#belonging

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. ↗

— Kazuo Ishiguro

#chaos #civilization #destruction #fear #insecurity

People enjoy the interaction on the Internet, and the feeling of belonging to a group that does something interesting: that's how some software projects are born. ↗

— Linus Torvalds

#born #does #enjoy #feeling #group

No house should ever be on a hill or on anything. It should be of the hill. Belonging to it. Hill and house should live together each the happier for the other. ↗

— Frank Lloyd Wright

#belonging #each #ever #happier #hill

Out of absolutely nowhere I felt a sudden, sweet shot of joy, piercing and distilled as the jolt I imagine heroin users get when the fix hits the vein. It was my partner bracing herself on her hands as she slid fluidly off the desk, it was the neat practiced movement of flipping my notebook shut one-handed, it was my superintendent wriggling into his suit jacket and covertly checking his shoulders for dandruff, it was the garishly lit office with a stack of marker-labeled case files sagging in the corner and evening rubbing up against the window. It was the realization, all over again, that this was real and it was my life. Maybe Katy Devlin, if she had made it that far, would have felt this way about blisters on her toes, the pungent smell of sweat and floor wax in the dance studios, the early-morning breakfast bells raced down echoing corridors. Maybe she, like me, would have loved the tiny details and the inconveniences even more dearly than the wonders, because they are the things that prove you belong. ↗

— Tana French

#tiny-details #imagination

We will live with racism for ever. But senses of self, senses of belonging, senses of us and of others? Those are up for grabs. ↗

— Richard Powers

#ever #grabs #live #others #racism

Possessions, outward success, publicity, luxury - to me these have always been contemptible. I believe that a simple and unassuming manner of life is best for everyone, best for both the body and the mind. ↗

— Albert Einstein

#simplicity #success #values #life

You could not spend your entire span of life in thrall to the code of stuff. There was no code of stuff. Stuff was just stuff. You couldn't live by it or for it. ↗

— John Lanchester

#life #material-possessions #stuff #life

Bez te tačke, za koju si vezan, ne bi volio ni drugi svijet, ne bi imao kud da odeš, jer ne bi bio nigdje. ↗

— Meša Selimović

#home #travel #death

How shall I ever learn who I am when there is so much of me that belongs to someone else? ↗

— Madeline Claire Franklin

#family #introspection #life #self-awareness #the-poppet-and-the-lune

And as if he had read her thoughts, the old man murmured, 'What a blessing it is to die in your own bed, under your own roof, with your family surrounding you, full of the knowledge that you have lived as thoroughly as you wanted to. ↗

— Anita Rau Badami

#dying #family