Quotes About Connection

He was the first person I'd met who was doing essentially what I was doing, though he was hiking much farther. He didn't need me to explain what I was doing out here. He understood.

As I passed them, I felt the presence of my mother so acutely that I had the sensation that she was there; once I even paused to look around for her before I could go on.

As I read, I could feel my mother's presence so acutely, her absence so profoundly, that it was hard to focus on the words.

There's nothing you can tell Sugar that doesn't strike her as beautiful and human. Which is why men and women write to her about intimacies they can't share with anyone else, unspeakable urges, insoluble grief. She understands that attention is the first and final act of love, and that the ultimate dwindling resource in the human arrangement isn't cheap oil or potable water or even common sense, but mercy.

The words are purposes. The words are maps. ADRIENNE RICH, "Diving into the Wreck" Will you take me as I am? Will you? JONI MITCHELL, "California

planting a root in the very center of my rootlessness.

Inhabit the beauty that lives in your beastly body and strive to see the beauty in all the other beasts.

There are so many amazing things in this world... I felt fierce and humble and gathered up inside, like I was safe in this world too.

The experience was powerful and fundamental. It seemed to me that it had always felt like this to be a human in the wild, and as long as the wild existed it would always feel this way.

I want someone special. I want to be loved and to receive love; to have someone there for me. My hunger for this is so great that I fear it's too much to ask anyone for. I'm afraid that if the volunteer coordinator did go out with me, I'd share all this with her at once, and though she'd be compassionate, she'd be scared off because she'd perceive me as needy.

Very nice," said Rick after a while. "Very nice," he repeated, with more emphasis the second time. "What is?" I asked, turning to him, though I knew. "Everything," he said. And it was true.

We should surround ourselves with people who feel like abundance.

We need books, and Cheryl's books in particular, because we are all, in the private kingdom of our hearts, desperate for the company of a wise, true friend. Someone who isn't embarrassed by our emotions, or her own, who recognizes that life is short and that all we have to offer, in the end, is love. Radical

Telling has a way of dispersing things. It will allow your lover to stand closer inside the circle of you. Let him.

when we're in the presence of someone else's pain, the burden of not-doing is so much greater than the burden of doing. Doing lifts the burden. Even if it's a small thing. Like writing a letter.

My daughter is wearing a dress that her grandmother bought for her at a yard sale. It's so simple it breaks my heart. How unspecial that fact is to so many, how ordinary for a child to wear a dress her grandmother bought her, but how very extraordinary it was to me.

But compassion isn't about solutions. It's about giving all the love that you've got.

your sister was attempting to show you what a real perfect couple looks like: happy, humane, and occasionally all fucked up.

I've long believed literature's greatest superpower is how it makes us feel less alone. Across generations, cultures, classes, races, genders, and every other divide, stories and sentences can make us think, Oh yes, me too. That is precisely how it feels to love and lose and triumph and try again.

She was a real human being laying herself bare, fearlessly, that we might come to understand the nature of our own predicaments.

Love is the feeling we have for those we care deeply about and hold in high regard.

He wasn't delusional or ill or giving into age-induced dementia. He was my father. The man he'd always been. And he was talking to me as if I was his daughter. As if he had a right. But he didn't.

The only thing I ever hope to do as a writer is to make people feel less alone, to make them feel more human, to make them feel what I have felt so many times as a reader: stories have the power to save us by illuminating the most profoundly beautiful and terrible things about our existence.

Small things such as this have saved me: How much I love my mother—even after all these years. How powerfully I carry her within me. My grief is tremendous but my love is bigger.