Quotes About Connection

We are seldom taught that the key to experiencing a meaningful life is to make a difference in the lives of others.

The more people I am with, Dorrigo thought, the more alone I feel.

He read and reread 'Ulysses'. He looked back at Amy. They were the first beautiful thing I ever knew, Dorrigo Evans said.

He was looking past Amy's naked body, over the crescent line between her chest and hip, haloed with tiny hairs, to where, beyond the weathered French doors with their flaking white paint, the moonlight formed a narrow road on the sea that ran away from his gaze into spreadeagled clouds. It was as if it were waiting for him.

He was… a lost apostrophe in search of a word to which he might belong

Why do you love words so? he heard Amy ask. ... They were the first beautiful thing I ever knew, Dorrigo Evans said.

and how if she didn't see him for another thirty years she would still love him, how she would still love him if he was dead until she was dead too.

And this sense, this feeling of communion, would at moments overwhelm him. At such times he had the sensation that there was only one book in the universe, and that all books were simply portals into this greater ongoing work—an inexhaustible, beautiful world that was not imaginary but the world as it truly was, a book without beginning or end.

She sometimes wondered, Francie continued, if parents' mistake was to make too much of their importance to their children, and their children repeat the same mistake.

He was your cobber? Like all immigrants, he seemed to have an unerring instinct for the oldest, truest words in his new language. The way he said the word, it felt free of the treacherous weight of mate.

I just wanted to tell a story of love & it was about fish & it was about me & it was about everything

O amor é público, ou não é amor.

Every death of those you love is the death also of so many shared memories and understanding, of a now irretrievable part of your own life.

And suddenly one note came back to us, just bounced back off the walls and rose from the floor and filled the place with this perfect hum...These two completely different things, a note and a room, finding each other. It sounded...right. Am I being ridiculous? Do you think that's what we mean by love, Mr. Evans? The note that comes back to you? That finds you even when you don't want to be found?

Without love, what was the world?

To be fair to them, they were only after something that walled them off from the past and from people in general, not something that offered any connection that might prove painful or human. Thet wanted stories, I came to realise, in which they were already imprisoned, not stories in which they appeared along with the storyteller, accomplices in escaping.

a belief in each other, a belief that they cleave to only more strongly when death comes. For if the living let go of the dead, their own life ceases to matter. The fact of their own survival somehow demands that they are one, now and forever.

Love is public,... or it's not love. Love is shared with others or it dies.

Dorrigo felt a warm

I am a part of all that I have met.

He smiled at me, and it was not the worried, nervous smile from before, but a smile that meant he was pleased. And I don't remember him ever smiling at me that way again.

He was like my father. They each wanted me to be their audience, to hear the things they needed to express.

Nothing in the world is as hopeful as knowing a woman you like is somewhere thinking about only you. Conversely, there is no badness anywhere as acute as the badness of no woman out in the world thinking about you. Or worse. That one has quit because of some bone-headedness on your part. It is like looking out an airplane window and finding the earth has disappeared. No loneliness can compete with that.

Conversations with adults other than a person's parents had more of an outcome.