Belong To Nowhere Quotes & Sayings

I'm a Russian and all I know of Russia is what I've read. I yearn for the broad fields of golden corn and the forests of silver beech that I've read of in books and though I try and try, I can't see them with my mind's eye. I know Moscow from what I've seen of it at the cinema. I sometimes rack my brain to picture to myself a Russian village, the straggling village of log houses with their thatched roofs that you read about in Chekov, and it's no good, I know that what I see isn't that at all. I'm a Russian and I speak my native language worse than I speak English and French. When I read Tolstoi and Dostoievsky it is easier for me to read them in a translation. I'm just as much a foreigner to my own people as I am to the English and French. You who've got a home and a country, people who love you, people whose ways are your ways, whom you understand without knowing them - how can you tell what it is to belong nowhere? — W. Somerset Maugham

The fact that I
am writing to you
in English
already falsifies what I
wanted to tell you.
My subject:
how to explain to you that I
don't belong to English
though I belong nowhere else — Gustavo Perez Firmat

I belong nowhere and to no one. — Waris Dirie

It makes me sick, the way sadness is addicting. The way I can't stop. Sadness is familiar. It's comfortable and it's easy in a sense that it comes naturally to me. But everything else about it is hard. The way my body aches with self-hatred. The way my mind spins and spins with hopeless thoughts. The way it poisons everything I do, every relationship I have. Yet it's addicting, because I know sadness, and I know it very well. And there's a sort of comfort in that, like being home after a trip or sleeping in your own bed after being away. There's just a sense that this is where I belong. This is how it's supposed to be. — Marianna Paige

That's right, baby. Scratch me up. Make your mark. I wanna look at my body later and know who I belong to. — Kate Meader

Our actions are our own; their consequences belong to Heaven. — Francis Of Assisi

I have a wonderful shelter, which is my family. I have a wonderful relationship with my brother and sister; this makes me feel that I know always where I belong. — Jose Carreras

We are not of the night or of the darkness. 6So then let us not sleep, as others do, but let us keep awake and be sober. 7For those who sleep, sleep at night, and those who get drunk, are drunk at night. 8But since we belong to the day, let us be sober, — Anonymous

The only reason i love the courage of these individuals is that they take their family members as astray chicks, and the reason i don't want to belong to this category is because those chicks are far more important to me than trivial wealth and fame. — Michael Bassey Johnson

Since many of you do not belong to the Catholic Church and others are non-believers, from the bottom of my heart I give this silent blessing to each and every one of you, respecting the conscience of each one of you but knowing that each one of you is a child of God. — Pope Francis

Because even though you don't want anyone to own you, it doesn't mean that there is nowhere you belong. — Lene Kaaberbol

Someday, we will go back to having the kind of legislature that we should, where members, whatever party they belong to, want to make the thing work and cooperate with each other to see that that will happen. — Irin Carmon

A question in your nerves is lit
Yet you know there is no answer fit
To satisfy, insure you not to quit
To keep it in your mind and not forget
That it is not he or she or them or it that you belong to ... — Bob Dylan

Contained within the breadth of my heart where you belong unto me and I unto you. — Truth Devour

It's a false premise to say that most monogamous people have chosen monogamy. Most people belong to the religion they were raised in ... because that's what's familiar. That's the milieu they grew up in, and, for better or worse, they're just continuing the pattern. Until this traditionalist mindset is shaken loose, you would likely try from reflex to impose notions onto nonmonogamy that are not only untenable in the new context but spel sudden and messy doom even in situations that otherwise could be worked out. — Anthony D. Ravenscroft

In my state of spiritual abstraction, I no longer belong to myself and to my eyesight. I am nothing more than a single narrow gasping lung, floating over the mists and summits. — Reinhold Messner

Lawyers belong to the people by birth and interest, and to the aristocracy by habit and taste; they may be looked upon as the connecting link of the two great classes of society. — Alexis De Tocqueville

Insights into erotic life belong to art, not education. But sometimes these have to be spelled out for the illiterates. And it ismainly a matter of convincing the illiterates, for they are the ones who write the penal code. — Karl Kraus

