Quotes About Connection

There are two barriers that often prevent communication between the young and their elders. The first is middle-aged forgetfulness of the fact that they themselves are no longer young. The second is youthful ignorance of the fact that the middle aged are still alive.

Knowledge of what you love somehow comes to you; you don't have to read nor analyze nor study. If you love a thing enough, knowledge of it seeps into you, with particulars more real than any chart can furnish.

And so well did they hide themselves in their love that grass grew over their hearts and all their loud songs became indecipherable ribbons of air.

In searching for a way out of my own troubles, I had found my way into the trouble of others, some long gone, and now I was trying to find my way back out, through their troubles, as if we human beings can ever learn from one another.

Can you imagine? That you can say something, offhand, and it can matter, it can really matter to someone else? Can you imagine what it's like to hear something like that? To hear someone say something and feel the world ripple around you?

The main thing was for him to feel that we were all together taking part in a joined project--the project of our life. To be a part of such a thing, he wanted nothing more than that. Indeed, it is what most of us want, is it not? Why should he be any different?

I will tell you it simply: he felt he was falling. He felt he fell through a succession of wells, of holes, of chasms, and that I was there at windows, and we would be together for a moment as he fell by. Then I would rush to the next window , down and down, and he would fall past, and I would see him again.

Much of the speech we do is largely meaningless and is just meant to communicate and validate small emotional contracts.

I believe in discovering the love that exists and then trying to understand it. Not to invent a love and try to make it exist, but to find what does exist, and then to see what it is.

I shall introduce this city and its occupants as a series of objects whose relationship cannot be told with any certainty. Though violence may connect them, though pity, compassion, hope may marry one thing to another, still all that is in process cannot be judged, and that which has passed has gone beyond judgment, which leaves us again, with lives and belongings, places, shuttling here and there, hapless, benighted, discordant.

The trouble is, as you get older, the people you like die and are not replaced with others, so that it is easily possible to end up with no one at all to talk to, or at least, no one you would want to hear responding to whatever it is you might have ended up saying.

Just in case the letter doesn't get all the way to you, I gave it some wings so it could fly the rest of the way.

My wife wrote me letters when we first met. We would meet every day, or nearly every day, but still she would write me letters. She thought the person she was in her letters was someone she herself did not know until the letter was written, and then it was like she was meeting herself.

reason and sensical behavior are not always necessary if there exists some small flood of kindness.

I believe in discovering the love that exists and then trying to understand it. Not to invent a love and try to make it exist, and then to see what it is. I believe in trying to understand love through other loves, other loves that have existed before. Many people have made the records of these loves. These records can be found. They can be read. Some are songs. Some are just photographs. Most are stories.

In searching for a way out of my own troubles, I had found my way into the troubles of others, some long gone, and now I was trying to find my way back out, through their troubles, as if we human beings can ever learn from one another.

There is a feeling that we are things in common not alone. That I am myself in terms of you, and you you in terms of others. Together we make a world and go on in this sea of days and months. In this picture no one is their own--everyone is everyone else; our bodies are the possession of our society. We might own things but never ourselves. Yet I think there is a different duty.

The main thing was for him to feel that we were all together taking part in a joined project—the project of our life. To be a part of such a thing, he wanted nothing more than that. Indeed, it is what most of us want, isn't it? Why should he be any different?

We felt lucky to have had him, and lucky to become the ones who were continually with him, caring for him. I have read some books of philosophy in which the freedom of burdens is explained, that somehow we are all seeking some appropriate burden. Until we find it, we are horribly shackled, can in fact scarcely live.

In any case, this is how we ended up making our friends--by pushing away the people we thought brutal, and gathering to ourselves those we thought kind and subtle.

This is what we bear, I thought, the nearness of other lives.

Muscles are the way the body obeys the mind.

Wes imagined that, in some other distant world, if he remembered nothing else about his father, he would remember that his hand trembled when he drank water. That, or the fact that his eyes teared up whenever he heard "Brown-Eyed Girl" on the radio.

I want to belong to you, like a name. I want to be a thing people have to know to know you.