Belonging To A Place Quotes & Sayings

She was still hugging the cat. "Poor slob," she said, tickling his head, "poor slob without a name. It's a little inconvenient, his not having a name. But I haven't any right to give him one: he'll have to wait until he belongs to somebody. We just sort of took up by the river one day, we don't belong to each other: he's an independent, and so am I. I don't want to own anything until I know I've found the place where me and things belong together. I'm not quite sure where that is just yet. But I know what it's like." She smiled, and let the cat drop to the floor. "It's like Tiffany's," she said.
[ ... ]
It calms me down right away, the quietness and the proud look of it; nothing very bad could happen to you there, not with those kind men in their nice suits, and that lovely smell of silver and alligator wallets. If I could find a real-life place that made me feel like Tiffany's, then I'd buy some furniture and give the cat a name. — Truman Capote

Marxism, like all other totalitarian movements in our century, must be seen as kind of secular pattern of redemption , designed to bring hope and fulfillment to those who have come to feel alienated , frustrated, and excluded from what they regard as their rightful place in a community. In its promise of unity and belonging lies much of the magic of totalitarian mistery, miracle, and authority. Bertrand Russell has not exaggerated in summing up the present significance of Marxism somewhat as follows: dialectical materialism is God; marx the Messiah; Lenin and Stalin the apostles; the proletariat the elect; the Communist party the Church; Moscow the seat of Church; the Revolution the second coming; the punishment of capitalismo hell; Trotsky the devil; and the communist commonwealth kingdom come. — Robert A. Nisbet

The fact is, that for the Huichol, and for all those who refuse, who are in flight, words and things are precisely what language does not speak about. Language is a natural act which implies belonging. He who exists, speaks. He who does not speak, does not exist. He has no place in the world. The Huichol language is Huichol to the same degree as the Huichol earth, the Huichol sky, religion, tattooing, dress, the peyoteros' hat. It is not enough to pronounce the syllables of the Huichol language to be Huichol. That is obvious. — Jean-Marie G. Le Clezio

In the literary machine that Proust's "In Search of Lost Time" constitutes, we are struck by the fact that all the parts are produced as asymmetrical sections, paths that suddenly come to an end, hermetically sealed boxes, noncommunicating vessels, watertight compartments, in which there are gaps even between things that are contiguous, gaps that are affirmations, pieces of a puzzle belonging not to any one puzzle but to many, pieces assembled by forcing them into a certain place where they may or may not belong, their unmatched edges violently forced out of shape, forcibly made to fit together, to interlock, with a number of pieces always left over. — Gilles Deleuze

How could I have thought that I needed to cure myself in order to fit into the 'real' world? I didn't need curing, and the world didn't, either; the only thing that did need curing was my understanding of my place in it. Without that understanding - without a sense of belonging to the real world - it was impossible to thrive in an imagined one. — Jonathan Franzen

It seems to me that the greatest adventure is to find a home in the world, particularly in the natural world, to earn a sense of belonging deeply to a place and to feel the deep response well up within you and become a part of you. When it is done, it can't be lost; the knowledge is as acute and sure as falling in love. — Cynthia Huntington

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

We are needy creatures, and our greatest need is for home - the place where we are, where we find protection and love. We achieve this home through representations of our own belonging, not alone but in conjunction with others. All our attempts to make our surroundings look right - through decorating, arranging, creating - are attempts to extend a welcome to ourselves and to those whom we love. — Roger Scruton

I think there are a lot of misconceptions on both sides, the developing vs. the developed world, especially about America. I've felt the frustration in my lack of belonging to any one place, but I've also felt it liberating to be able to appreciate something without feeling disloyal to my own culture. — Jhumpa Lahiri

Home, to me, was any place by my mother's side. Since my mother's death, the idea of home has assumed many forms. I use the word loosely to refer to India, Nepal and even Tibet when I am in San Francisco. Home is a place that is always imminent but never present. Or maybe it is the very opposite, maybe I am at ease whenever I am and the feeling of not belonging to any one place is a condition of being at home. — Tsering Wangmo Dhompa

After a while Estevan said, What I really hate is not belonging in any place. To be unwanted everywhere. — Barbara Kingsolver