You belong to me. — Teresa Mummert

I believe that whenever you do something right it gives you a little bit of weight so that you come to feel rooted to this earth more solid, secure. Now what scares me is, well sometimes out of nowhere a bad wind blows up. It could be cancer, could be drink, could be some woman who don't belong to you. And despite the weight holding you to the ground, when that wind comes, it picks you up light as a leaf and takes you where it wants. Were in control until were not. Then were helpless. — Truman Capote

Incarnate ugliness, and yet alive! What would become of them all? Perhaps with the passing of the coal they would disappear again, off the face of the earth. They had appeared out of nowhere in their thousands, when the coal had called for them. Perhaps they were only
weird fauna of the coal-seams. Creatures of another reality, they were elementals, serving the elements of coal, as the metal-workers were elementals, serving the element of iron. Men not men, but animas of coal and iron and clay. Fauna of the elements, carbon, iron, silicon: elementals. They had perhaps some of the weird, inhuman beauty of minerals, the lustre of coal, the weight and blueness and resistance of iron, the transparency of glass. Elemental creatures, weird and distorted, of the mineral world! They belonged to the coal, the iron, the clay, as fish belong to the sea and worms to dead wood. The anima of mineral disintegration! — D.H. Lawrence

Once when I was givin' th' children a bit of a preach after they'd been fightin' I ses to 'em all, When I was at school my jography told as th' world was shaped like a orange an' I found out before I was ten that th' whole orange doesn't belong to nobody. No one owns more than his bit of a quarter an' there's times it seems like there's not enow quarters to go round. But don't you - none o' you - think as you own th' whole orange or you'll find out you're mistaken, an' you won't find it out without hard knocks. — Frances Hodgson Burnett

By playing on people's desire to belong to groups, Facebook creates a new, inclusive society. After all, Facebook is not like Harvard College. Anyone with access to the Internet can sign up. — Amity Shlaes

- Be careful, professor. We don't yet know whose hands the town is in.

- Whoever they belong to, they're the same hands. — Evelio Rosero

I know I belong in Dauntless because everything I did in that aptitude test told me so. I'm loyal to my faction for that reason
because there's nowhere else I could possibly be. But her? And you?" She shakes her head. "I have no idea who you're loyal to. And I'm not going to pretend like everything's okay. — Veronica Roth

By 1998, members of the United States National Academy of Sciences, an elite elected group sponsored by the federal government, were approaching complete atheism. Only 10 percent testified to a belief in either God or immortality. Among them were a scant 2 percent of the biologists. In modern civilizations, there is no overwhelming importance in the general populace to belong to an organized religion. Witness, — Edward O. Wilson

The body with its perfect mechanism loses power, magnetism, beauty, and brightness, when the soul departs from the body. This shows that the power, magnetism, beauty, and brightness belong to the soul. — Hazrat Inayat Khan

Conservation is getting nowhere because it is incompatible with our Abrahamic concept of land. We abuse land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us. When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect. — Aldo Leopold

Farts come from no
one and nowhere; they are anonymous emanations that belong
to the group as a whole, and even when every person in the
room can point to the culprit, the only sane course of action is
denial. — Paul Auster

And underneath it all, there remained an ever present anger and hurt, the feeling of belonging nowhere that comes to people who belong everywhere. — Zadie Smith

Solitary writers come out of nowhere and do not belong anywhere. They are not domesticated or socialized, not as writers. Their subject is not the world about them but the one within them. From story to story or poem to poem, they repeat themselves because all they have to work with are themselves and their dreams, which are strange dreams and often bad dreams. As anyone knows, nothing is more troublesome to communicate than yourself and your dreams, the feelings and visions that have molded you into what you are. — Thomas Ligotti

To belong nowhere is a blessing and a curse, like any kind of freedom. — Leah Stewart

