Belonging Quotes (page 13)
Why are you not smarter? It's only the rich who can't afford to be smart. They're compromised. They got locked years ago into privilege. They have to protect their belongings. No one is meaner than the rich. Trust me. But they have to follow the rules of their shitty civilised world. They declare war, they have honour, and they can't leave. But you two. We three. We're free.
Michael Ondaatje
All that I've done, thought or been is a series of submissions, either to a false self that I assumed belonged to me because I expressed myself through it to the outside, or to a weight of circumstances that I supposed was the air I breathed. In this moment of seeing, I suddenly find myself isolated, an exile where I'd always thought I was a citizen. At the heart of my thoughts I wasn't I.
Fernando Pessoa
She took refuge in her newborn son. she had felt him leave her body with a sensation of relief at freeing herself from something that did not belong to her and she had been horrified at herself when she confirmed that she did not feel the slightest affection for that calf from her womb the midwife showed her in the raw, smeared with grease and blood and with the umbilical cord rolled around his neck. But in her lonliness in the palace she learned to know him, they learned to know each...
Gabriel Garcia Marquez
She had been born to cradle other people's children, wear their hand-me-down clothing, eat their leftovers, live on borrowed happiness and grief, grow old beneath other people's roofs, die one day in her miserable little room in the far courtyard in a bed that did not belong to her, and be buried in a common grave in the public cemetery.
Isabel Allende
When you have lived as long as I, you will see that every human being has his shell, and that you must take the shell into acount. By the shell I mean the whole envelope of circumstances. There is no such thing as an isolated man or woman; we are each of us made up of a cluster of apurtenances. What do you call one's self? Where does it begin? Where does it end? It overflows into everythng tht belongs to us - and then flows back again. (...) One's self - for other people - is one's expression...
Henry James