Over four decades of pastoral ministry - I got started early - you make mistakes. But the mistakes you most regret are the ones that obscure the gospel and hurt the people you love, by saying in effect, "You do not belong," to those for whom Christ died to provide a place of belonging. — Ken Wilson

When you're guest-starring, it's very nice, but you're there very briefly, and it's right there in the name: You're a guest. It's very hard to get a real sense of belonging. With recurring and regular roles, at least you have a sense that this is a home and a steady place. — Zeljko Ivanek

Nationalism has two fatal charms for its devotees: It presupposes local self-sufficiency, which is a pleasant and desirable condition, and it suggests, very subtly, a certain personal superiority by reason of one's belonging to a place which is definable and familiar, as against a place that is strange, remote. — E.B. White

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

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

Under no circumstances must we touch land belonging to fellahs or worked by them. Only if a fellah leaves his place of settlement, should we offer to buy his land, at an appropriate price. — David Ben-Gurion

New York is essentially national in interest, position, pursuits. No one thinks of the place as belonging to a particular state, but to the United States. — James F. Cooper

As a kid, I imagined lots of different scenarios for my life. I would be an astronaut. Maybe a cartoonist. A famous explorer or rock star. Never once did I see myself standing under the window of a house belonging to some druggie named Carbine, waiting for his yard gnome to steal his stash so I could get a cab back to a cheap motel where my friend, a neurotic, death-obsessed dwarf, was waiting for me so we could get on the road to an undefined place and a mysterious Dr. X, who would cure me of mad cow disease and stop a band of dark energy from destroying the universe. — Libba Bray

THE POWER OF THE GROUP We all want to feel a sense of belonging. This isn't a character flaw. It's fundamental to the human experience. Our finest achievements are possible when people come together to work for a common cause. School spirit, the rightful pride we feel in our community, our heritage, our religion, and our families, all come from the value we place on belonging to a group. — Rosalind Wiseman

She liked the idea of a place belonging to the cows, no ownership of human ego. — Aporva Kala

When we have sampled much and have wandered far and have seen how fleeting and sometimes superficial a lot of the world is, our gratitude grows for the privilege of being part of something we can count on-home and family and the loyalty of loved ones. We come to know what it means to be bound together by duty, by respect, by belonging. We learn that nothing can fully take the place of the blessed relationship of family life. — Thomas S. Monson

If my friend asks me to sit in a temple belonging to a God that I do not know, because he needs a friend to sit with him, I will be happy to sit there in the foreign temple. Because the temple itself is an outer container only. What is the true religion? What is the inner oil contained by that outer container? The inner oil is the friendship I share with my friend. The true religion is being there to sit beside my friend. If I cannot do this for my friend, then how am I worthy to sit in any temple, whether belonging to a God that I know or to a God that I don't know? If there is no inner oil within my soul, I do not deserve to sit in any temple. Religion is the friendship within the heart, not the place where we sit on a holy day. Religion is the oil within the lamp, not the metal container we see as the lamp. — C. JoyBell C.

At a time when most of my peers were struggling to find an identity, I knew exactly who I was: the church girl, the girl who always had a place in her youth group family, the girl on fire for God. I'm not sure I can ever calculate the value of that community, that sense of belonging and of being loved. It never even occurred to me that such a fire could be washed out. — Rachel Held Evans

From the outside, people think it's drug-related. But wherever you come from, people are driven by a sense of belonging. What I say to kids all the time is you don't own streets. We don't own the paving stones we are fighting over. Instead of fighting each other, you should be fighting the government to make this a better place to live. — Ashley Walters

This no-land was exactly the place in which my self was pushed and started to float without points of reference, and at the same time to resist the forced choice of only one identity and the erosion of my plural cultural belonging. More then ever before, certainly more than at any other time of my geographical and cultural dislocation due to the experience of migration, I was convinced of the necessity to reinforce my pertinence not to the single reality, but to a multiplicity of spaces. As never before, I kept remembering irrationally the shape of my country still entire and unbroken, without the scars of the new borders drawn on a mainly historically incorrect 'ethnic basis'. My imagined country was visible only from the window of a plane flying over the Balkans, as only from the air are the new states' borders and walls of ethnic separation invisible. In my stubborn conviction I was keeping all the scattered pieces together as a mental map of my non-existent homeland. — Melita Richter Malabotta

