100 Quotes About Belonging

Owning our story can be hard but not nearly as difficult as spending our lives running from it. Embracing our vulnerabilities is risky but not nearly as dangerous as giving up on love and belonging and joy–the experiences that make us the most vulnerable. Only when we are brave enough to explore the darkness will we discover the infinite power of our light. Unknown

She didn't belong anywhere and she never really belonged to anyone. And everyone else belonged somewhere and to someone. People thought she was too wonderful. But she only wanted to belong to someone. People always thought she was too wonderful to belong to them or that something too wonderful would hurt too much to lose. And that's why she liked him-- because he just thought she was crazy. C. Joybell C.

They must live outside class, without relations or money; they must work and stick to each other till death. But England belonged to them. That, besides companionship, was their reward. Her air and sky were theirs, not the timorous millions' who own stuffy little boxes, but never their own souls. E.m. Forster

Later, you told me what your mother had said. How your father, the farmer, rose up slowly. You told me how your mother wailed on the other end of the phone, grieving her loss and complaining about the basketball of a goitre perched on her shoulder. She told you, your father walked onto the veranda and saw a chook floating ten feet above the ground. The chook didn’t flap a feather and just sat there brooding, swaying in the breeze. Jon Gresham

It was a great mistake, my being born a man, I would have been much more successful as a seagull or a fish. As it is, I will always be a stranger who never feels at home, who does not really want and is not really wanted, who can never belong, who must be a little in love with death! Eugene ONeill

Everything might scatter. You might be right. I suppose it's something we can't easily get away from. People need to feel they belong. To a nation, to a race. Otherwise, who knows what might happen? This civilisation of ours, perhaps it'll just collapse. And everything scatter, as you put it. Kazuo Ishiguro

To be able to open the heart again after betrayal, injury, or loss is a precious act. It requires both courage and compassion. It requires a new movement to emerge from the depths of grief. Forgiveness is one of the most certain paths to restoration, and it is also one of the most difficult. However, it is an attempt to return to wholeness, once again, by letting go and freeing myself from the tight clutch and heavy burden of caution, anger, resentment, and the desire for revenge and punishment. In forgiving others, I free myself towards belonging and wholeness, be it with the person I am forgiving, or with myself. Sharon Weil

...I have big dreams, too. I used to think that made me different and strange. But when I came here and found all these books, I realized there are places in the world where I belong, even if I haven't found them yet. Walt Disney Company

As Isabel acted out her date, both of them laughing, I stayed in the kitchen, out of sight, and pretended she was telling me, too. And that, for once, I was part of this hidden language of laughter and silliness and girls that was, somehow, friendship. Sarah Dessen

She was neither widow nor mother: she only yearned for the dignity of a woman who had once belonged, somewhere, to somebody. She had belonged to no one, for she had never wanted chick nor child. Her idea of home had been any side-alley entrance and a pint of tinted gin. All she had ever striven for was small change left lying by strangers on North Clark Street bars; and any man's bottle at all. Nelson Algren

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. Charlotte Eriksson

We should have realized it sooner, at least my father should have, that there was no coming back. Not in September when the riots died down, not in October when the subcontinent still lay in shock, not even in November as he had hoped and promised us. Lahore was now lost forever Aanchal Malhotra

Society, as we have constituted it, will have no place for me, has none to offer; but Nature, whose sweet rains fall on unjust and just alike, will have clefts in the rocks where I may hide, and secret valleys in whose silence I may weep undisturbed. She will hang the night with stars so that I may walk abroad in the darkness without stumbling, and send the wind over my footprints so that none may track me to my hurt: she will cleanse me in great waters, and with bitter herbs make me whole. Oscar Wilde

The river of my village doesn’t make you think about anything. When you’re at its bank you’re only at its bank. Alberto Caeiro

The voice so filled with nostalgia that you could almost see the memories floating through the blue smoke, memories not only of music and joy and youth, but perhaps, of dreams. They listened to the music, each hearing it in his own way, feeling relaxed and a part of the music, a part of each other, and almost a part of the world. Hubert Selby Jr.