See the people on the sidewalk? ... aren't you glad you're not one of them?
they're all so self-importantly going nowhere ... they just have no idea of who they are or where they really belong. nothing will ever be enough for them. nothing will truly make them happy. they all think they've got to get someplace, got to meet someone, got to get to work, got to get home, got to keep that appointment. if they had a hundred million bucks, it wouldn't be enough for them. if they had four cars, they'd need more. if they had four homes, they'd need more. they are organically out of touch with their land and their tribe. — Kinky Friedman

Also, on account of the odd relationship between time and space, the people who do manage to time-jump sometimes space-jump at the same time and end up in places where they simply don't belong. Over there, for example," he said as a raucous DeLorean sports car rared into view from nowhere, "is that crazy American professorwho can't seem to stay put in one time, and, I must say, there is an absolute plague of of killer robots from the future being sent to change the past. Sleeping there under that banyan tree is a certain Hank Morgan of Hartford, Connecticut, who was accidentally transported one day back to King Arthur's Court, and stayed there until Merlin put him to sleep for 1300 thirteen hundred years. He was suppsoed to wake up back in his own time, but look at this lazy fellow! He's still snoring away, and has missed his slot. — Salman Rushdie

I wasn't born a victim of life nor its slave. I just became a victim of circumstances at the mercy of the society. My thoughts had always been the same -- this world is a delusion of nightmare, a drama in which we are all eager for the finale. Just as my mother used to say, I am going where I belong; but I am going nowhere. — Hans Lindor

Belonging nowhere, no one can tell who he really is. Who one really is depends on what world he belongs to. The secret multitudes who belong to no world, no way of life, no particular time and place, are the truly displaced persons: displaced from their true selves. They are not the disinherited: they are those who have disinherited their own selves. — Nelson Algren

Let me tell you the meaning of the sacred and alluring garden that blooms in the heart of the desert and produces the food of life. The garden for which you are currently heading is nowhere and everywhere except in the camps. It is another name for the only place where you belong, Michaels, where you do not feel homeless. It is off every map, no road leads to it that is merely a road, and only you know the way. — J.M. Coetzee

In fact history does not belong to us; but we belong to it. — Hans-Georg Gadamer

No one can compare us to the apartheid regime. It's not like in South Africa between the blacks and the whites who belong to the same nation, or in Berlin where you find parents living on the eastern side and their children in the western side. — Silvan Shalom

I love you, Ink, and I want you-only you. Being strong doesn't mean I don't want you too. You are the only person who knows every part of my life, every part of me in it, the good and the bad and the horrible, and you still love me. You are always with me, even when you're not there. And when you're not there, I can feel it, like an empty space where you ought to be, and I can hardly wait until you're back to fill it again. Neither world feels like it fits, but we belong. — Dawn Metcalf

Freedom and dignity are not scraps to be doled out by cruel masters. They belong to every man, woman, and child. They are our right. And we won't stop, until they belong to us! — Steven Dos Santos

I'm not in show business because I don't have to go to the meetings, I'm just not a part of it, I don't belong to it. When you "belong" to something. You want to think about that word, "belong." People should think about that: it means they own you. If you belong to something it owns you, and I just don't care for that. I like spinning out here like one of those subatomic particles that they can't quite pin down. — George Carlin

I kill on order. I am everyone's assassin. I belong to no one but the grim reaper herself. — Katherine Ewell

One good thing about New York is that most people function daily while in a low-grade depression. It's not like if you're in Los Angeles, where everyone's so actively working on cheerfulness and mental and physical health that if they sense you're down, they shun you. Also, all that sunshine is a cruel joke when you're depressed. In New York, even in your misery, you feel like you belong. — Mindy Kaling

Again and again we picture ourselves sitting together with the people we feel drawn to all our lives, precisely these so-called simple people, whom naturally we imagine much differently from the way they truly are, for if we actually sit down with them we see that they aren't the way we've pictured them and that we absolutely don't belong with them, as we've talked ourselves into believing, and we get rejected at their table and in their midst as we logically should get after sitting down at their table and believing we belonged with them or we could sit with them for even the shortest time without being punished, which is the biggest mistake, I thought. All our lives we yearn to be with these people and want to reach out to them and when we realize what we feel for them are rejected by them and indeed in the most brutal fashion. — Thomas Bernhard

