quest for belonging Quotes

I think the experience of feeling isolated, of not fitting in, creates the urge to explore.

I had spent my whole life feeling homesick. The only difference between the two of us was that I didn't know what or where home was.

So much of adolescence is an ill-defined dying, An intolerable waiting, A longing for another place and time, Another condition.

I had ambitions to set out and find, like an odyssey or going home somewhere, set out to find this home that I'd left a while back and couldn't remember exactly where it was, but I was on my way there. And encountering what I encountered on the way was how I envisioned it all. I didn't really have any ambition at all. I was born very far from where I'm supposed to be, and so, I'm on my way home, you know?

All the lonely people, where do they all come from?

Because what nobody ever understood is that I, too, wanted to be a somebody. But how do you go through life wanting to be a someone and not knowing how?

Some are young people who don't know who they are, what they can be or even want to be. They are afraid, but they don't know of what. They are angry, but they don't know at whom. They are rejected and they don't know why. All they want is to be somebody.

No wonder we cannot appreciate the really central Kafka joke: that the horrific struggle to establish a human self results in a self whose humanity is inseparable from the horrific struggle. That our endless and impossible journey toward home is in fact our home.

Once upon a time . . . What time are we upon and where do I belong?

To walk is to lack a place. It is the indefinite process of being absent and in search of a proper.

That's how life feels to me. Everyone is doing it; everyone knows how. To live and be who they are and find a place, find a moment. I'm still waiting.