Quotes About Connection

What we understand and love understands and loves us also.

A heaven opens when people are kind to one another.

In the forest you pray involuntarily, and it's also the only place in the world where God is near; God seems to have created forests so we can pray in them as if in sacred temples; one person prays in one way, another in another, but everyone prays. When you lie beneath a fir tree reading a book, you are praying, if praying is the same as being lost in thought. Let God be where He will, in the forest you can sense Him, and you offer up your little bit of belief with silent rapture.

Walk,' was my answer, 'I definitely must, to invigorate myself and to maintain contact with the living world.... Without walking, I would be dead.

There are little books we read as if we're eating something delicious. We quickly forget them. After a certain amount of time, perhaps we recall them again. They're Like people we're capable of loving because they're not difficult.

In the forest you pray involuntarily.

Just as conversation is the bridge that connects you with those whom you love, prayer is the glue that affixes your heart to your heavenly Father.

People frequently point to communication as a problem, because its easy to notice, but usually it is a symptom of an underlying problem with a relationship posture.

What is making contact? It is hard to define, but people do know when they have or have not made contact… Sometimes it seems that humans have lost the art. The range of possibilities for contact open to human beings is extremely large, ranging from conversations that can last hours to something as brief as a pull on a pigtail. However, just a small attempt to make contact with the other person on a regular basis can put a distant relationship back on track.

If two partners in a relationship work on their own levels of differentiation, their relationship will automatically improve. If even one of the partners works to raise his or her level of differentiation, the relationship will do better over the long term.

The human dyad is so unstable that when two people who are important to each other develop a problem, which they invariably do, they automatically look around for a third person to include in the anxious situation in some way. The third person is brought into participation in the anxiety of the original twosome, and thus anxiety flows around the triangle.

The emotional intensity of a significant relationship is a stimulus that intensifies the drive toward togetherness. As each partner finds personal meaning in the relationship, the togetherness force becomes more intense, as though some sort of gravitational force were operating.

The central dilemma in managing the individuality/togetherness force for each person is how to keep the focus on one's own life and life direction but still stay in open, clear communication with the other significant people in that life.

Sometimes relationships are an attempt to complete the self the same way it was completed in the original family system.

Family systems theory tells us that each partner in a relationship is exactly as differentiated or emotionally mature as the other; otherwise the two wouldn't attract.

The real problem is, to some degree, that the partners in a difficult relations are "no-selfs." Too much of each self has been absorbed into the relationship.

People with low levels of emotional maturity or differentiation attract other people with low maturity levels, and people with higher levels attract higher level people.

Reading is like thinking, like praying, like talking to a friend, like expressing your ideas, like listening to other people's ideas, like listening to music, like looking at the view, like taking a walk on the beach.

For a moment the two of them looked at each other, wordless, as if they were asleep and their dreams had converged on common ground, a place where sound was alien.

Conversations and jokes together, mutual rendering of good services, the reading together of sweetly phrased books, the sharing of nonsense and mutual attentions.

one's family is made up of supporting players in one's personal drama. One never supposes that they starred in some possibly gaudy and certainly deeply felt show of their own.

But I was a lonely creature, and although I would have been very happy to have a friend I just never happened to meet one.

My lifelong involvement with Mrs Dempster began at 5:58 o'clock p.m. on 27 December 1908, at which time I was ten years and seven months old.

I had schooled myself since the war-days never to speak of my enthusiasms; when other people did not share them, which was usual, I was hurt and my pleasure diminished; why was I always excited about things other people did not care about? But I could not hold in.