where I'm going; I decided I'm not crazy or alien. It's just that I'm more like one of those kids they find in remote jungles or forests []. A wolf child. And they've dragged me into this fucking schizo-culture, snarling and spitting and walking around on curled knuckles.

I learned the joke at the core of American self-improvement: knowledge was so much junk to be processed one way or another at great universities. The real treasure the great universities offered was a lifelong membership in a respected artificial extended family.

Imagine the feeling of relief that would flood our whole being if we knew that when we were in the grip of sorrow or illness, our village would respond to our need. This would not be out of pity, but out of a realization that every one of us will take our turn at being ill, and we will need one another. The indigenous thought is when one of us is ill, all of us are ill. Taking this thought a little further, we see that healing is a matter, in great part, of having our, connections to the community and the cosmos restored. This truth has been acknowledged in many studies. Our immune response is strengthened when we feel our connection with community. By regularly renewing the bonds of belonging, we support our ability to remain healthy and whole.

I love, so I belong.

I made my way here alone for a long while. It took some time to find my place. It took more time to become somebody worth protecting.

In every city you go, you will come across men of different kinds and you are the one to choose where your to belong.

I never said it was easy to find your place in this world, but I’m coming to the conclusion that if you seek to please others, you will forever be changing because you will never be yourself, only fragments of someone you could be. You need to belong to yourself, and let others belong to themselves too. You need to be free and detached from things and your surroundings. You need to build your home in your own simple existence, not in friends, lovers, your career or material belongings, because these are things you will lose one day. That’s the natural order of this world. This is called the practice of detachment.

Never, never make the mistake of thinking you’re the only alien on the planet. But that’s exactly the way I did feel – different desks, different schedule, halls and halls and halls that all looked the same to me. Everybody else knew their way around. I might as well have been a million light years from home. And lost.

Intimacy transcends the physical. It is a feeling of closeness that isn’t about proximity, but of belonging. It is a beautiful emotional space in which two become one.

I no longer felt I could try to belong with these people.

In the clay, there is a tiger and the problem is neither in the question nor is in the text, it is in interpretation. You can listen or read the answer in folk literature and Sufi music. To belong is to have a grammar and in grammar there are exceptions. You can never belong fully except to the gravity of the universe. We belong anyways.

Invisibility can be good as a superpower. But psychiatry reveals people don't like it very much.

I rest in ease, knowing there are others out there, whispering themselves to sleep, just like me.

It's not how long you live somewhere that makes it home. Home is a feeling here, (she tapped on the chest). That you belong somewhere and somewhere belongs to you. But i will tell you a secret. Some people don't feel they belong anywhere. No matter where they are, they are always unhappy. They go from place to place trying to find peace. And usually they find themselves back where they started.

Sever all ties. The words in his mouth like ash. It was not the coldness of the words that horrified him, their utter opposition to anything human, but rather his own affinity for them, the way he was drawn to this vision of solitude with a feeling almost of nostalgia. He had the kind of loneliness that battles everything, that makes a person strange forever.

I still know this place and its people to the marrow of their bones, to their soft, unguarded core, which had once sustained my own life, yet I am as much of an outsider here as I am on the other side of the world, in my adopted country. The truth is that there is no bridge between the two lives - the past and the present - that would conveniently span the memory of loss and the promise of an onward search. There is only a wound, the inner divide of exile. A daughter of an anatomy professor, I should have known that sliced hearts do not become whole, that split souls do not mend. Along with all those who left their countries for other shores, I belong in neither land.

It doesn't matter if the group is a church or a gang or a sewing circle or masculinity itself, asking members to dislike, disown, or distance themselves from another group of people as a condition of 'belonging' is always about control and power. I think we have to question the intentions of any group that insists on disdain toward other people as a membership requirement. It may be disguised as belonging, but real belonging doesn't necessitate disdain.

It doesn’t matter where you’re at, when you’re with people you love, you’re where you belong.

[I]t doesn’t matter whom you love or where you move from or to, you always take yourself with you. If you don’t know who you are, or if you’ve forgotten or misplaced her, then you’ll always feel as if you don’t belong. Anywhere. (xiii)

It's never too late to come home," he said, and pulled me gently, insistently toward him."All you have to do...is stop moving away.

