Quotes About Connection

Eating with others was different from just talking to them—it was an act of commitment, a recognition of shared humanity. We all share these physical needs, it said; we are brothers and sisters in our vulnerability.

To be free Is often to be lonely. He would unite The unequal moieties fractured By our own well-meaning sense of justice Would restore to the larger the wit and will The smaller possess but can only use For arid disputes, would give back to The son the mother's richness of feeling …

she knew that this man, this mechanic, this fixer of machines with their broken hearts, did indeed love and admire her—was like walking in the sunshine;

You were looking for somebody, and there was somebody, and you would convince yourself that this random person was what you were really looking for in the first place.

Her tone was breezy. That, she thought, was the best way to talk to teenagers—about anything. You talked to them in that way, as if you were not expecting them to be listening to you—which, of course, they were not.

I'm glad you came," said Rob. "I like having lunch. I find it a much more sociable meal than dinner.

The poem had said something about being grateful for the small scale, for the local, for the minor things that gave meaning to life. And Angus was right: these things were being forgotten in the headlong rush into globalisation, which drained identity out of life, rendered it distant, impersonal.

Many people only go to see other people when they want to ask for some favour.

We enmesh the people we love in a nest of golden wires. Or bind them to us.

She could turn away and say that they had nothing to do with her, or she could accept that they had somehow touched her skirt. ...we all had a skirt, and those who touched our skirt became our concern.

they were two people thrown together on a journey, who found themselves sharing the same railway compartment and becoming resigned to each other's company.

of being linked with each other, we have every temptation to be selfish and unmoved by others and by their plight. Our towns, our cities, our places become no more than hotels, with all that lack of intimacy that is a feature of hotels – strangers under one roof, no more. Well, we should not be strangers to one another. We

her daddy, as she called him, and of whom she thought at some point every day, every single day, and whom she had loved with all her heart.

She used the expression that the Batswana preferred: to become late. There was human sympathy here; to be dead is to be nothing, to be finished. The expression is far too final, too disruptive of the bonds that bind us to one another, bonds that survive the demise of one person. A late father is still your father, even though he is not there; a dead father sounds as if he has nothing further to do--he is finished.

But some of us cannot see love, she said to herself, even when it is there, right before us, asking us to invite it in.

We were not the first people to tread where we now trod; countless ancestors had come exactly this way. And although their footprints might have been blown away by the wind, we could sense their presence if only we opened our eyes and ears to it. And we could hear their voices, too, if we listened hard enough. We could hear their warnings, their encouragements, their advice - if only we turned our head to the wind and heard the voices, faint and distant, that the wind carried

In the lives of most of us, the list of unsaid things was, he thought, a long one.

Reflections on human smallness have often prompted me to think that. What do divisions between people matter? What does it matter if somebody is English or Scottish or whatever?

YOU DO NOT CHANGE PEOPLE BY SHOUTING AT THEM

Mma Ramotswe smiled at her old friend. You can go through life and make new friends every year -- every month practically -- but there was never any substitute for those friendships of childhood that survive into adult years. Those are the ones in which we are bound to one another with hoops of steel. She reached out and touched Dr. Maketsi on the arm, gently, as old friends will sometimes do when they have nothing more to say.

and the vestiges of that early feeling were still there, as she could not bring herself to punish the snails or caterpillars for their depredations. They were her fellow creatures, after all. They had not asked to be snails or caterpillars, and they needed to eat, as we all did.

substitute for those friendships of childhood that survive into adult years. Those are the ones in which we are bound to one

We should not be too surprised by the kindness of strangers, as it is always there.

acknowledge the unexpected exchange of fellow feeling between