When you get to a place where you understand that love and belonging, your worthiness, is a birthright and not something you have to earn, anything is possible. — Brene Brown

For hundreds of years the world was wrapped in a veil of spiritual darkness, until there was not one fundamental truth belonging to the place of salvation ... Joseph Smith declared that in the year 1820 the Lord revealed to him that all the 'Christian' churches were in error, teaching for commandments the doctrines of men. — Joseph Fielding Smith

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

Joshua couldn't help but wonder why he went on this journey to begin with. Doubts rose in his mind - doubts of the justification of all this. Was it all worth it? He began to think that whatever it was that had pushed or pulled him to go and leave his world, his place of belonging, was probably just a dream, no more than the senseless musings of a bored existence. — Stefan Bolz

Belonging to a place isn't nearly as necessary as belonging to people you love and who love you and need you. — Zilpha Keatley Snyder

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 found my place when I moved to London, where I chose to live, making my own tribe who were all from different backgrounds and places. The class thing is very dominant there, but in the cultural cross-fertilization, I felt a sense of belonging. — Neneh Cherry

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

The child, merely by going on with his life, learns to speak the language belonging to his race. It is like a mental chemistry that takes place in the child. — Maria Montessori

Being human signifies, for each one of us, belonging to a class, a society, a country, a continent and a civilization; and for us European earth-dwellers, the adventure played out in the heart of the New World signifies in the first place that it was not our world and that we bear responsibility for the crime of its destruction. — Claude Levi-Strauss

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

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

Home is ultimately not about a place to live but about the people with whom you are most fully alive. Home is about love, relationship, community, and belonging, and we are all searching for home. — Erwin Raphael McManus

Travel does not exist without home ... If we never return to the place we started, we would just be wandering, lost. Home is a reflecting surface, a place to measure our growth and enrich us after being infused with the outside world. — Josh Gates

If we think of belonging only as membership in a club, organization, or church, we miss the point. Belonging is the risk to move beyond the world we know, to venture out on pilgrimage, to accept exile. And it is the risk of being with companions on that journey, God, a spouse, friends, children, mentors, teachers, people who came from the same place we did, people who came from entirely different places, saints and sinners of all sorts, those known to us and those unknown, our secret longings, questions, and fears. — Diana Butler Bass

The wistful term "transcendental homelessness" was coined by Georg Lukacs in
1916, in a little book called
The Theory of the Novel
. It refers to the longing of all souls
for the place in which they once belonged, and the "nostalgia ... for utopian perfection, a
nostalgia that feels itself and its desires to be the only true reality" (70). According to
Lukacs, everyone has a sense that he or she once belonged somewhere. However, this
place has been lost, and the purpose of human life is to once again find this place. The
search for this place of belonging, for the "home" that will once more fill life with
meaning, is the fundamental structure of the novel — Anonymous

The room was a library. Not a public library, but a private library; that is, a collection of books belonging to Justice Strauss. There were shelves and shelves of them, on every wall from the floor to the ceiling, and separate shelves of them in the middle of the room. The only place were there weren't books was in one corner, where there were some large, comfortable-looking chairs and a wooden table with lamps hanging over them, perfect for reading. Although it was not as big as their parents library, it was cozy, and the Baudelaire children were thrilled. — Lemony Snicket

Matthew implies that the kingdom belonging to the Son of Man is one and the same as the Kingdom of God. And since the Kingdom of God is built upon a complete reversal of the present order, wherein the poor become powerful and the meek are made mighty, what better king to rule over it on God's behalf than one who himself embodies the new social order flipped on its head? A peasant king. A king with no place to lay his head. A king who came to serve, not to be served. A king riding on a donkey. — Reza Aslan

Everyone had a place. Everyone fit. Everyone belonged. Everyone but Anna Mae. — Kathleen Fuller

I think I've grown up in a mixed environment, and maybe a lot of the time I haven't really belonged anywhere in the way I've dreamt of belonging to, you know, living on the street and playing to all the kids on the street, growing up together. I suppose 'Raw Like Sushi' was a place where all of those things could come together. — Neneh Cherry

