Quotes About Connection

Perhaps pain, even other people's pain, becomes a smell you carry round with you? A

If he'd learned nothing else at the Slade he'd learned that men and women could be friends, even intimate friends, without sex intruding.

It's the hardest thing in the world to continue to be aware of someone else's pain.

privacy sacrificed without intimacy being gained.

Because she deserved my tears if anyone on earth ever did. I could feel the tears within me, undiscovered, and untouched in their inland sea. Those tears had been with me always.

He treated the stars as though they were love songs written to him by God.

I loved these salt rivers more than I loved the sea; I loved the movement of tides more than I loved the fury of surf. Something in me was congruent with this land, something affirmed when I witnessed the startled, piping rush of shrimp or the flash of starlight on the scales of mullet. I could feel myself relax and change whenever I returned to the lowcountry and saw the vast green expanses of marsh, feminine as lace, delicate as calligraphy. The lowcountry had its own special ache and sting.

Fierce praying was a way of finding entrance and prologue into my own writing.

My mother's family is passionate about visiting and cleaning the graves of their deceased. Once a year, the Peeks and the Nolens would gather to clean the tombstones and plant flowers at the grave sites of their people. Once, in Piedmont, when I was a little boy, I was helping to clean a grave of an ancestor of my grandfather named Jerry Mire Peek. When I asked my cousin Clyde whom this unknown relation was named after, he said, "He was named after the prophet Jerry Mire.

If I catch a fish before the sun rises, I have connected myself again to the deep hum of the planet. If I turn on the television because I cannot stand an evening alone with myself or my family, I am admitting my citizenship with the living dead.

The best thing about a small town is that you grow up knowing everyone. It is also the worst thing.

Don't go yet. Please. Tell me a story, one about us. Tell what it meant. How on earth did it happen? The story, Pat—tell it to me.

It's the great surprise of my life that I ended up loving [my father] so much.

Basketball allowed me to revere my father without him knowing what I was up to. I took up basketball as a form of homage and mimicry.

If not for sports, I do not think my father would have ever talked to me.

Among the worst things about growing old is the loss of those irreplaceable friends who added richness and depth to your life.

To have attracted readers is the most magical part of my writing life. I was not expecting you to show up when I wrote my first books. It took me by surprise. It filled me with gratitude. It still does.

People give me looks of pity and ask me why I want to wallow in my disconnection from a very connected world. It is simple. The world seems way too connected to me now. It seems to be ruining the lives of teenagers and bringing out the bestial cruelty in those who can hide their vileness under the mask of some idiotic pseudonym. I like to sit alone and think about things. Solitude is as precious as coin silver and it takes labor to attain it.

Think instead about children. People. Human beings. Feel for once that education is about people—not figures.

beneath the great sisterhood of stars unfurling in the night sky . . .

it was but one of the things that made friendship with me an ambivalent enterprise.

You're worried about your mother dying, aren't you," Leah said, putting her cheek on my forearm. "I can tell." For a moment I hesitated, but I could hear the call for intimacy in her voice, the desire for me to let her enter those grottoes where I tended my own fear of my mother's illness.

When we cuss each other out, call each other the vilest names on earth, and put each other down with thoughtless cruelty, it is the only way we know and the only language we have to express our ardent love for each other.

music as we danced our way in both