Quote by Bienvenido Santos: “We are all strangers in a strange land, longing for home, wherever that may be.”

Belonging is not a given — many people spend their lives feeling like outsiders, searching for a place or community where they truly fit. This quote says that feeling is near-universal, especially for those who have been displaced. The comfort is in recognizing that almost everyone is searching for the same thing.

Santos wrote this during the post-World War Two years when Filipino communities in the United States were navigating the complex aftermath of both the war and Philippine independence in 1946. Many Filipinos remained stranded in America, unable to return home amid economic and political uncertainty.

Filipino novelist and short story writer, born in Manila in 1911, and widely regarded as one of the finest Filipino writers in English. His fiction explored the experience of Filipinos living as strangers in America and the painful longing for homeland, drawing on his own years as an expatriate.