Quotes About Not Belonging

#1. The feeling of being an underdog, not belonging, is very much me. You harbour a little feeling of resentment towards the 'upper dog'.

Asa Larsson

#2. I grew up in a Mauritian bubble in France ... I had the feeling of not belonging, but still living with French culture.

J.M.G. Le Clezio

#3. And all that talk about the breakup being good for us- who am I trying to fool? I'm cut loose, untethered, not belonging to anything or anybody.

Amy Tan

#4. Language, identity, place, home: these are all of a piece - just different elements of belonging and not-belonging.

Jhumpa Lahiri

#5. It was the feeling of not belonging, and longing for your familiar couch and your familiar TV with all those comforting TV people who couldn't see you.

Deb Caletti

#6. Every girl comes into the world with varying degrees of ambition," she said, "even if it's only the hope of not belonging body and soul to her husband.

Sue Monk Kidd

#7. Something in me was always watching life from the outside, permanently obsessed with the notion of belonging vs. not-belonging [to a group]. It did not make for a happy childhood, but it was excellent training for a writer.

Barbara Kingsolver

#8. Love is being, not belonging. Giving and receiving, not possessing.

Isabel Vincent

#9. I recently heard a great writer say that an essential element in the life of a writer is to have been an outsider in childhood, to have been given the "gift" of not belonging.

Elizabeth Lesser

#10. Where there are those who honour their locality and celebrate a sense of belonging, others can be cast out as not belonging. And here are the seeds of racism and persecution. When the romantic reifies the land, ugly things might be done in the name of that land.

Adam Sharr

#11. The feeling of not belonging, of not being entirely worthy, of being sometimes hostage to your own sensibilities. Those things speak to me very personally.

Anthony Minghella

#12. Of course in Turkey I'm seen as being on the 'Western' side, criticised by the nationalists, criticised by the communitarians as not belonging. Even, sometimes, criticised for looking at my country through Western eyes. And in the Western media I'm portrayed as belonging to the East.

Orhan Pamuk

#13. Not belonging will give you the freedom to follow your dreams instead of the crowd.

Trisha Goddard

#14. Everyone reads Harper Lee personally. For me, 'Mockingbird' was about admitting my own hyphenated identity - about loving and hating my world, about both belonging and not belonging to the community I came from.

Margaret Stohl

#15. After a while Estevan said, What I really hate is not belonging in any place. To be unwanted everywhere.

Barbara Kingsolver

#16. Not belonging is a terrible feeling. It feels awkward and it hurts, as if you were wearing someone else's shoes.

Phoebe Stone

#17. The same feeling of not belonging, of futility, wherever I go: I pretend interest in what matters nothing to me, I bestir myself mechanically or out of charity, without ever being caught up, without ever being somewhere. What attracts me is elsewhere, and I don't know where that elsewhere is.

Emil Cioran

#18. Not belonging is the greatest gift. Always remember that.

Lauren Kate

#19. A mixture, before the English, of irritation and bafflement, of having this same language, same past, so many same things, and yet not belonging to them any more. Being worse than rootless ... speciesless.

John Fowles

#20. You'll say things all wrong but they'll at once become American ways of saying things. You won't know shit but it'll right away become an American type of ignorance. Not belonging, that's an old American tradition, see?, that's the American way.

Salman Rushdie

#21. Adoption has the dimension of connection - not only to your own tribe, but beyond, widening the scope of what constitutes love, ties and family. It is a larger embrace. By adopting, we stretch past our immediate circles and, by reaching out, find an unexpected sense of belonging with others.

Isabella Rossellini

#22. Man cannot reach the shrine if he does not make the pilgrimage.
Languages are jealous. They do not give up their best treasures to those who try to deal with them through an intermediary belonging to an alien rival.

Rabindranath Tagore

#23. One must not count in thousands, like the propagandist belonging to a small group that has not yet given leadership to the masses; in these circumstances one must count in millions and tens of millions.

Vladimir Lenin

#24. The hardest thing about being at Sony was not the travel; it was being divorced from the public and private life I had in New York. Travelling as much as I did, while I didn't lose connection with my friends, I lost a sense of belonging.

Howard Stringer

#25. I don't carry myself as a black person but as a woman that belongs to everybody. After all, it's the general public that made me - not any one particular group. So I don't think of myself as belonging to any particular group and never have.

