Quotes about Belonging

It is this rattling I believe that affects the second point: our uneasiness with our own feelings of foreignness, our own rapidly fraying sense of belonging. To what do we pay greatest allegiance? Family, language group, culture, country, gender? Religion, race? And if none of these matter, are we urbane, cosmopolitan, or simply lonely? In other words, how do we decide where we belong? What convinces us that we do? Or put another way, what is the matter with foreignness?

if she wishes to be American—to be known as such and to actually belong—she must become a thing unimaginable in her home country: she must become white.

Somehow, some way, the child assuaged the tiny yet eternal yearning for the home Lina once knew where everyone had anything and no one had everything.

for one's language, the one we dream in, is home.

Much of the alarm hovering at the borders, the gates, is stoked, it seems to me, by (1) both the threat and the promise of globalism and (2) an uneasy relationship with our own foreignness, our own rapidly disintegrating sense of belonging. Let me begin with globalization. In

Church is not for spectators.

Our citizenship is in heaven" (Philippians 3:20a). That's our home. That's the kingdom to which we belong. We just work down here. Understanding this key spiritual truth is fundamental to all we do on earth.

Death most resembles a prophet who is without honor in his own land or a poet who is a stranger among his people.

When you forget who you are and whose you are, you start to compromise.

I do believe that people can only be in love with one landscape in their lifetime. One can appreciate and enjoy many geographies, but there is only one that one feels in one's bones.

There is no home left for universal souls, except perhaps in Antarctica or on the high seas.

So what is it, he thought, that binds me to this spot of earth as if to a home I cannot leave? We must all leave home, after all, we must all leave our mothers. Or am I such a child, such a child from such a line of children, that none of us can leave, but have to come back to die here with our heads upon our mothers' laps, I upon hers, she upon her mother's, and so back and back, generation upon generation?