Quotes about Belonging

Cecelia, as with every look and gesture she let us know, was entirely at ease only in the company of her equals—a company that included, besides herself, only her sister. And of course Cecelia held some secret doubts about herself; you can't dislike nearly everybody and be quite certain that you have exempted yourself.

But if nobody can ever quite be nothing to you in Port William, then everybody finally has got to be something to you.

he gave up the idea that there is a better place somewhere else. There is no better place than this, not in this world. And it is by the place we've got, and our love for it and our keeping of it, that this world is joined to Heaven.

The way we are, we are members of each other. All of us. Everything. The difference ain't in who is a member and who is not, but in who knows it and who don't. Burley Coulter

And in the fields and the town, walking, standing, or sitting under the trees, resting and talking together in the peace of a sabbath profound and bright, are people of such beauty that he weeps to see them. He sees that these are the membership of one another and of the place and of the song or light in which they live and move.

I began to take for granted that I was somewhere, and somewhere that I knew, but I never quite felt that I was somewhere I wanted to be.

Surely heaven must have something of the color and shape of whatever village or hill or cottage of which the believer says, This is my own.

Your outside is just what you live in, sleep in, and has little connection with who you are and even less with what you do.

when she spoke even now, after forty years, among the slurred consonants and the flat vowels of the land where her life had been cast, New England talked as plainly as it did in the speech of her kin who had never left New Hampshire

This world is not his world; this life his life.

Jews who long have drifted from the faith of their fathers... are stirred in their inmost parts when the old, familiar Passover sounds chance to fall upon their ears.

To be admitted to Nature's hearth costs nothing. None is excluded, but excludes himself. You have only to push aside the curtain.