The next chapter is about belonging: the essential need we have to be and to share with others. The human heart is a place of freedom. We can be obliged to follow the law but not to love, because "true love casts out fear." Our society grows in justice and peace as we allow energies of love and concern for all to rise up in ourselves. — Jean Vanier

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. — Elena Gorokhova

Jesus says. "Acknowledge and accept who I want to be for you: a Savior of boundless compassion, infinite patience, unbearable forgiveness, and love that keeps no score of wrongs. Quit projecting onto Me your own feelings about yourself. At this moment your life is a bruised reed and I will not crush it, a smoldering wick and I will not quench it. You are in a safe place."
Brennan Manning. Abba's Child: The Cry of the Heart for Intimate Belonging — Brennan Manning

My home is a place of unconditional belonging, which is part of its pleasure, part of its pain - as Robert Frost wrote, home is Something you somehow haven't to deserve. — Gretchen Rubin

I stood and let the feeling of that place fill me. I have often wondered if this was what religious people feel when they pray. It is a feeling of reverence and awe, serenity and belonging. The light breeze, the smell of the forest, the rushing water, the whispering leaves - they seem to fill me, like my soul is opening up and being swept clean. It is the only thing in my life I could call spiritual. — Marie Sexton

Let me belong again to that faraway place I left so long ago, from which I am alienated, and which has forgotten me, in which I am an alien now even though it was the place where I began, let me belong again, walk those streets knowing they are mine, knowing that my story is a part of those streets, even though it isn't, it hasn't been for most of a lifetime, let it be so, let it be so — Salman Rushdie

He did not think of himself as a tourist; he was a traveler. The difference is partly one of time, he would explain. Whereas the tourist generally hurries back home at the end of a few weeks or months, the traveler, belonging no more to one place than to the next, moves slowly, over periods of years, from one part of the earth to another. — Paul Bowles

Fitting is a luxury rarely given to immigrants, or children of immigrants. We are stuck in emotional purgatory. Home, somehow, is always the last place you left, and never the place you're in. — Scaachi Koul

At the heart of this home is my family; where my family is, is home. If I lived by myself, home would be the place peopled with reminders of everyone I loved. My home is a place of unconditional belonging, which is part of its pleasure, part of its pain- as Robert Frost wrote, home is "something you somehow haven't to deserve." At home, I feel a greater sense of safety and acceptance, and also of responsibility and obligation. — Gretchen Rubin

It feels strange to be home, as if I am now just a visitor to the land that I love, no longer really a part of it. I understand for the first time that our sense of belonging is all about participation. We belong because we are part of the work of this place. — James Rebanks

What would it be like, I marveled, to go through life so utterly unwary? So wholly certain of your belonging to a place that it was never necessary to consider how your next move would be perceived?

Timing was everything.

Things always seem to look so much brighter in the fall. Remember you used to tell me that? — Helen Wan

For a moment I felt the quiet hungering thing that comes inside when you return to the place of your origins, and then the ache of mis-belonging. — Sue Monk Kidd

I need the sun, sand and ocean to rejuvenate my spirit, the food to enliven my body and all of the familiar places, friends and family to revitalize my soul. I go for replenishment. For a kind of love that I truly know. For a place of belonging, always. — Grace Gealey

Whereas the tourist generally hurries back home at the end of a few weeks or months, the traveler belonging no more to one place than to the next, moves slowly over periods of years, from one part of the earth to another. Indeed, he would have found it difficult to tell, among the many places he had lived, precisely where it was he had felt most at home. — Paul Bowles

The whole functioning of the mediaeval University was profoundly agonistic and ludic. The everlasting disputations which took the place of our learned discussions in periodicals, etc., the solemn ceremonial which is still such a marked feature of University life, the grouping of scholars into nationes, the divisions and subdivisions, the schisms, the unbridgeable gulfs - all these are phenomena belonging to the sphere of competition and play-rules. Erasmus — Johan Huizinga

It wasn't exactly love at first sight, but it was deeper than that. A sense of belonging to a place I never knew I wanted but somehow always needed. It was a home that carried a heartbeat. — Nikki Rowe

Being engaged in some way for the good of the community, whatever that community, is a factor in a meaningful life. We long to belong, and belonging and caring anchors our sense of place in the universe. — Patricia Churchland