Quotes About Connection

You can't tell your story to everybody, I said. Maybe you can only tell it to one person.

It was an interesting idea, I said, that the narrative impulse might spring from the desire to avoid guilt, rather than from the need – as was generally assumed – to connect things together in a meaningful way; that it was a strategy calculated, in other words, to disburden ourselves of responsibility.

Eventually I had to get up and go downstairs, and there were all the usual chores to do and all the enacting of oneself that living with other people requires

Sometimes, when she has been two or more hours from the source of my body, I begin to feel a sort of elemental anxiety for her, as if she were walking a tightrope and had gone too far out, as if she could not exist for so long in time, in gravity, away from me.

He has not asked them one question about themselves: she and Claudia do not exist for him, they are just lines of perspective, ways for him to measure his location in space.

I]t has struck me that along with all other losses, I might lose friendship, too. I am not equal anymore to the people that I know, and what is friendship but a celebration of equality?

something so small that it would cause passers-by to briefly glance at it and therefore unconsciously decrease their speed, could over time result in the whole motorway coming to a standstill in another place miles away.

We live with an almost superstitious belief in our own differences, she said, and Luis has shown that those differences are not the result of some divine mystery but are merely the consequence of our lack of empathy, which if we had it would enable us to see that in fact we are all the same.

I was working, somehow, to free her from myself, when it appeared that what she needed was to take some of me along with her!

The interesting ones are like islands, he said: you don't bump into them on the street or at a party, you have to know where they are and go to them by arrangement.

He put out his hand and I felt his fingers circling my arm. The hand was solid, heavy, like a moulded marble hand from antiquity. I looked at it and at the dark woollen material of his coat sleeve and the mounded expanse of his shoulder. A flooding feeling of relief passed violently through me, as if I was the passenger in a car that had finally swerved away from a sharp drop.

Supongo, añadí, que esa es una definición del amor, creer en algo que solo dos personas pueden ver.

In other words, it was nobody's fault; but all the same it was brought home to me how much of what was beautiful in their lives was the result of a shared vision of things that strictly speaking could not have been said to exist.

Now and again,' she continued presently, 'I have met people who have freed themselves from their family relationships. Yet there often seems to be a kind of emptiness in that freedom, as though in order to dispense with their relatives they have had to dispense with a part of themselves. Like the man trapped in the glacier who cut off his own arm,' she said, with a faint smile.

I suppose, I said, it is one definition of love, the belief in something that only the two of you can see, and in this case it proved to be an impermanent basis for living.

Imagino que essa seja uma das definições do amor, falei, a crença em algo que só vocês dois conseguem ver

Joskus minun vain täytyy saada puhua jotta tuntisin itseni todelliseksi, ja toivoisin että sinäkin puhuisit minulle." Hän makasi vaiti pimeässä ja tuijotti kattoon. Sitten hän sanoi: "Minusta tuntuu kuin sydämeni puhuisi sinulle koko ajan.

Like love, I said, being understood creates the fear that you will never be understood again.

The second place was one such bridge, and Tony's silence ran undisrupted beneath it like a river.

More – life,' he said, opening his hands in a gesture of receipt. 'And more affection,' he added, after a pause. 'I wanted more affection.

I feel like my heart is talking to you all the time.

no longer interested in socialising; in fact, increasingly he found other people positively bewildering. The interesting ones are like islands, he said: you don't bump into them on the street or at a party, you have to know where they are and go to them by arrangement

We live with an almost superstitious belief in our own differences, she said, and Luís has shown that those differences are not the result of some divine mystery but are merely the consequence of our lack of empathy, which if we had it would enable us to see that in fact we are all the same.

Como en el amor, continué, que te entiendan crea el temor a que no vuelvan a entenderte jamás.