Quotes About Interconnectedness

to leap into it and hold on, connecting everything

How sometimes everything closes up, a painted fan, landscapes and moments flowing together until the sense of distance— say, between Clapp's Pond and me— vanishes, edges slide together like the feathers of a wing, everything touches everything.

we are each other's destiny

Do you think there is anything not attached by its unbreakable cord to everything else?

She can't see herself apart from the rest of the world or the world from what she must do every spring. Crawling up the high hill, luminous under the sand that has packed against her skin, she doesn't dream, she knows she is a part of the pond she lives in, the tall trees are her children, the birds that swim above her are tied to her by an unbreakable string.

I would say that there exist a thousand unbreakable links between each of us and everything else, and that our dignity and our chances are one. The farthest star and the mud at our feet are a family, and there is no decency or sense in honoring one thing, or a few things, and then closing the list. The pine tree, the leopard, the Platte River, and ourselves—we are at risk together, or we are on our way to a sustainable world together. We are each other's destiny.

You made a discovery yesterday; remember? 'No man is an Island.' It's true in more ways than one. Don't go on hating yourself because there are some things you can't do and can't face on your own. None of us can.

In nature's cyclical rhythms, there are no grounds for the discriminatory view that underlies Darwin's view of superiority and inferiority that deems single-celled organisms as lower, and more complicated life forms as higher. It would be more appropriate to say we are all one continuous life-form.

What is miraculous is that in modern society you can trust and be trusted by a shopkeeper you do not know.

Education is not a skyhook from which to hang economic policy; it is an emergent phenomenon.

Some people might think that the smartest way to guarantee their own well-being is to isolate themselves from others and to work hard at their own happiness, without consideration for what other people are experiencing. They probably assume that if everybody did that, we'd all be happy. But the result would be exactly the opposite: instead of being happy, they would be torn between hope and fear, make their own lives miserable, and ruin the lives of the people around them too.

As they told it, all these people were involved with each other. There was a lot of hooking up and jealousy and breaking up and making up. Anyone could have been mad about what happened.

If I found a job, a project, an idea or a person I wanted—I'd have to depend on the whole world. Everything has strings leading to everything else. We're all so tied together. We're all in a net, the net is waiting, and we're pushed into it by one single desire.

A good novel is an indivisible sum: every scene, sequence and passage of a good novel has to involve, contribute to and advance all three of its major attributes: theme, plot, characterization.

fiction is like a spider's web, attached ever so slightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners.

I can see that my choices were never truly mine alone--and that is how it should be, that to assert otherwise is to chase after a sorry sort of freedom.

I don't distinguish between struggling with the world and struggling with myself . . . I enter a pact with other people, other forces in the world, that their problems are mine and mine are theirs . . . The minute others imprint my senses, they become me and I must deal with them or else close part of myself off and make myself and the world smaller, lukewarm.

Maintaining this social compact, though, required trust. It required that we see ourselves as bound together

For I'm convinced that the pandemic we're currently living through is both a manifestation of and a mere interruption in the relentless march toward an interconnected world, one in which peoples and cultures can't help but collide.

Why shouldn't our "great chain of being" include the other creatures with which we have shared the planet, the creatures we have martyred in service to us or driven out of their homes to make way for our expansion?

You may think of yourself as a freestanding individual, a unique point of consciousness in the universe, but in many ways you are just subbing for absent family members or departed ancestors.

The death of something living is the price of our own survival, and we pay it again and again. We have no choice. It is the one solemn promise every life on earth is born and bound to keep.

This is what it means to be alone: everyone is connected to everyone else, their bodies are a bright liquid life flowing around you, sharing a single heart that drives them to move all together. If the shark comes they will all escape, and leave you to be eaten.

a single-file army of ants biting a mammoth tree into uniform grains and hauling it down to the dark for their ravenous queen. and, in reply, a choir of seedlings arching their necks out of rotted tree stumps, sucking life out of death. this forest eats itself and lives forever.