HEREIt’s-Can I say? 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. Patrick Ness

Tru, this is your home. You are my blood kin, my second cousin thrice removed. But blood kin's not the most important kin. Do you know what is?" "No, sir." "Love kin. And that comes from the heart. That's why this is your home. G. Neri

I been with strangers all day and they treated me like family. I come in here to family and you treat me like a stranger. August Wilson

How shall I ever learn who I am when there is so much of me that belongs to someone else? Madeline Claire Franklin

Mother was anchor. Mother was comfort. Mother was home. A girl who lost her mother was suddenly a tiny boat on an angry ocean. Some boats eventually floated ashore. And some boats, like me, seemed to float farther and farther from land. Ruta Sepetys

By remaining constrained in one's environment or country or family, one has little chance of being other than the original prescription. By leaving, one gains a perspective, a distance of both space and time, which is essential for writing about family or home, in any case. Rabih Alameddine

Our home is a belonging place. Seth Adam Smith

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. Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

No one belongs when they are new to this world. All children are Changelings. Catherynne M. Valente

That evening, in her apartment, still in Warsaw, Ana takes down a book from her shelf — a rather thick, ordinary paperback. It looks old, because it's worn out and somehow shabby. But it's not ordinary. I can tell by the way she handles it so carefully, like something unique. 'This is the book I told you about, ' she says, holding out the Anthology of Feminist Texts, a collection of early American feminist essays, 'the only feminist book translated into the Polish language, ' the only such book to turn to when you are sick and tired of reading about man-eater/man-killer feminists from the West, I think, looking at it, imagining how many women have read this one copy. 'Sometimes I feel like I live on Jupiter, among Jupiterians, and then one day, quite by chance, I discover that I belong to another species. And I discover it in this book. Isn't that wonderful. Unknown

I wonder whether there is such a thing as a sense of individuality. Is it all a facade, covering a deep need to belong? Are we simply pack animals desperately trying to pretend we are not? Rabih Alameddine

The sea is intriguing and exciting. It always reinforces in me a sense of belonging. The waves bring with them a strange kind of peace and calm. The sea has been a silent spectator to many major incidents in my life. The many outings with friends and family; the long walks on the shore with dad, my hero and philosopher; the moments spent with my love, the memories are endless. Jagdish Joghee

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

And we kissed again. It was a warm, indescribably lovely feeling. But it was more than just physical. It was a dialogue between two young people with high ideals and a Big Plan. It was about belonging, secrets, partnership, commitment. Jasper Fforde

That is part of the beauty of all literature. You discover that your longings are universal longings, that you're not lonely and isolated from anyone. You belong. F. Scott Fitzgerald

Some journeys take you farther from where you come from, but closer to where you belong. Ron Franscell

Life in all its brevity deserved to be lived, for the right reasons. Belonging Places. M.R. Weston

Learning and knowing something is cool, but superb knowledge comes when you leave your books and become the inner world's friend. Michael Bassey Johnson

Our culture values independence and isolation far too much, it seems to me--we have a hard time making ourselves part of things, of making ourselves responsible to others, and trusting others to be there for us. Sure, there's pain involved if we get hurt, but there's far more pain in isolation. I love community because God gave us other people to live with, not to pull away from, and I learn so much from others that I can't imagine my life without the learning I've gained from getting to know other people. Tom Walsh

Zazen is better than a home. Zazen is a home that you can't ever lose. Ruth Ozeki

Their tongues met, starving, two years without this delicious meal. They kissed and kissed and kissed. The joining of their mouths was more intense than that night on the ferry. This was a kiss of reunion. Of forgiveness. Of coming home. Lori Wilde

...not to look back or feel sad about things, that home is wherever I am. Donna Tartt

My idea of "goodness" had to do with belonging in a small yet reciprocal way to something huge and beautiful beyond my understanding. Carrie Saxifrage

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

I belong therefore I exist. Debasish Mridha

I love, so I belong. Debasish Mridha

Those who don't belong to any specific place can't, in fact, return anywhere. Jhumpa Lahiri

Shrinking in a corner, pressed into the wall;do they know I'm present, am I here at all? Is there a written rule book, that tells you how to be–all the right things to talk about–that everyone has but me? Slowly I am withering–a flowered deprived of sun;longing to belong to–somewhere or someone. Lang Leav

But most of those to whom Ender's Game feels most important are those who, like me, feel themselves to be perpetually outside their most beloved communities, never able to come inside and feel confident of belonging. Orson Scott Card

I could tell he was just as scared to love as I, But we still both carelessly climbed into eachothers arms and before we knew it, love had found us. Nikki Rowe

Language is the only homeland. Unknown

[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) Sarah Ban Breathnach

But what is identity really? What is it to ‘belong’ when we cast ourselves in the mold of a social group? I ask this, in spite of my implicit allegiance to one; yet, it is a worthwhile question. I mean, really, what does it even mean to share a commonality of blood or language or religion or heritage or context or economy or trade–and what value does this sharing of common traits, values and experiences truly have when there exists already a larger model of connection and commonality enveloping these disparate identities whole..? Do we pout at our inadequacies in the face of a “something” that is slightly more heterogeneous in its model of belonging? Sometimes, we simply must let go and chalk up all these movements to an inveterate (and arbitrary) sense of pride. Ashim Shanker

