Quotes About Connection

The ants are my friends- they're blowing in the wind

Through all the muck of themselves, the times they had unobligated each other, the anger, the permitted absences, the loneliness grown dangerous, she had always returned to him. He'd had faith in that - abracadabra! But eventually the deadlines set in again. Could you live in the dead excellence of a thing - the stupid mortar of a body, the stubborn husk love had crawled from? Yes, he thought.

Every family is a family of alligators.

Like true friends, they take no hardy or elegant stance loosely choreographed from some broad perspective. They get right in there and mutter Jesus Christ! and shake their heads.

I would look out upon the wildflowers, the mulch of swamps and leaves, the spring mosses greening on the rocks, or the boulderous mountains of street-black snow, whatever season it happened to be- my mittens clotted with ice, or my hands grimy with marsh mud- and from the back of my larynx I'd send part of my voice out toward the horizon and part of it straight up toward the sky. There must have been some pain in me. I wanted to howl and fly and break apart.

When they slept together, she almost cried. He was a kisser, and he kissed and kissed. It seemed the kindest thing that had ever happened to her. He kissed and whispered and brought her a large glass of water when she asked for one.

He was thinking, but she could tell he wasn't good at it....'Where do you live,' she asked, 'and how do I get there?

I can't believe I just asked you to hold my hand,' said Ira, but Mike had already taken it.

Adoption. A realized fantasy of your parents not really being your parents. Your genes could thrust one arm in the air and pump up and down. Yes! You were not actually related to Them!

There are lots of people in this world, Moss, but you can't be in love with them all.

All this wandering that you do, he said, leaning in the window, his face white as a cream cheese, his scar the carved zigzag of a snowmobile across a winter lake. Wind blew handsomely through his hair. How will anyone ever get close to you? I don't know, she said. She shook his hand through the window and then put on her gloves.

Sometimes there was a simultaneous quiet upstairs and down, like a blanket of snow, as if at that moment no one anywhere in the galaxy knew what to say.

Learn that you have a way of knowing each other which somehow slips out and beyond the ways you have of not knowing each other at all.

One of the problems with people in Chicago, she remembered, was that they were never lonely at the same time. Their sadness occurred in isolation, lurched and spazzed, sent them spinning fizzly back into empty, padded corners, disconnected and alone.

It's not that men fear intimacy,' I said to Eleanor. 'It's that they're hypochondriacs of intimacy: They always think they have it when they don't. Gerard thinks we're very close but half the time he's talking to me like he met me forty-five minutes ago, telling me things about himself I've known for years, and asking me questions about myself that he should know the answers to already. Last night he asked me what my middle name was. God, I can't talk about it.

I cried for everyone and for all the scrabbly, funny love one sent out into the world like some hit song that enters space and bounds off to another galaxy, a tune so pretty you think the words are true, you do! There was never any containing a song like that, keeping it. It went off and out, speeding out of earshot or imagining or any reach at all, like a rocket invented in sleep.

There is something comforting, thinks Mack, in embracing someone the same size as you.

No, I'm not Jewish, she said archly, staring him down, to teach him, to teach him this: Are you? Yes, he said. He studied her eyes. Oh, she said. Not many of us in this part of the world, so I thought I'd ask. Yes. She felt an embarrassed sense of loss, as if something that should have been hers but wasn't had been taken away, legally, by the police.

How quickly bodies came to love each other, promise themselves to each other always, without asking permission. From the mind! If only she could give up her mind, let her heart swell, inflamed, her brain stepping out for whole days, whole seasons, her work shrinking to limericks.

She gave him books of poetry: Wordsworth, Whitman, all the W's. When she'd ask him how he liked them, he would say, Fine. I'm on page… and then he would tell her what page he was on and how many pages he'd accomplished that day.

She knew that the world was not created to speak just to her, and yet, as with her son, sometimes things did.

She would turn from him in bed, her hands under the pillow, the digital clock peeling back the old skins of numbers.

One of the problems with people in Chicago, she remembered, was that they were never lonely at the same time.

There was sex where you were looked in the eye and beautiful things were said to you, and then there was what Ira used to think of as yoo-hoo sex: where the other person seemed spirited away, not quite there, their pleasure mysterious and crazy and only accidentally involving you. "Yoo-hoo?" was what his grandmother always called before entering a house where she knew someone but not well enough to know whether they were actually home.