Belonging To Each Other Quotes & Sayings

No house should ever be on a hill or on anything. It should be of the hill. Belonging to it. Hill and house should live together each the happier for the other. — Frank Lloyd Wright

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

There is a growing belief, particularly among those belonging to the fifty-plus age group, that recently married people seem to be tripping over themselves to divorce each other. And often, for frivolous reasons! — Vijay Nagaswami

And we exhaust ourselves with this playful joust, we look at each other, silently, eye to eye, no smiles, nothing more to be said. All at one, we both leap, like wolf mates reunited, searching for that which identifies us as belonging to each other: the scent of our skin, the taste of our tongues, the smoothness of our hair, the saltiness of our necks, the ridges of our spines, the slopes and creases we know so well yet feel so new. He is tender and I am wild, nuzzling and nipping, both of us tumbling until we lose all memory of who we are before this moment, because at his moment we are the same. — Amy Tan

There is some strange sense in which distance and closeness are sisters, the two sides of the one experience. Distance awakens longing; closeness is belonging. Yet they are always in a dynamic interflow with each other. When we fix or locate them definitively, we injure our growth. It is an interesting imaginative exercise to interchange them: to consider what is near as distant and to consider the distant as intimate. — John O'Donohue

Battered and bloody, we join Cassius, Lysander, and Sevro before the door leading out of the Sovereign's inner sanctum as Cassius types in the Olympic code to open the doors. He pauses to sniff the air. 'What's that smell?'
'Smells like a sewer,' I say.
Sevro stares intensely at the razors he's taken from Aja, including the one belonging to Lorn. 'I think it smells like victory.'
'Did you shit your pants?' Cassius squints at him. 'You did.'
'Sevro ... ' Mustang says.
'It's an involuntary muscle reaction when you're fake executed and swallow massive amounts ofhaemanthus oil,' Sevro snaps. 'You think I would do that on purpose?'
Cassius and I look at each other.
I shrug. 'Well, maybe.'
'Yeah, actually.'
He flips us the crux and makes a face, twisting his lips till it looks like he's going to explode. 'What's happening?' I ask. 'Are you ... still ... '
'No! — Pierce Brown

On the seventh day of the Seventh-month, in the Palace of Long Life,
We told each other secretly in the quiet midnight world
That we wished to fly in heaven, two birds with the wings of one,
And to grow together on the earth, two branches of one tree."
Earth endures, heaven endures; some time both shall end,
While this unending sorrow goes on and on for ever. — Bai Juyi

Community as openness ...
Communities are truly communities when they open to others, when they remain vulnerable and humble; when the members are growing in love, in compassion and in humility. Communities cease to be such when members close in upon themselves with the certitude that they alone have wisdom and truth and expect everyone to be like them and learn from them.
The fundamental attitudes of true community, where there is true belonging, are openness, welcome, and listening to God, to the universe, to each other and to other communities. Community life is inspired by the universal and is open to the universal. It is based on forgiveness and openness to those who are different, to the poor and the weak. Sects put up walls and barriers out of fear, out of a need to prove themselves and to create a false security. Community is the breaking down of barriers to welcome difference. — Jean Vanier

The object of man's worship, whatever it be, will naturally be his standard of perfection. He clothes it with every attribute, belonging, in his view, to a perfect character; and this character he himself endeavors to attain. — Simon Greenleaf

No sensitive Christian can be satisfied with a distinction between righteousness and unrighteousness drawn only between communities, with each individual belonging unambiguously on one or the other side of the line. The behavior of "the righteous" is often very disappointing, while "the unrighteous" regularly perform in a manner that is much better than our theology might lead us to expect of them. Thus the need for a perspective that allows for both a rather slow process of sanctification in the Christian life and some sort of divine restraint on the power of sin in the unbelieving community. These theological adjustments to a religious perspective that might otherwise betray strong Manichean tones provide us with yet another reason for openness to a broad-ranging dialogue: Christians have good grounds for believing that their own weakness can be corrected by encountering the strengths of others. — Richard J. Mouw

When psychological education is less rudimentary that it is at present, people belonging to different types will recognize each other's right to exist. Every man will stick to the problems, inward or outward, with which nature has fitted him to deal; and he will restrained, if not by tolerance, at least by the salutary fear of making a fool of himself, from trespassing on the territory of minds belonging to another type. — Aldous Huxley

There is great beauty in the notion of desire. Each of us is a child of the desire of our parents for each other. We are creatures of desire because we are creations of desire. The human heart discovers its most touching music when desire and love inform each other. When we love, we leave our separate solitudes and come toward union, where we complement each other. It is this ancient desire in every heart to discover and come home to its lost other half that awakens and activates its capacity for love and belonging. There are certain things that can happen to us only in solitude, and every life needs a rhythm of solitude in order to experience this. However, the experience of self-discovery, psychological integration, and spiritual growth can happen to us only when our desire draws us out of our shells and toward the precarious and life-giving sanctuary of another heart. — John O'Donohue