Charles says that he does not care what sort of Jane I am so long as I am his Jane; Sardar says that he does not care what sort of Jane I am so long as I am my own Jane; Sahjara says that she does not care what sort of Jane I am so long as she is my Sahjara. Thus I am daily three Janes, and so the luckiest of all. Lyndsay Faye

He wished he could have roots spreading under every inch of his lost soil, his beloved lost home, that he could have been part of something, that he could have been himself, walking down the road not taken, living a life in context and not the migrant's hollow journey that had been his fate Salman Rushdie

You mean, ' Captain Penderton said, 'that any fulfilment obtained at the expense of normalcy is wrong, and should not be allowed to bring happiness. In short, it is better, because it is morally honourable, for the square peg to keep scraping around the round hole rather than to discover and use the unorthodox square that would fit?'…' I don't agree Carson McCullers

When things fall apart, the children of the land scurry and scatter like birds escaping a burning sky.... They will never be the same again because you cannot be the same once you leave behind who and what you are, you just cannot be the same.... Look at them leaving in droves, despite knowing they will be welcomed with restraint in those strange lands because they do not belong NoViolet Bulawayo

The waves splash against my face, carrying a message: Welcome, you belong here. Unknown

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. W. Somerset Maugham

You feel more like home to me than any place I've ever been. Angela N. Blount

I had come to a place where I was meant to be. I don't mean anything so prosaic as a sense of coming home. This was different, very different. It was like arriving at a place much safer than home. Pat Conroy

I wonder if ever again Americans can have that experience of returning to a home place so intimately known, profoundly felt, deeply loved, and absolutely submitted to? It is not quite true that you can't go home again. I have done it, coming back here. But it gets less likely. We have had too many divorces, we have consumed too much transportation, we have lived too shallowly in too many places. Wallace Stegner

Coming back to Karachi is like stepping into the sea again after months on land. How easily you float, how peaceful is the sense of being borne along, and how familiar the sound of the water lapping against your limbs. Kamila Shamsie

Oblige me by telling me where I am."" That is impossible. You know nothing about whereness. The only way to come to know where you are is to begin to make yourself at home. George MacDonald

As far back as I can remember, there has always been a place to which I belonged with a certainty that nothing has been able to take from me. When I say place, that means less a geographical locality and more a group of people with whom I am connected and to whom I belong. Sindiwe Magona

It’s well known that he who returns never left Pablo Neruda

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. Claire Hajaj

Rootlessness, " I opine, "is the twenty-first century norm."" You're not wrong and that's why we're in the shit we're in, mate. If you belong nowhere, why give a tinker's toss about anywhere? David Mitchell

Like most people, when I look back, the family house is held in time, or rather it is now outside of time, because it exists so clearly and it does not change, and it can only be entered through a door in the mind. I like it that pre-industrial societies, and religious cultures still, now, distinguish between two kinds of time — linear time, that is also cyclical because history repeats itself, even as it seems to progress, and real time, which is not subject to the clock or the calendar, and is where the soul used to live. This real time is reversible and redeemable. It is why, in religious rites of all kinds, something that happened once is re-enacted — Passover, Christmas, Easter, or, in the pagan record, Midsummer and the dying of the god. As we participate in the ritual, we step outside of linear time and enter real time. Time is only truly locked when we live in a mechanised world. Then we turn into clock-watchers and time-servers. Like the rest of life, time becomes uniform and standardised. When I left home at sixteen I bought a small rug. It was my roll-up world. Whatever room, whatever temporary place I had, I unrolled the rug. It was a map of myself. Invisible to others, but held in the rug, were all the places I had stayed — for a few weeks, for a few months. On the first night anywhere new I liked to lie in bed and look at the rug to remind myself that I had what I needed even though what I had was so little. Sometimes you have to live in precarious and temporary places. Unsuitable places. Wrong places. Sometimes the safe place won’t help you. Why did I leave home when I was sixteen? It was one of those important choices that will change the rest of your life. When I look back it feels like I was at the borders of common sense, and the sensible thing to do would have been to keep quiet, keep going, learn to lie better and leave later. I have noticed that doing the sensible thing is only a good idea when the decision is quite small. For the life-changing things, you must risk it. And here is the shock — when you risk it, when you do the right thing, when you arrive at the borders of common sense and cross into unknown territory, leaving behind you all the familiar smells and lights, then you do not experience great joy and huge energy. You are unhappy. Things get worse. It is a time of mourning. Loss. Fear. We bullet ourselves through with questions. And then we feel shot and wounded. And then all the cowards come out and say, ‘See, I told you so.’ In fact, they told you nothing. . Jeanette Winterson

