Quotes About Connection

Not till we are completely lost, or turned round,—for a man needs only to be turned round once with his eyes shut in this world to be lost,—do we appreciate the vastness and strangeness of nature. Not till we are lost, in other words, not till we have lost the world, do we begin to find ourselves, and realize where we are and the infinite extent of our relations.

everyone is interdependent. Everyone is vulnerable. Everyone is penetrable, and everyone is penetrated incessantly by the vibrations of sound traveling into the inner ear.

Earlier 18th-century literary language was not supple enough to connect the life of the imagination to that of the street.

The unexamined life is not worth living, as the aphorism goes, but perhaps an honorable and informed life requires examining others' lives, not just one's own. Perhaps we do not know ourselves unless we know others. And if we do, we know that nobody is nobody.

I wanted English to be an instrument on which many kinds of music could be played. I wanted writing that could be lavish, subtle, evocative, that could describe mists and moods and hopes and not just facts and solid objects. I wanted to map how the world is connected by patterns and intuitions and resemblances. I wanted to trace the lost patterns that came before the world is broken and find the new ones we could make out of the shards.

To love someone is to put yourself in their place, we say, which is to put ourself in their story, or figure out how to tell yourself their story. Which means that a place is a story, and stories are geography, and empathy is first of all an act of imagination, a storyteller's art, and then a way of traveling from here to there.

I have been both a ghost and haunted in the city I love.

Walking allows us to be in our bodies and in the world without being made busy by them. It leaves us free to think without being wholly lost in our thoughts

The question then is how to get lost. Never to get lost is not to live, not to know how to get lost brings you to destruction and somewhere in the terra incognita in between lies a life of discovery. Thoreau: 'Not till we are lost, in other words, not till we have lost the world, do we begin to find ourselves, and realize where we are and the infinite extent of our relations…' Lose the whole world, he asserts, get lost in it, and find your soul.

Some things we have only as long as they remain lost, some things are not lost only so long as they are distant.

The utilitarian argument against fiestas, parades, carnivals, and general public merriment is that they produce nothing. But they do: they produce society. They renew the reasons why we might want to belong and the feeling that we do.

Mutual aid [called this in Kropotkin's 1902 Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution means that every participant is both giver and recipient in acts of care that bind them together, as distinct from the one-way street of charity. 86

My body was a lonely house. I was not always home; I was often elsewhere. I imagined when I was young some science-fiction version of humans becoming brains in jars as a good thing, that our bodies were some sad thing we were mired in rather than instruments of joy, connection, and vitality, the non-negotiable terms of our existence.

The utilitarian argument against fiestas, parades, carnivals, and general public merriment is that they produce nothing. But they do: they produce society.

Walking is a state in which the mind, body, and the world are aligned… it produces thoughts, experiences, arrivals.

If you walk a city, if you love a city, if you put in your miles and years with open heart and mind, the city will reveal itself to you. Maybe it won't become yours, but you will become its - its chronicler, its pilgrim, its ardent lover, its nonnative son or native daughter or defender.

Even if we can't completely comprehend, we might care.

Certain kinds of beauty make people weep, the moments "when hope and history rhyme

A Book Is a Heart That Only Beats in the Chest of Another. ~Rebecca Solnit on the Solitary Intimacy of Reading and Writing

Listen to what makes your hair stand on end, your heart melt, and your eyes go wide, what stops you in your tracks and makes you want to live, wherever it comes from, and hope that your writing can do all those things for other people.

Words bring us together, and silence separates us, leaves us bereft of the help or solidarity or just communion that speech can solicit or elicit.

Eliminate your mother, then your two grandmothers, then your four great-grandmothers. Go back more generations and hundreds, then thousands disappear. Mothers vanish, and the fathers and mothers of those mothers. Ever more lives disappear as if unlived until you have narrowed a forest down to a tree, a web down to a line. This is what it takes to construct a linear narrative of blood or influence or meaning.

If you're lucky, you carry a torch into that dark of Virginia Woolf's, and if you're really lucky you'll sometimes see to whom you've passed it, as I did on that day (and if you're polite, you'll remember who handed it to you).

When you don't hear others, you don't imagine them, they become unreal, and you are left in the wasteland of a world with only yourself in it, and that surely makes you starving, though you know not for what, if you have ceased to imagine others exist in any true deep way that matters.