Happy the bard, (if that fair name belong
To him that blends no fable with his song)
Whose lines uniting, by an honest art,
The faithful monitors and poets part,
Seek to delight, that they may mend mankind,
And while they captivate, inform the mind.
Still happier, if he till a thankful soil,
And fruit reward his honorable toil:
But happier far who comfort those that wait
To hear plain truth at Judah's hallow'd gate — William Cowper

We belong to an age whose culture is in danger of perishing through the means to culture. — Friedrich Nietzsche

The narrative for girls is that you just hang around and wait to be "chosen" and then you belong to somebody and you live happily ever after. There isn't room for more nuanced concerns about the creepy proprietary nature of that relationship model, or the breadth of what fulfillment really means for women. — Lindy West

Once you've read a book, you and it belong to each other for life. ... — Kimberley Freeman

The theater troubled her. It had a magic of its own, one that didn't belong to her, one that wasn't in her control. It changed the world, and said things were otherwise than they were. And it was worse than that. It was magic that didn't belong to magical people. It was commanded by ordinary people, who didn't know the rules. They altered the world because it sounded better. — Terry Pratchett

When it becomes clear that no one else shares your level of passion, you are where you belong. — Placido Domingo

To the first class belong the Gospels and Acts; to the second, the Epistles; to the third, the Revelation. — Philip Schaff

The conservative does not defend the Old Regime; he speaks on behalf of old regimes - in the family, the factory, the field. There, ordinary men, and sometimes women, get to play the part of little lords and ladies, supervising their underlings as if they all belong to a feudal estate . . . The task of this type of conservatism---democratic feudalism - -becomes clear: surround these old regimes with fences and gates, protect them from meddlesome intruders like the state or a social movement, while descanting on mobility and innovation, freedom and the future. — Corey Robin

I don't think you're weak," Jared said. "I want to guard you because you are important to me. Because you are - God, this is going to sound so stupid, I can never think of a way to say it - you are precious. I can never think of how to describe the value you have to me, because all the words for value suggest that you belong to me, and you don't. — Sarah Rees Brennan

Conventional measures of mental ability, such as intelligence tests and scholarship, show some of the very highest records belong to INFP and INFJ types, who relegate thinking to last place or next to last. The preference for thinking appears to have far less intellectual effect than the preference for intuition, even in some technical fields, such as scientific research, where its influence was expected to be most important. — Isabel Briggs Myers

I don't belong with you. I've been an idiot all the way — Ray Bradbury

If I could put my finger on it, I'd bottle it and sell it. I came down here originally in 1972 with some drunken fraternity guys and had never seen anything like it - the climate, the smells. It's the cradle of music; it just flipped me. Someone suggested that there's an incomplete part of our chromosomes that gets repaired or found when we hit New Orleans. Some of us just belong here. — John Goodman

The only universal attribute of scientific statements resides in their potential fallibility. If a claim cannot be disproven, it does not belong to the enterprise of science. — Stephen Jay Gould

Everything must belong somewhere. I know that now, that's why I'm staying here. — Conor Oberst

My problem might be that even if I did go home, I wouldn't belong there, among people who give without thinking and care without trying. — Veronica Roth

Jack doesn't belong anymore to just a family. He belongs to the country. — Joseph P. Kennedy

You had to pitch in and out. The zone didn't belong to the hitters; it belonged to the pitchers. Today, if you pitch too far inside, the umpire would stop you right there. I don't think it's fair. — Juan Marichal

My whole image is a short step to the right of bondage porn. It's like I was begging you to do this to me before we even met, isn't it? Like I was just waiting for someone to belong to. I'm everything you think I am. I want everything you think I do. Explore me. — Thursday Euclid

The more woman aims for personal identity and autonomy ... the fiercer will be her struggle with nature - that is, with the intractable physical laws of her own body. And the more nature will punish her: 'Do not dare to be free! For your body does not belong to you.' — Camille Paglia