Belonging Quotes

“That is part of the beauty of all literature. You discover that your longings are universal longings, that you're not lonely and isolated from anyone. You belong.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald

“I have learned that if you must leave a place that you have lived in and loved and where all your yesteryears are buried deep, leave it any way except a slow way, leave it the fastest way you can. Never turn back and never believe that an hour you remember is a better hour because it is dead. Passed years seem safe ones, vanquished ones, while the future lives in a cloud, formidable from a distance.”
― Beryl Markham, West with the Night

“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.”
― Brene Brown

“Perhaps home is not a place but simply an irrevocable condition.”
― James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room

“Home's where you go when you run out of homes.”
― John le Carré, The Honourable Schoolboy

“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.

“I don't even remember the season. I just remember walking between them and feeling for the first time that I belonged somewhere.”
― Stephen Chbosky, The Perks of Being a Wallflower

“Because true belonging only happens when we present our authentic, imperfect selves to the world, our sense of belonging can never be greater than our level of self-acceptance.”
― Brené Brown, Daring Greatly: How the Courage to Be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent, and Lead

“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, Daring Greatly: How the Courage to Be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent, and Lead

“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.

“I feel sorry for anyone who is in a place where he feels strange and stupid.”
― Lois Lowry, The Giver

“We are all strangers in a strange land, longing for home, but not quite knowing what or where home is. We glimpse it sometimes in our dreams, or as we turn a corner, and suddenly there is a strange, sweet familiarity that vanishes almost as soon as it comes.”
― Madeleine L'Engle, The Rock That Is Higher: Story as Truth

“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, The Speckled People: A Memoir of a Half-Irish Childhood

“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, Breakfast at Tiffany’s and Three Stories

“Home is a notion that only nations of the homeless fully appreciate and only the uprooted comprehend.”
― Wallace Stegner, Angle of Repose

“I have an idea that some men are born out of their due place. Accident has cast them amid certain surroundings, but they have always a nostalgia for a home they know not. They are strangers in their birthplace, and the leafy lanes they have known from childhood or the populous streets in which they have played, remain but a place of passage. They may spend their whole lives aliens among their kindred and remain aloof among the only scenes they have ever known. Perhaps it is this sense of strangeness that sends men far and wide in the search for something permanent, to which they may attach themselves. Perhaps some deep-rooted atavism urges the wanderer back to lands which his ancestors left in the dim beginnings of history.”
― W. Somerset Maugham, The Moon and Sixpence

“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., Requiem for a Dream

“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, All About Love: New Visions

“Some of us aren't meant to belong. Some of us have to turn the world upside down and shake the hell out of it until we make our own place in it.”
― Elizabeth Lowell, Remember Summer

“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

“Society, as we have constituted it, will have no place for me, has none to offer; but Nature, whose sweet rains fall on unjust and just alike, will have clefts in the rocks where I may hide, and secret valleys in whose silence I may weep undisturbed. She will hang the night with stars so that I may walk abroad in the darkness without stumbling, and send the wind over my footprints so that none may track me to my hurt: she will cleanse me in great waters, and with bitter herbs make me whole.”
― Oscar Wilde, De Profundis

“I've always tried to make a home for myself, but I have not felt at home in myself. I've worked hard at being the hero of my own life. But every time I checked the register of displaced persons, I was still on it. I didn't know how to belong. Longing? Yes. Belonging? No.”
― Jeanette Winterson, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

“Shrinking in a corner,
pressed into the wall;
do they know I'm present,
am I here at all?

Is there a written rule book,
that tells you how to be—
all the right things to talk about—
that everyone has but me?

Slowly I am withering—
a flowered deprived of sun;
longing to belong to—
somewhere or someone.”
― Lang Leav, Love & Misadventure

“Language is the only homeland.”
― Czesław Miłosz

“I been with strangers all day and they treated me like family. I come in here to family and you treat me like a stranger.”
― August Wilson, The Piano Lesson

“How could you ever feel comfortable if no matter where you went you felt like you belonged someplace else?”
― Mark Peter Hughes, Lemonade Mouth

“You will always be one of us.”
― Leigh Bardugo, Ruin and Rising

“It’s not always enough to go looking for the place we belong. Sometimes we need to make that place.”
― Sangu Mandanna, The Very Secret Society of Irregular Witches

“Is love this misguided need to have you beside me most of the time? Is love this safety I feel in our silences? Is it this belonging, this completeness?”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Half of a Yellow Sun

“You feel more like home to me than any place I've ever been.”
― Angela N. Blount, Once Upon an Ever After