It’s really pathetic; the way you strive to belong ; to other people , places and perspectives that have nothing to do with who you are

I still feel at home in Baltimore in a way I will never feel anywhere else – part of the definition of home being a place you don’t belong anymore.

I think what hurts the most is that I just really want to belong. I want to stand inside the circle of other people and be noticed for the right things, but it seems like the wrong things are always bigger. And all the advie I've ever read --smile more, be yourself, dream big, stay positive--seems to have some darker side that's never mentioned.

It is a delicate balance between being present and yet keeping your eyes on the prize. The objective is not to dwell in the future, but to just make sure you visit it with the regularity required to keep you engaged with what you’re doing and where you’re going.

It is possible to adore those newly come into your world, to envision, no matter how late in the day, a happily entwined future with those who have not been part of your past.

It is "the love of Christ" which "constraineth us" "to live not unto ourselves, but unto Him that died for us, and rose again.

It's hard to put into words what sometimes you pick up in the ether, the quiet, cruel nuances of not belonging- the subtle cues that tell you to not risk anything, to find your people and just stay put.

It's like the song of a family where everything's always all right, it's a song of belonging that makes you belong just by hearing it, it's a song that'll always take care of you and never leave you. If you have a heart, it breaks, if you have a heart that's broken, it fixes.

It sounds as if you are trapped in a cycle of thinking about yourself and how you don't belong in the world.

It’s well known that he who returns never left

It was a place you could make into a home if your home hadn’t worked out.

I've been dropped off in a place I do not belong anymore. Certainly not here with Mother and Daddy,...

I used to be a wanderess without roots – discontent and bereft of belonging and then he took me to The Last Best Place where I was touched and warmed through. Never before have I felt the breath-taking spirit of the frontier as distinctly as I do here and never before have I felt so at home where all things magnificent are made more so by inspired calm of earthy humility.

...I've always parented with the belief that love and belonging are the ground zero of wholehearted parenting. If they know they are loved and lovable, if they know how to love, and if they know that no matter what, they belong at home, everything else will work out. However, as they got older and peer groups became more important, it was easier that I imagined to slip back into subtly teaching them how to fit in or do whatever it takes to find a crew... I have to stay constantly mindful to practice what I believe...

I've always tried to make a home for myself, but I have not felt at home in myself. I've worked hard at being the hero of my own life. But every time I checked the register of displaced persons, I was still on it. I didn't know how to belong. Longing? Yes. Belonging? No.

I've never been somewhere I belonged, but there are places where I think I could be happy. Like San Francisco. Well, do art museums count? Because I feel like I belong in them.

I want to belong. Belonging makes things okay, and I want to be okay. I just want to be okay.

I was called an 'ethnic traitor' and kicked in the pit of the stomach, then called a 'sellout' and stuck across the face again. I really couldn't understand what the last one meant. I knew the literal meaning of the word, of course, but I just couldn't bring myself to think that I was a sellout. I could sense the incongruity of the label but didn't have words to express it. Then someone who was able to say exactly what I was feeling appeared, like a superhero. A voice rose up from the back of the classroom. "We've never belonged to a country we could sell out

Love is God of All.

I went to my dresser, turned the lamp off, and crawled into bed. I was taking a chance but I couldn't help slipping in behind Tweet and draping my arm around her waist. She placed her hand on top of mine and squeezed it slightly. I buried my nose in her dark hair, breathing in the scent of raspberry and vanilla. This was were we belonged.

Looking out over the lake, I felt enveloped in the most peaceful, loving utopia.

Love is not leaning on each other, adjusting to fit a different size. Love is simply two hands reached out in the darkness, saying; I’ll be your light, if you’ll be mine.

Maybe I live in the gates that lead to outbound international flights. Maybe that is home. And do I feel more comfortable at the departures or at the arrivals?

Maybe 'perfect' was just another word for belonging. For feeling like yourself. It didn't mean things weren't hard. It just meant they were right.