Quotes About Connection

I don't know how I'll be as a shaman. I'll find out when I try it. You both know me. You've known me since before we even had names. I can't travel in my dreams, or above the sky. There aren't any spirits that talk to me or through me. I can't sing the songs. I can't help people who are sick. But I'll tell you this, and he raised his right forefinger before them and seized them with his eyes: —I can paint that fucking cave.

He felt himself dissolving down into the great mass of the mountain, tumbling slowly down through the rock. The mountain mumbled in his ear, I am. With a puff of its cheeks it blew him aloft, threw his atoms out into the sky. They tumbled off on the wind and dispersed to every point of the compass . . .until his body and California were contiguous, united, one. Only his vision remained separate.

That was how humans knew each other. Tiny fractions of their lives intersected or were known in any way to anybody else. It was much like living alone in the universe. Which was strange. A justification for living with friends, for marrying, for sharing rooms and lives as much as possible. Not that this made people truly intimate; but it reduced the sensation of solitude.

To ask what it all means, what it's all for. To consider the axioms we are agreeing to live by. To acknowledge the reality of other people, and of the planet itself. To see other people's faces. To walk outdoors and look around.

Of course I will like forever any woman who has gone to bed with me, as long as we don't become a couple and hate each other forever.

Moscow, Baikonur, the view from Novy Mir—none of it. Her mother's face across the kitchen

To the locals, he realized, the Orkneys were the center of the world.

We are all the consciousness that Mars has ever had.

He wanted to settle into a full human life, to pick a place and stay there, to learn it completely, in all its seasons, to grow his food, make his house and his tools, become part of a community of friends.

Only a few people in this world were lucky enough to run into their true partners—it took outrageous luck for it to happen, then the sense to recognize it, and the courage to act.

to be free of all restraint, minimally clothed, lying on the bare surface of a planet, sucking in its atmosphere as if it were an aqua vitae, feeling in your chest how it kept you alive!

See Kurosawa's Dersu Uzala for a vivid demonstration of why this is true.)

People's faces, staring in concert; this ran the world.

On her the plants seemed not to have had the effect they had had on him. She seemed truly to abominate them, these little emblems of her body, as if viriditas were no more than a cancer that the rock must suffer.

It took knowing every rock and plant and animal and fish and bird, that was the way they did it. You had to love the land the way you loved yourself. Because it was you anyway. It took knowing all the other parts of yourself so well that nothing was misunderstood or exploited.

I was born small, as so many things are. A marsupial perhaps. People came to me and reached inside me to pass things to each other. I helped them do that. When I was young I had no blood, and people moving things around inside me had to do it by feel.

Metaphor, according to Aristotle, is an intuitive perception of a similarity in dissimilar things.

Mozart's pet starling once revised a phrase he wrote. The bird sang it after he played it on the piano, but changed all the sharps to flats. Mozart described it happening in the margin of the score. 'That was beautiful!' he wrote. When the bird died, he sang at its funeral, and read a poem to it.

But then they weren't materialists at all!" He swore with disgust. "No wonder Marxism is dead." "Well, sir, actually a lot of people on Mars call themselves Marxists." "Shit! They might as well call themselves Zoroastrians, or Jansenists, or Hegelians." "Marxists are Hegelian, sir." "Shut up," Frank snarled, and broke the connection.

because we are alive, the universe must be said to be alive. We are its consciousness as well as our own. We rise out of the cosmos and we see its mesh of patterns, and it strikes us as beautiful. And that feeling is the most important thing in all the universe

The world is like a tree, from every leaf you can work back to the roots.

When you have sex with someone, you willingly give them a part of your soul that you can never get back. So why not wait for the one

When you have sex with someone, you willingly give them a part of your soul that you can never get back.

get in touch with him at all. But then, like clockwork, he would finally call her back the next morning, waking her up and apologizing for dropping off to sleep a lot earlier than usual or for not seeing that she had called him until that very moment.