Eartha Kitt

#26. That's what being a demigod was all about, not quite belonging in the mortal world or on Mount Olympus but trying to make peace with both sides of their nature.

Rick Riordan

#27. Ronan taught me that children do not exist to honor their parents; their parents exist to honor them. [ ... ] Ronan was mine but he never belonged to me. This is not an issue of ownership. A child is not a couch.

Emily Rapp

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

Michelle Harrison

#29. She has a look," I said, "of not altogether belonging to today.

Robert Nathan

#30. I'm not practising, I don't go to church, but what I got from it was a sense of belonging to something bigger. What I really miss is being forced to be in a community with people that aren't the same as you. Then, you really have to work through the ways that you're different.

Win Butler

#31. Here's what is truly at the heart of wholeheartedness: Worthy now, not if, not when, we're worthy of love and belonging now. Right this minute. As is.

Brene Brown

#32. The dynamism of any diverse community depends not only on the diversity itself but on promoting a sense of belonging among those who formerly would have been considered and felt themselves outsiders.

Sonia Sotomayor

#33. The spiritual is inclusive. It is the deepest sense of belonging and participation.We all participate in the spiritual at all times, whether we know it or not.

Rachel Naomi Remen

#34. As for poetry 'belonging' in the classroom, it's like the way they taught us sex in those old hygiene classes: not performance but semiotics. If it I had taken Hygiene 71 seriously, I would have become a monk; & if I had taken college English seriously, I would have become an accountant.

Jerome Rothenberg

#35. Our Christian identity is belonging to a people: the Church. Without the Church we are not Christians.

Pope Francis

#36. I don't belong to anyone! I'm not a thing, to be kept or ordered or driven to such despair that I open my own veins. Look at me, Aoife. Look at me! I'm a woman.

Nicola Griffith

#37. Each state, so that it does not abridge the great fundamental rights belonging, under the Constitution, to all citizens, may grant or withhold such civil rights as it pleases; all that is required is that, in this respect, its laws shall be impartial.

Lyman Trumbull

#38. I think anytime you can share images that make young women feel a sense of belonging when they might not be feeling their best or their strongest is so cool.

Petra Collins

#39. Before I took the veil, I was ornamented for the ceremony, and was clothed in a rich dress belonging to the Convent, which was used on such occasions; and placed not far from the altar in the chapel, in the view of a number of spectators who had assembled, perhaps about forty.

Maria Monk

#40. I can't even think of the right word, but it's not "help." It's more like a prerequisite. I think connection is why we're here, it's what gives purpose and meaning to our lives, and belonging is in our DNA. And so "tribe" and "belonging" are irreducible needs, like love.

Brene Brown

#41. Sometimes something that you've been asking for
It'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

#42. I have the greatest love for the rituals of organised religion - the sense of community and belonging it can confer to people. But me, I'm more a questioner than a follower; not by whim or fashion, but as a decision painfully arrived at after much, much thought.

Kabir Bedi

#43. Not to look back or feel sad about things, that home is wherever I am.

Donna Tartt

#44. A man who thinks of himself as belonging to a particular national group in America has not yet become an American. And the man who goes among you to trade upon your nationality is no worthy son to live under the Stars and Stripes.

Woodrow Wilson

#45. Travel does not exist without home ... If we never return to the place we started, we would just be wandering, lost. Home is a reflecting surface, a place to measure our growth and enrich us after being infused with the outside world.

Josh Gates

#46. Thus he has two standpoints from which he can consider himself...: first, as belonging to the world of sense, under the laws of nature (heteronomy), and, second, as belonging to the intelligible world under laws which, independent of nature, are not empirical but founded only on reason.

Immanuel Kant

#47. Home is ultimately not about a place to live but about the people with whom you are most fully alive. Home is about love, relationship, community, and belonging, and we are all searching for home.

Erwin Raphael McManus

#48. Liberty is not an Idea belonging to Volition, or preferring; but to the Person having the Power of doing, or forbearing to do, according as the Mind shall chuse or direct.

John Locke

#49. Bean could see the hunger in their eyes. Not the regular hunger, for food, but the real hunger, the deep hunger, for family, for love, for belonging.

