Quotes About Connection

The patterns of our lives come from those things that do not drift apart but move together for a little while, like dancers.

If you boil the strange soup of contemporary right-wing ideology down to a sort of bouillon cube, you find the idea that things are not connected to other things, that people are not connected to other people, and that they are all better off unconnected. The core values are individual freedom and individual responsibility: yourself for yourself, on your own.

I think of that lost world, the way we lived before these new networking technologies, as having two poles: solitude and communion. The new chatter puts us somewhere in between, assuaging fears of being alone without risking real connection. It is a shallow between two deeper zones, a safe spot between the dangers of contact with ourselves, with others.

The people close to you become mirrors and journals in which you record your history, the instruments that help you know yourself and remember yourself, and you do the same for them. When they vanish so does the use, the appreciation, the understanding of those small anectodes, catchphrases, jokes: they become a book slammed shut or burnt.

A pair of glasses on which the temperature and chance of rain pops up or someone's trying to schedule me for a project or a drink is not going to help with reveries about justice, meaning, and the beautiful deep marine blue of nearly every dusk.

So the threads of ideas weave around the world and through the decades and centuries.

Writing is lonely, it's an intimate talk with the undead, with the unborn, with the absent, with strangers , with the readers who may never come to be and who even if they read you will do so weeks, years, decades later.

When you have become quite wild, then perhaps some of the wild things will come to take a look at you, and one of them may perhaps take a fancy to you, not because you are suffering and cold, but simply because he happens to like your looks.

Si el dolor y la belleza están conectados, quizá con la madurez llega no lo que Nabhan llama abstracción, sino un sentido estético que compensa parcialmente las pérdidas que sufrimos con el tiempo y que encuentra belleza en lo distante.

Hay cosas que solo poseemos si están perdidas, hay cosas que no se pierden si de ellas nos separa la distancia.

If you lack words for a phenomenon, an emotion, a situation, you can't talk about it, which means that you can't come together to address it, let alone change it.

If I am not my brother's keeper, then we have been expelled from paradise, a paradise of unbroken solidarities.

Books are solitudes in which we meet

Walking assuages or legitimizes this alienation: one is mildly disconnected because one is walking, not because one is incapable of connecting.

And yet the experience happens anyway. Again and again I have seen people slip into this realm and light up with joy. The lack of language doesn't prevent them from experiencing it, only from grasping and making something of it.

Every love has its landscape.

To consider earth holy is to connect the lowest and most material to the most high and ethereal, to close the breach between matter and spirit. It subversively suggests that the whole world might potentially be holy and that the sacred can be underfoot rather than above.

it's okay to realize that we do need help, that calling out for help is a very generous act because it allows others to help us and it allows us to be helped. Sometimes we're calling out for help.

You don't have to subscribe to a political ideology, move to a commune, or join the guerrillas in the mountains; you wake up in a society suddenly transformed, and chances are good you will be part of that transformation in what you do, in whom you connect to, in how you feel. Something changes.

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.

The things that make our lives are so tenuous, so unlikely, that we barely come into being, barely meet the people we're meant to love, barely find our way in the woods, barely survive catastrophe every day.

it's okay to realize that we do need help, that calling out for help is a very generous act because it allows others to help us and it allows us to be helped.

We'd never set eyes on each other before. But that's the work that books do, reaching out further than their writers.

Stepping into the smell of a long-abandoned aple crop, Cameron called towards the house, hoping to catch his mother's attention in the window where she would be sitting working