Quotes about belonging

Ceremony is a vehicle for belonging—to a family, to a people, and to the land.

People always say, "It's good to be a part of a something bigger than yourself," but you already are. You're part of a huge thing. The whole of humanity. That's enormous. But you can't see it, so you pick, what? An organization? A culture? A religion? That's not bigger than you. It's much, much smaller!

Leaving, I discovered, did not cure my displacement, but rather reinforced it.

Even before Mother interrupted my rally, the support of the Orïshans didn’t touch the boundless joy of these maji. I wonder what it would be like to be embraced like that. To actually have a place where you belong.

"I still had this idea that there was a whole world of marvelous golden people somewhere, as far ahead of me as the seniors at Rye when I was in sixth grade; people who knew everything instinctively, who made their lives work out the way they wanted without even trying, who never had to make the best of a bad job because it never occurred to them to do anything less than perfectly the first time. Sort of heroic super-people, all of them beautiful and witty and calm and kind, and I always imagined that when I did find them I'd suddenly know that I belonged among them, that I was one of them, that I'd been meant to be one of them all along, and everything in the meantime had been a mistake; and they'd know it too. I'd be like the ugly duckling among the swans."

I could now move without effort from one world to the other as easily as I could change my clothes, but I appreciated that I was in danger of belonging to neither.  When I was among my own people, a shadowy figure was always at my side watching them with critical, intolerant eyes.

Spread along the platform was a mass of bobbing black hair like a long wave of silk. Suddenly I felt the first stirrings of what I would later come to recognize as kinship, a feeling that alarmed me, a sense that I was of a piece with a group of people for the most basic reasons, simple to the senses and irrational. They all looked like me.

There was something about the way the old man said the word "comfortable." It had a different meaning--not the comfort of big houses or rich food or even clean streets, but the comfort of belonging with the land, and the peace of being with these hills. (p108)

We have to belong to ourselves as much as we need to belong to others. Any belonging that asks us to betray ourselves is not true belonging.

Ever since I can remember, my thoughts have been plagued by a sense that I was a little out of whack, as if belonging was beyond me.

I'm stunned. Is this a trick to steal my shoes? Thirty-year carnie vet Wayne-o is offering me, me, a corn dog. I think I've officially been accepted as a fellow carny! We all want acceptance, and maybe that's the allure of the carny life—no matter how big of a freak you are in the outside world, if you work hard enough, you can be accepted as a carny.

"It's been so long that I think I was unsettled by the idea of feeling like I belonged anywhere. But you made me feel like I belong."