Belonging Quotes

“As I allowed the reality of our dysfunctional and perhaps irrevocably broken relationship to make a home inside me, I discovered that all I now wanted for my mother was for her to find a measure of serenity.”
― Michelle Miller, Belonging: A Daughter’s Search for Identity Through Loss and Love

“He seemed to have cracked the code for how to carry the burdens of this world gently, which left me reflecting on how we humans weave in and out of each other’s lives, offering support at critical moments,”
― Michelle Miller, Belonging: A Daughter’s Search for Identity Through Loss and Love

“for me Hope was also what every incredibly busy and hardworking woman truly needs by her side—a wife.”
― Michelle Miller, Belonging: A Daughter’s Search for Identity Through Loss and Love

“I needed to turn my attention to the work of building a future rather than trying to reclaim a broken past.”
― Michelle Miller, Belonging: A Daughter’s Search for Identity Through Loss and Love

“full impact of the news, because I knew that if I shattered then, I’d never be able to fit myself back together. And so I reached for numbness as if it were a life raft, allowing me to keep breathing in a world where my father no longer was.”
― Michelle Miller, Belonging: A Daughter’s Search for Identity Through Loss and Love

“First, anyone can be a hero. Second, pay attention to the less obvious stories that run alongside the main one. And third, look for human greatness in every situation.”
― Michelle Miller, Belonging: A Daughter’s Search for Identity Through Loss and Love

“we just gazed down at our hands, two contrasting skin tones resting on the table between us, a story of America.”
― Michelle Miller, Belonging: A Daughter’s Search for Identity Through Loss and Love

“With some effort, he lifted his head from the pillow so as to fix me more squarely in his gaze. “I need you to do something for me,” he said, his eyes glassy, his breathing labored.”
― Michelle Miller, Belonging: A Daughter’s Search for Identity Through Loss and Love

“A part of me might always be “a mess,” but somewhere between the solitude and the revelry of my travels, I had located the self-reliance to reconcile both sides of myself, to recreate myself as a whole and confident daughter of the world.”
― Michelle Miller, Belonging: A Daughter’s Search for Identity Through Loss and Love

“there’s no better way to find that place inside yourself where you’re most brave.”
― Michelle Miller, Belonging: A Daughter’s Search for Identity Through Loss and Love

“I took it in then, the idea that a chance encounter could completely reorient a person’s trajectory, and I felt a frisson of something ordained,”
― Michelle Miller, Belonging: A Daughter’s Search for Identity Through Loss and Love

“I, of all people, should have understood that belonging was earned, not given.”
― Michelle Miller, Belonging: A Daughter’s Search for Identity Through Loss and Love

“no family, not even the Woodses, was immune from the fragility and unpredictability of life.”
― Michelle Miller, Belonging: A Daughter’s Search for Identity Through Loss and Love

“By nature, I tended toward irrepressible cheer, but now, it felt as if some sort of protective skin had been ripped away, so that everything, even my own face, looked unfamiliar and wrong.”
― Michelle Miller, Belonging: A Daughter’s Search for Identity Through Loss and Love

“Little and Tony moved through life with an infectious joy, making their home a hub of entertainments, fostering a familial atmosphere.”
― Michelle Miller, Belonging: A Daughter’s Search for Identity Through Loss and Love

“who, throughout my childhood and adolescence, I would look to for the kinds of instruction that girls normally get from their mothers, everyday lessons on who and how to be. Most of these women never suspected that I had adopted them as maternal surrogates, folding them with sweet longing into the secret places of my heart.”
― Michelle Miller, Belonging: A Daughter’s Search for Identity Through Loss and Love

“the awareness of being motherless crept inside me like a whisper.”
― Michelle Miller, Belonging: A Daughter’s Search for Identity Through Loss and Love

“when Cheryl’s mother learned about me, she had done an unforgivable thing.”
― Michelle Miller, Belonging: A Daughter’s Search for Identity Through Loss and Love

“We are each, after all, born to a quest whose starting point is set by the providence of where our star is cast, and we must place our feet upon the path where we awaken, and follow it home.”
― Michelle Miller, Belonging: A Daughter’s Search for Identity Through Loss and Love

“The most we can do is to write—intelligently, creatively, evocatively—about what it is like living in the world at this time,”
― Michelle Miller, Belonging: A Daughter’s Search for Identity Through Loss and Love

“this is more than a memoir of how I got to the place where I now stand. It is also a clear-eyed engagement with our nation’s racial story.”
― Michelle Miller, Belonging: A Daughter’s Search for Identity Through Loss and Love

“identity is shaped as much by those who are absent in our lives as by those who stay by our side.”
― Michelle Miller, Belonging: A Daughter’s Search for Identity Through Loss and Love

“Family was the people who rallied to your side, come what may, whether they gave birth to you or not.”
― Michelle Miller, Belonging: A Daughter’s Search for Identity Through Loss and Love