Quotes About Connection

You see, when people once begin to do kindnesses, it is so easy and pleasant, they find it hard to leave off; and sometimes it beautifies them so that they find they love one another very much—as Mr. Chrome and Miss Kent discovered that wondrous day.

There was no answer except her sister's cheek against her own, not even tears, for when most deeply moved, Jo did not cry.

I could never love anyone as I love my sisters.

I don't want a fashionable wedding, but only those about me whom I love, and to them I wish to look and be my familiar self.

If friendship were a matter of bookkeeping -- so much joy in one column, so much sorrow in the other -- everything would cancel out and you would, it seems, be left with nothing. Yet there must be another factor in the equation, for somehow the joy outweighs the sorrow.

Old love, middle love, the kind of love that knows itself and knows that nothing lasts, is a desperate shared wildness.

How come we've got these bodies? They are frail supports for what we feel. There are times I get so hemmed in by my arms and legs I look forward to getting past them. As though death will set me free like a traveling cloud... I'll be out there as a piece of the endless body of the world feeling pleasures so much larger than skin and bones and blood.

When we're young, we think we are the only species worth knowing. But the more I come to know people, the better I like ravens.

Women don't realize how much store men set on the regularity of their habits. We absorb their comings and goings into our bodies, their rhythms into our bones.

Our songs travel the earth. We sing to one another. Not a single note is ever lost and no song is original. They all come from the same place and go back to a time when only the stones howled.

The story comes around, pushing at our brains, and soon we are trying to ravel back to the beginning, trying to put families into order and make sense of things. But we start with one person, and soon another and another follows, and still another, until we are lost in the connections.

I was in love with the whole world and all that lived in its rainy arms.

I am part of what she thinks is her illness, a symptom of which she thinks she has been cured. She, on the other hand, is what I was looking for.

Tu dois aimer. Tu dois ressentir. C'est la raison pour laquelle tu es ici sur terre. Tu es ici pour mettre ton coeur en danger

I hold his name close as my own blood and I will never let it out. I only spoke it that once so he would know he was alive.

There are ways of being abandoned even when your parents are right there.

Grandpa's mind had left us, gone wild and wary. When I walked with him I could feel how strange it was. His thoughts swam between us, hidden under rocks, disappearing in weeds, and I was fishing for them, dangling my own words like baits and lures.

Can you stop your mother from singing to you? Who would do such a thing?

When a baby falls asleep in your arms you are absolved. The purest creature alive has chosen you. There's nothing else.

They moved in dance steps too intricate for the noninitiated eye to imitate or understand. Clearly they were of one soul. Handsome, rangy, wildly various, they were bound in total loyalty, not by oath, but by the simple, unquestioning belongingness of part of one organism.

Someone has been tortured on my behalf. Someone has been tortured on your behalf. Someone in this world will always be suffering on your behalf. If it comes your time to suffer, just remember. Someone suffered for you. That is what taking on a cloak of human flesh is all about, the willingness to hurt for another human being.

Women don't realize how much store men set on the regularity of their habits. We absorb their comings and goings into our bodies, their rhythms into our bones. Our pulse is set to theirs, and as always on a weekend afternoon we were waiting for my mother to start us ticking away on the evening.

You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on earth. You are here to risk your heart.

If, as I suspect, my body survives by uttering itself over and over again, then I have some questions. If [I] am one word, so are my daughters, so are all of us in strings and loops. Each life is one short word slowly uttered.