All Quotes By Tag: Belonging

“…to create a sense of belonging takes dedicated time and space to listen and to care for each other, whether we are talking about the extended family, a nuclear family, a couple or friends. -Isla Crawford”

“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.”

“They say in extreme moments time will slow, returning to its unmoving core, and standing there, it seemed as if everything stopped. Within the stillness, I felt the old, irrepressible ache to know what my point in the world might be. I felt the longing more solemnly than anything I’d ever felt, even more than my old innate loneliness. What came to me was the fleur de lis button in the box and the lost girl who’d put it there, how I’d twice carried it from Charleston to Philadelphia and back, carried it like a sad, decaying hope.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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!”

“What love actually is, is the action on a spontaneous positive impulse or idea. Love is the third step in connection—the first step is kindness, which is an investment of emotion to reach out and motivate someone. The second step is social intelligence where we consider all the possible things we could do to make a situation more enjoyable in the short and long term. The last step is love, which is action. Once we get to the third step there is no reason to question it. If our intuition already took care of the first step and our intellect confirmed it, whether or not our action also benefits us, it doesn’t matter. In neither of the three steps, kindness, social intelligence or love should there be consideration for whether something also indirectly benefits us, because that is irrelevant, even if we might be criticized for it. Bartering is weighing possible criticism or praise into what good deeds we choose to do.”

“Perhaps home is not a place but simply an irrevocable condition.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”