Belonging Quotes

Is love this misguided need to have you beside me most of the time? Is love this safety I feel in our silences? Is it this belonging, this completeness?

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Because true belonging only happens when we present our authentic, imperfect selves to the world, our sense of belonging can never be greater than our level of self-acceptance.

Brené Brown

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

You don’t belong only to yourself, you know. I doubt there is a single person in this world that belongs only to himself. When someone makes a connection...there is always something shared. And so people will never be completely free. It’s that which brings out the fun...and sadness...and love.

CLAMP

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

Julia Day

There was a man with tongue of woodWho essayed to sing,And in truth it was lamentable.But there was one who heardThe clip-clapper of this tongue of woodAnd knew what the manWished to sing,And with that the singer was content.

Stephen Crane

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

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

Steve Maraboli

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

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

They hooted and laughed all the way back to the car, teasing Milkman, egging him on to tell more about how scared he was. And he told them. Laughing too, hard, loud, and long. Really laughing, and he found himself exhilarated by simply walking the earth. Walking it like he belonged on it; like his legs were stalks, tree trunks, a part of his body that extended down down down into the rock and soil, and were comfortable there--on the earth and on the place where he walked. And he did not limp.

Toni Morrison

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

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

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

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

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

We are halves, but we make an infinite whole.

Catherynne M. Valente

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

What if we all stopped fighting to belong and realized that we already do? What if we acknowledged, in each interaction with ourselves and with others, the eternal, beautiful interconnected energy that flows between us? What if we recognized our equality and celebrated our differences? Imagine how the world could be.

Vironika Tugaleva

Big cities comforted me: the cover, the chaos, the hollow sympathy of the architecture, the Tube lines snaking underground. London could swallow you up, in a good way. There were times when I'd been broken and being subsumed into a city had made me feel part of a whole again.

Emma Jane Unsworth

How do you sell emptiness, vulnerability, and nonsuccess?

Richard Rohr

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

Tessa Shaffer

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

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

Sue Monk Kidd

She may have been among them but she could never be one of them. She was without inclusion for-as-much as she was not "one of the girls" and she wasn't "one of the guys." She was an outsider gazing in, endlessly comfortless, while they wished they had what it took to be less like the others and more like her.

Donna Lynn Hope

The doors of Hell are never bolted or barred, to those who belong there.

Simon R. Green

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

Charlotte Eriksson

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

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

Violence can be a gift. Violence belongs to everyone.

Bryant McGill

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

O. Fred Donaldson

Acceptance is the sense of belonging.

M.F. Moonzajer

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.

Brené Brown

We all belong here equally...Just by being born onto the earth we are accepted and the earth supports us. We don't have to be especially good. We don't have to accomplish anything. We don't even have to be healthy.

Polly Horvath

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

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.tBut 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

You could just tell when a person belonged somewhere. That is something you can't fake, no matter how hard you try

Sarah Dessen

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

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

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 villageAnd where it comes fromAnd where it’s going.And so, because it belongs to less people,The river of my village is freer and greater.

Alberto Caeiro

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. tI 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. tTime 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. tWhen 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. tSometimes you have to live in precarious and temporary places. Unsuitable places. Wrong places. Sometimes the safe place won’t help you. tWhy 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. tI 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. tAnd 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. tYou are unhappy. Things get worse. tIt is a time of mourning. Loss. Fear. We bullet ourselves through with questions. And then we feel shot and wounded. tAnd then all the cowards come out and say, ‘See, I told you so.’ tIn 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

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

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

It’s well known that he who returns never left

Pablo Neruda

How people feel when they are returning home from an absence, long or short, I did not know: I had never experienced the sensation. I had known what it was to come back to Gateshead when a child after a long walk, to be scolded for looking cold or gloomy; and later, what it was to come back from church to Lowood, to long for a plenteous meal and a good fire, and to be unable to get either. Neither of these returnings was very pleasant or desirable: no magnet drew me to a given point, increasing in its strength of attraction the nearer I came. The return to Thornfield was yet to be tried.

Charlotte Brontë

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.

Paula McLain

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

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

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?

Michal Coret

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

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

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

Angela N. Blount

Home's where you go when you run out of homes.

John le Carré

Home is a notion that only nations of the homeless fully appreciate and only the uprooted comprehend.

Wallace Stegner

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.

Jane Devin

Bean could see the hunger in their eyes. Not the regular hunger, for food, but the real hunger, the deep hunger, for family, for love, for belonging.

Orson Scott Card

1 2 3 Next

Belonging Quotes

Related Topics