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

The Tejo runs down from SpainAnd the Tejo goes into the sea in Portugal.Everybody knows that. But not many people know the river of my village And where it comes from And where it’s going. And so, because it belongs to less people, The river of my village is freer and greater. Alberto Caeiro

My friends stood on the ground two feet below me, and miles away from understanding why I would want to sleep on a trailer platform.. I couldn't possibly begin to explain what was only beginning to bud inside me: I wanted a home. I wanted to be at home, in the world and in my body (a feeling I had been missing since I'd woken up in the hospital) and somehow, in some as yet undefined way, I knew that windows in the great room and a skylight over my bed were going to help with that. Dee Williams

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. Joanne Harris

HereYou always belonged here. You were theirs, certain as a rock. I’m the one who worriesif I fit in with the furniture and the landscape. But I “follow too muchthe devices and desires of my own heart.” Already the curves in the roadare familiar to me, and the mountainin all kinds of light, treating all people the same.and when I come over the hill, I see the house, with its generous and firm proportions, smokerising gaily from the chimney. I feel my life start up again, like a cutting when it growsthe first pale and tentativeroot hair in a glass of water. . Jane Kenyon

He said it was better to belong where you don't belong than not to belong where you used to belong, remembering when you used to belong there. Terry Pratchett

That is what happens when the heart door opens- you become less yourself than part of everything.' Many are the sentinels who guard that door: our fears, our self-importance, our meanness, our greed, our bitterness, and others. Roger Housden

Playmates share two gifts. You are loveable, and there is nothing to be afraid of. O. Fred Donaldson

Violence can be a gift. Violence belongs to everyone. Bryant McGill

But I also knew that if he turned away from me at this moment, somehow I would survive that, and I would find a way to flourish like the yard that still bloomed and grew around my family home. I'm Sookie Stackhouse. I belong here. Charlaine Harris

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. Steve Maraboli

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

I'd chosen the regret I could live with best, that's all. I'd chosen the life I belonged to. Sue Monk Kidd

She’d found him. She’d helped him. She’d saved him. He was hers. And they’d taken him away, ripped him from her arms, literally. Laura Kaye

I don't think you really belong here, Aviger." Xoxarle nodded wisely, slowly. Aviger shrugged, and did not raise his eyes. "I don't think any of us do."" The brave belong where they decide." Some harshness entered the Idiran's voice. Iain Banks

The only thing worse than not knowing where she belonged...was knowing where she didn't. Tessa Shaffer

How do you sell emptiness, vulnerability, and nonsuccess? Richard Rohr

A person with ubuntu is open and available to others, affirming of others, does not feel threatened that others are able and good, for he or she has a proper self-assurance that comes from knowing that he or she belongs in a greater whole and is diminished when others are humiliated or diminished, when others are tortured or oppressed. Desmond Tutu

We are halves, but we make an infinite whole. Catherynne M. Valente

This is how we came by our factions: Candor, Erudite, Amity, Abnegation and Dauntless." Max smiles. "In them we find administrators and teachers and counselors and leaders and protectors. In them we find our sense of belonging, our sense of community, our very lives. Veronica Roth

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. Alison G. Bailey

And as if he had read her thoughts, the old man murmured, 'What a blessing it is to die in your own bed, under your own roof, with your family surrounding you, full of the knowledge that you have lived as thoroughly as you wanted to. Anita Rau Badami

When we separate ourselves from the rest of the world, the world becomes a lonely and difficult place to live in. When we see ourselves as completely separate, we cannot call upon the power and strength that comes from unity, from being part of a greater whole. In today's world, we buy into the lie that if we do see ourselves as--or make ourselves into--a part of the greater whole, then we'll lose our identity and become nothing more than another face in the crowd, a lemming who does nothing but follow others and never creates his or her own life. Nothing, though, could be further from the truth. . Tom Walsh

Pack is for comfort when you hurt, I thought, putting my head back down. And for the first time in a long time, maybe the first time ever, I appreciated being a part of one. Patricia Briggs

There would be a general reclaiming of fallen buttons and misplaced spectacles, of neighbors and kin, till time and error and accident were undone, and the world became comprehensible and whole. Marilynne Robinson

I feel like I'm supposed to make some comment to underscore the ridiculousness of it all, but honestly? It's sort of nice not to have to be cynical for a change. I guess it feels like I'm a part of something. Becky Albertalli

You are my home; it is in your loving gaze that I find the comfort, acceptance, and the sense of belonging. Steve Maraboli

Why now? Why not? Live or die, a man and a woman need love. There is a need in the race. We need to share. To belong. Perhaps you will die before the year is out. But remember this: to have may be taken from you, to have had never. Far better to have tasted love before dying, than to die alone. David Gemmell

Neither of us fit in, so instead we fit together. Julia Day

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. Mohsin Hamid