Belonging Quotes

Owning our story can be hard but not nearly as difficult as spending our lives running from it. Embracing our vulnerabilities is risky but not nearly as dangerous as giving up on love and belonging and joy—the experiences that make us the most vulnerable. Only when we are brave enough to explore the darkness will we discover the infinite power of our light.

~ Brené Brown

She didn't belong anywhere and she never really belonged to anyone. And everyone else belonged somewhere and to someone. People thought she was too wonderful. But she only wanted to belong to someone. People always thought she was too wonderful to belong to them or that something too wonderful would hurt too much to lose. And that's why she liked him-- because he just thought she was crazy.

~ C. Joybell C.

Before, I wanted to say: I found love! But now, I want to say: I found a person. And he belongs to me and I belong to him.

~ C. Joybell C.

Vulnerability is the birthplace of love, belonging, joy, courage, empathy, and creativity. It is the source of hope, empathy, accountability, and authenticity. If we want greater clarity in our purpose or deeper and more meaningful spiritual lives, vulnerability is the path.

~ Brené Brown

I feel sorry for anyone who is in a place where he feels strange and stupid.

~ Lois Lowry

Maybe your country is only a place you make up in your own mind. Something you dream about and sing about. Maybe it's not a place on the map at all, but just a story full of people you meet and places you visit, full of books and films you've been to. I'm not afraid of being homesick and having no language to live in. I don't have to be like anyone else. I'm walking on the wall and nobody can stop me.

~ Hugo Hamilton

Those who have a strong sense of love and belonging have the courage to be imperfect.

~ Brené Brown

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

Plain Kate greased her boots and bandaged her feet, and soon she would walk like a Roamer born. She helped Drina with the water and the wood, and in the long, wet evenings she carved objarka burji.Plain Kate carved fast and learned slowly. She was bewildered most of the time, but Daj called her mira again, and when she asked Drina what it meant, the girl replied, It means she likes you. It means your family.Family. It could have kept her walking for a hundred miles. And she did walk far.

~ Erin Bow

Taggle, meanwhile, made himself popular, killing rats and bringing a rabbit into camp every evening, preening in the praise - silently, thank god, though at night, he recounted choice bits to Kate: Rye Baro says I am a princeling; he split the leg bone for me so that I could eat the marrow. They love me. And I'm sure they'll keep you, too.Mira, she thought, and treasured it each time she heard it, They must keep me. Family.

~ Erin Bow

Later, you told me what your mother had said. How your father, the farmer, rose up slowly. You told me how your mother wailed on the other end of the phone, grieving her loss and complaining about the basketball of a goitre perched on her shoulder. She told you, your father walked onto the veranda and saw a chook floating ten feet above the ground. The chook didn’t flap a feather and just sat there brooding, swaying in the breeze.

~ Jon Gresham

It was a great mistake, my being born a man, I would have been much more successful as a seagull or a fish. As it is, I will always be a stranger who never feels at home, who does not really want and is not really wanted, who can never belong, who must be a little in love with death!

~ Eugene O'neill

Everything might scatter. You might be right. I suppose it's something we can't easily get away from. People need to feel they belong. To a nation, to a race. Otherwise, who knows what might happen? This civilisation of ours, perhaps it'll just collapse. And everything scatter, as you put it.

~ Kazuo Ishiguro

Pa never told stories like Grandpa. Or treated the barn like family. Eli knew how Grandpa’s own pa had built the barn by hand, hauling bluestone for the foundation behind a stubborn ox with horns as wide as a tractor. How the smell of the plank walls was like family and how you never washed your chore coat so the animals would smell that you were family, too.

~ Sandra Neil Wallace

The fundamental emotional need of every child is being-with.

~ Dragos Bratasanu

To be able to open the heart again after betrayal, injury, or loss is a precious act. It requires both courage and compassion. It requires a new movement to emerge from the depths of grief. Forgiveness is one of the most certain paths to restoration, and it is also one of the most difficult. However, it is an attempt to return to wholeness, once again, by letting go and freeing myself from the tight clutch and heavy burden of caution, anger, resentment, and the desire for revenge and punishment. In forgiving others, I free myself towards belonging and wholeness, be it with the person I am forgiving, or with myself.

~ Sharon Weil

Life is energy and, as such, it belongs to all, reaches all, and blesses all.

~ Donna Goddard

...I have big dreams, too. I used to think that made me different and strange. But when I came here and found all these books, I realized there are places in the world where I belong, even if I haven't found them yet.

~ Walt Disney Company

A generous heart is always open, always ready to receive our going and coming. In the midst of such love we need never fear abandonment. This is the most precious gift true love offers - the experience of knowing we always belong.