There is a privacy about it which no other season gives you ... In spring, summer and fall people sort of have an open season on each other; only in the winter, in the country, can you have longer, quiet stretches when you can savor belonging to yourself. — Ruth Stout

Pretty quickly, I stopped seeing the company as an engine of community. Instead, I saw it as a mythmaker offering only an illusion of belonging and meeting its customers' desire for connections in form, maybe, but surely not in substance. Once I came to this conclusion, I started to dig deeper into the company's other promises
great working conditions, musical discovery, fair treatment of farmer, and concern for the environment. Every time I went excavating, the stories turned out to be more complex, more heavily edited, and more ambiguous than I had first thought. Each time, it became clear that Starbucks fulfilled its many promises only in the thinnest, most transitory of ways and that people's desires went largely unfulfilled. — Bryant Simon

Moreover, we were to each other aspects of a dream unrealized. I emblemized the excitement of freedom, a life untethered by the confines of constructs. She illustrated a sense of belonging, of ongoing laughter in the face of those constructs, a true lifeline within the walking dead. We were standing in different places, yet the same, seeing within each other a sense of truth within the lies, a radiant light that illuminated the dark. — Jackie Haze

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

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.

They are so caught up in their happiness that they don't realize I'm not really a part of it. I am wandering along the periphery. I am like the people in the Winslow Homer paintings, sharing the same room with them but not really there. I am like the fish in the aquarium, thinking in a different language, adapting to a life that's not my natural habitat. I am the people in the other cars, each with his or her own story, but passing too quickly to be noticed or understood.
... There are moments I just sit in my frame, float in my tank, ride in my car and say nothing, think nothing that connects me to anything at all. — David Levithan

And he loved my mother. I saw him on the last days of his life lift that oil-scented right hand and enter its fingers into her ordered hair and rustle it free of its pins as if he had been offered velvet or the fur of a rare animal. Forever I hold that gesture. For me it was perhaps the last remembered pleasure belonging to him. It is the unspoiled core of whatever I know of love and family (and I have not been successful at the craft of it). Our shyness at embracing each other - it rarely happened - did not matter. I felt safe and comforted in his house. — Michael Ondaatje

On the day of the universe's Last Judgment, two humans and a robot belonging to the Earth and Trisolaran civilizations embraced each other in ecstasy. — Liu Cixin

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

We understand that a family is something you make. I grew up hearing 'blood is thicker than water,' and maybe it's true, but in the gay community we've got more than water between us. We've got something stamped onto our DNA, something that marks us as belonging to each other every bit as much as we belong to our birth families. I'm not sure people outside the circle can ever fully understand a connection they've never experienced. — Rachel Spangler

For Abby, "friend" is a word whose sharp corners have been worn smooth by overuse. "I'm friends with the guys in IT," she might say, or "I'm meeting some friends after work."

But she remembers when the word "friend" could draw blood. She and Gretchen spent hours ranking their friendships, trying to determine who was a best friend and who was an everyday friend, debating whether anyone could have two best friends at the same time, writing each other's names over and over in purple ink, buzzed on the dopamine high of belonging to someone else, having a total stranger choose you, someone who wanted to know you, another person who cared that you were alive. — Grady Hendrix

Those soldiers belonging to the victorious side whose blood has oozed into the ground and whose hearts have ceased beating, have they partaken in the triumph as well as those who are unscarred and busy draining cups of sake to each other's glorious deeds? I rather think they belong instead to the defeated."
...
"You mean that those who are killed all belong to the defeated, regardless of which side they were on? — Erik Christian Haugaard

People do belong to each other. Once you make a sacrifice for someone, you own part of his or her soul. — Jodi Picoult

The fog was where I wanted to be. Halfway down the path you can't see this house. You'd never know it was here. Or any of the other places down the avenue. I couldn't see but a few feet ahead. I didn't meet a soul. Everything looked and sounded unreal. Nothing was what it is. That's what I wanted - to be alone with myself in another world where truth is untrue and life can hide from itself. Out beyond the harbor, where the road runs along the beach, I even lost the feeling of being on land. The fog and the sea seemed part of each other. It was like walking on the bottom of the sea. As if I had drowned long ago. As if I was the ghost belonging to the fog, and the fog was the ghost of the sea. It felt damned peaceful to be nothing more than a ghost within a ghost. — Eugene O'Neill

At the exact time that our society embraces shaming, blaming, judgment, and rejection, it also holds acceptance and belonging as immensely important. In other words, it's never been more impossible to 'fit in,' yet 'fitting in' has never been more important and valued — Brene Brown

Marriage, by its very nature, requires complementarity. The mystical union of Christ and the church - each "part" belonging to the other but neither interchangeable - cannot be pictured in marital union without the differentiation of male and female. — Kevin DeYoung

Each member of the family in his own cell of consciousness, each making his own patchwork quilt of reality - collecting fragments of experience here, pieces of information there. From the tiny impressions gleaned from one another, they created a sense of belonging and tried to make do with the way they found each other. — Toni Morrison