Orson Scott Card

#50. Science, enabled by engineering, empowered by NASA, tells us not only that we are in the universe but that the universe is in us. And for me, that sense of belonging elevates, not denigrates, the ego.

Neil DeGrasse Tyson

#51. 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

#52. It's not an accidental entanglement; it's an intentional knot. Love belongs with belonging.

Brene Brown

#53. I wonder whether there is such a thing as a sense of individuality. Is it all a facade, covering a deep need to belong? Are we simply pack animals desperately trying to pretend we are not?

Rabih Alameddine

#54. Everybody feels safe belonging not to the excluded minority but to the excluding majority. You think, Oh, I'm glad that's not me. It's basically the same in all periods in all societies. If you belong to the majority, you can avoid thinking about lots of troubling things.

Haruki Murakami

#55. People have asked the question "Can a Thing exist without any Attributes belonging to it?" It is a very puzzling question, and I'm not going to try to answer it: let us turn up our noses, and treat it with contemptuous silence, as if it really wasn't worth noticing.

Lewis Carroll

#56. The aim is not to give human beings real goals that warrant belief, and tasks to share in, but to re-establish "belonging," although this kind of speech and thought is precisely calculated to avoid contact and so makes belonging impossible.

Paul Goodman

#57. Identity does not grow out of action until it has taken root in belonging.

Charles Martin

#58. but I couldn't get through the day wearing clothes belonging to elderly people. I am not Alexa Chung

Marian Keyes

#59. I think that all research scientists think of themselves as belonging to a grand tradition, building on work that has been worked on since the very beginning of science itself. Whereas I'm not sure writers think of themselves in the same way.

Hanya Yanagihara

#60. When you get to a place where you understand that love and belonging, your worthiness, is a birthright and not something you have to earn, anything is possible.

Brene Brown

#61. I don't think you really belong here, Aviger." Xoxarle nodded wisely, slowly.
Aviger shrugged, and did not raise his eyes. "I don't think any of us do."
"The brave belong where they decide." Some harshness entered the Idiran's voice.

Iain Banks

#62. Every time I add something I truly believe is original and belonging to myself it ends up being stolen orn taken down.
So No! I will not add any quotes Besides it's considered a Narcissistic act to quote oneself in my book.

Zachary Appleton

#63. Do you not understand?" he whispered. "I have never belonged to anyone. Not since I was a child. It is a lonely thing to be unclaimed by another. The idea that I could be yours seduces me more than you can know.

Kristen Callihan

#64. God is not related to creatures as though belonging to a different "genus," but as transcending every "genus," and as the principle of all "genera.

Thomas Aquinas

#65. Everything in the Universe is for us. Nothing is against us. Life is ever giving of Itself. We must receive, utilize and extend the gift. Success and prosperity are spiritual attributes belonging to all people, but not necessarily used by all people." - Ernest Holmes in The Science of Mind

John Randolph Price

#66. TCK builds relationships to all of the cultures, while not having full ownership in any. Although elements from each culture are assimilated into the TCK's life experience, the sense of belonging is in relationship to others of similar background.

David C. Pollock

#67. My hope is that my personal testimony can help in some way to not only
advance the dialogue and approve Referendum 74, but also to help shape a
culture of belonging in which ALL people are equal.

Macklemore

#68. The only thing worse than not knowing where she belonged...was knowing where she didn't.

Tessa Shaffer

#69. Tru, this is your home. You are my blood kin, my second cousin thrice removed. But blood kin's not the most important kin. Do you know what is?" "No, sir." "Love kin. And that comes from the heart. That's why this is your home.

G. Neri

#70. Civil Rights: What black folks are given in the U.S. on the installment plan, as in civil-rights bills. Not to be confused with human rights, which are the dignity, stature, humanity, respect, and freedom belonging to all people by right of their birth.

Dick Gregory

#71. We are biologically, cognitively, physically, and spiritually wired to love, be loved, and to belong. When those needs are not met, we don't function as were meant to be. We break. We fall apart. We numb. We ache ... The absence of love and belonging will always lead to suffering.

Brene Brown

#72. 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.

Brene Brown

#73. He could not return to living full-time with the Dursleys, not now that he knew the other world, the one to which he really belonged.