~ Bell Hooks

What a wonderful life, to be blessed with many sacred brothers and sisters?

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

Nothing belongs to itself anymore. These trees are yours because you once looked at them. These streets are yours because you once traversed them. These coffee shops and bookshops, these cafés and bars, their sole owner is you. They gave themselves so willingly, surrendering to your perfume. You sang with the birds and they stopped to listen to you. You smiled at the sheepish stars and they fell into your hair. The sun and moon, the sea and mountain, they have all left from heartbreak. Nothing belongs to itself anymore. You once spoke to Him, and then God became yours. He sits with us in darkness now to plot how to make you ours.” K.K.

~ Kamand Kojouri

As Isabel acted out her date, both of them laughing, I stayed in the kitchen, out of sight, and pretended she was telling me, too. And that, for once, I was part of this hidden language of laughter and silliness and girls that was, somehow, friendship.

~ Sarah Dessen

If I exist, then surely there must be someone else out there like me.

~ Joyce Rachelle

And I decided it really was true after all. You only really need two people to believe in the same thing, to feel as though you just might belong.

~ Joanna Cannon

I know what it's like not to have friends. People need friends. Life's not much fun without them.

~ Michelle Harrison

I didn't just see a child in my dreams—I felt it in my heart.

~ Seth Adam Smith

Sometimes something that you've been asking forIt's just something that you could not see before. For it was something that made you belong,And that was there the whole time all along.

~ Ana Claudia Antunes

I have sometimes sacrificed freedom in order to belong, but more often I have given up all hope of belonging.

~ Jeanette Winterson

Art is my cure to all this madness, sadness and loss of belonging in the world & through it I'll walk myself home.

~ Nikki Rowe

She tried to remember all the times she had spoken to him. She replayed every moment she could remember at the beach last week. Not once had she led him to believe that she liked him improperly. And yet, last night, he had appeared as if she had invited him. She had given herself so willingly, so lasciviously, that he must have thought she had desired him all along. Perhaps she had, or perhaps she had not realised how pleasurable intimacy could be.

~ Mahita Vas

Some women's arms are placed of exile, others are a native land.

~ Amin Maalouf

Some women's arms are places of exile, others are a native land.

~ Amin Maalouf

She was neither widow nor mother: she only yearned for the dignity of a woman who had once belonged, somewhere, to somebody. She had belonged to no one, for she had never wanted chick nor child. Her idea of home had been any side-alley entrance and a pint of tinted gin. All she had ever striven for was small change left lying by strangers on North Clark Street bars; and any man's bottle at all.

~ Nelson Algren

I never said it was easy to find your place in this world, but I’m coming to the conclusion that if you seek to please others, you will forever be changing because you will never be yourself, only fragments of someone you could be. You need to belong to yourself, and let others belong to themselves too. You need to be free and detached from things and your surroundings. You need to build your home in your own simple existence, not in friends, lovers, your career or material belongings, because these are things you will lose one day. That’s the natural order of this world. This is called the practice of detachment.

~ Charlotte Eriksson

Especially at a time when one's life was new, roots helped.

~ Barbara Delinsky

You yearn to stay in this in-between place, where the beauty of the times you have freshly bade farewell to is still alive and vivid in your mind – almost real – and the reality of your new circumstances has yet to fully sink in. You listen to the familiar melodies that had accompanied you on your journey, and allow the music to evoke landscapes and scenes in your mind. The songs caress your sub-consciousness and fill your being with an airy joy. You are both here and elsewhere. Or perhaps you are everywhere and nowhere.

~ Agnes Chew

Moments later, I was climbing nervously into the back of the car. The driver wore the archetypal expression of an antagonist. No words were exchanged beyond the brief lines uttered to this nameless stranger, whose inclinations remained unclear. The car sped along empty roads and traversed dingy alleyways. Music blared from its speakers. I did not remember exhaling throughout the entire journey.

~ Agnes Chew

There’s a drive in a lost soul—in one that is searching for acceptance, companionship, belonging, whatever you want to call it. The slightest coincidence ignites a spark that one hopes will lead to something meaningful.

~ Doug Cooper

I've never been somewhere I belonged, but there are places where I think I could be happy. Like San Francisco. Well, do art museums count? Because I feel like I belong in them.

~ Heather Demetrios

We should have realized it sooner, at least my father should have, that there was no coming back. Not in September when the riots died down, not in October when the subcontinent still lay in shock, not even in November as he had hoped and promised us. Lahore was now lost forever

~ Aanchal Malhotra