J.K. Rowling

#74. Injuries to the body, especially the face, are not treated simply as problems of form. We should rather speak of themas belonging in the province of mental hygiene. Otherwise, who whould willingly devote his efforts to cosmetic work?

Kobo Abe

#75. And in history I found that Christianity, so far from belonging to the Dark Ages, was the one path across the Dark Ages that was not dark.

G.K. Chesterton

#76. Rootlessness," I opine, "is the twenty-first century norm."
"You're not wrong and that's why we're in the shit we're in, mate. If you belong nowhere, why give a tinker's toss about anywhere?

David Mitchell

#77. I always prided myself on being apart from the ruling class. I think it's always important, not just in Washington but in life, to be able to able to balance your sense of belonging with what it's like to be someone who doesn't belong.

Mark Leibovich

#78. Do not let me hear
Of the wisdom of old men, but rather of their folly,
Their fear of fear and frenzy, their fear of possession,
Of belonging to another, or to others, or to God.
The only wisdom we can hope to acquire
Is the wisdom of humility: humility is endless.

T. S. Eliot

#79. Isolation and belonging are not absolute, provable states of being. They arise completely out of the nothingness within you; you measure their dimensions against your own firm or shaky sense of who you are.

Paula Sharp

#80. My faith did not require beauty or belonging - the deeper I went into my practice, the less it required at all.

G. Willow Wilson

#81. Only I do hope it's my dream, and not the Red King's! I don't like belonging to another person's dream,

Lewis Carroll

#82. Beauty is the replication and duplication of mind's delusion. It is not uniqueness or exceptionality; it is the mentality of belonging and fitting in.

M.F. Moonzajer

#83. Why now? Why not? Live or die, a man and a woman need love. There is a need in the race. We need to share. To belong. Perhaps you will die before the year is out. But remember this: to have may be taken from you, to have had never. Far better to have tasted love before dying, than to die alone.

David Gemmell

#84. Why can't life be like this? Human beings in all their magnificence. Working to find that moment of pride. That one second of excellence at being alive...The feeling of belonging not just to oneself but to the entire universe.

Ron Jones

#85. Belonging to another man and therefore not even a little bit to him.

Jhumpa Lahiri

#86. I feel like I'm supposed to make some comment to underscore the ridiculousness of it all, but honestly? It's sort of nice not to have to be cynical for a change. I guess it feels like I'm a part of something.

Becky Albertalli

#87. Beautiful places are not just a joy for the moment, while you're there. They will become homes for you, spaces of solace and comfort, where you can close your eyes and go to. Nothing you experience will ever go away. It belongs to you now. Just feel. Don't be afraid to feel.

Charlotte Eriksson

#88. When i write, i'm capable of having a girl of my dreams. She may not be perfect, but she's mine. And i'm her role model for God.

Ariel Seraphino

#89. The simple faith in progress is not a conviction belonging to strength, but one belonging to acquiescence and hence to weakness.

Norbert Wiener

#90. Each of us promenades his thought, like a monkey on a leash. When you read, you always have to such monkeys: your own and one belonging to someone else. Or, even worse, a monkey and a hyena. Now, consider what you will feed them. For a hyena does not eat the same things as a monkey ...

Milorad Pavic

#91. Why not be a communist, she thinks, if it means that kind of belonging?

David Rakoff

#92. As a civilian not playing sport, to get that sense of real belonging and feeling how you are progressing through the day is what I loved and miss.

Matthew Hayden

#93. In all his years he had not seen one as ancient as this, so obviously belonging to a world far older than his own.

Stephen Lloyd Jones

#94. It was peace, deeper and broader than the starfields around him. It was belonging. It was freedom. Kneeling before the one who could only be the Ancient had not been the cost of freedom, but the means. For a long time he laughed and wept and laughed again, released.

Jonathan Renshaw

#95. 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

#96. He said it was better to belong where you don't belong than not to belong where you used to belong, remembering when you used to belong there.

Terry Pratchett

#97. She had borne so long this cruelty of belonging to him and not being claimed by him.

D.H. Lawrence

#98. The problem has not been finding a place where I belong, which is how a children's book might tell it, but of finding ways of insisting on belonging nowhere.

Eula Biss

#99. Divine love is not something belonging to God: it is God Himself.

Henri Bergson

#100. 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