Quotes About Connection

Colonel Kassad stepped closer and laid long fingers on the poet's shoulder. For a few seconds the room seemed warmed by the mere fact of human contact.

Sarai gripped his hand. "Do you think you're the only one who has had the dream?" "Dream?" managed Sol. She

For years I have carried on silent conversations with Siri, framing questions to myself for future discussion with her, and it suddenly strikes me with cold clarity that we will never again sit together and talk. An emptiness begins to grow inside me. Should

To see and feel one's beloved naked for the first time is one of life's pure, irreducible epiphanies. If there is a true religion in the universe, it must include that truth of contact or be forever hollow.

he finally accepted the pull of the earth and saw clearly that it was more than the mindless call of matter to matter. And with that realization, Baedecker felt the same energy in himself, flowing through him and from him, bringing together and binding people as well as things.

That's precisely what messiahs do, Raul . . . bridge different worlds. Different eras. Provide the bond between two irreconcilable concepts.

When there's something or someone, when there's anything that makes you happy, you don't let a continent or an ocean or an empty pocket keep you apart

My brother, he says. My brother is dead. And again he asks me to kill him. One more time before he falls to his knees and sobs. And i get it. I do. Because i have a brother too.

I'm curious how someone...finds God, or solace, or peace or whatever it is he finds out here alone...while he's reciting words. Is it just a matter of believing what you say?

I can tell you that the writing of a book, no matter how deeply, profoundly personal-if it is literature, if you have attended to the formidable task of illumination the human heart in conflict with itself-will do the opposite of expose you. It will connect you. With others. With the world around you. With yourself.

I touched follow on my phone's screen. I saw it—a vision—two half sisters who had never known of one another's existence, sending the most modern version of a smoke signal, each from her own coast. I see you. I see you, too.

I've never heard a writer feel that way about a device with a screen. Oh sure, they're functional, practical. We would be lost without them. But just as we need to feel our feet on the earth, smell and taste the world around us, the pen scratching against the page, sensory and slow, is the difference between looking at a high-definition picture of a flower and holding that very same flower in your palm, feeling the brush of its petals, the color of its stamen rubbing off on your fingers.

Third things are essential to marriages, objects or practices or habits or arts or institutions or games or human beings that provide a site of joint rapture or contentment. Each member of a couple is separate; the two come together in double attention. Lovemaking is not a third thing but two-in-one. John Keats can be a third thing, or the Boston Symphony Orchestra, or Dutch interiors, or Monopoly.

Our shared vocabulary—our own language—will die with us. We are the treasure itself: fathoms deep, in the world we have made and made again.

Knowing what you know, you're more of a daughter to Paul than you can possibly imagine. You take something that isn't your own and you breathe life into it. You create it—and it becomes your creation. You are an agent to help my brother express the finest kind of love.

How can I tell her that her lists will not protect her?

But I think that at the moment of my death, I'd like to be looking at those pictures of everyone I have ever loved.

Let the young soul look back upon its life and ask itself: what until now have you truly loved, what has raised up your soul, what ruled it and at the same time made it

There must be that second, bobbing and darting in the aliveness of their shared history, unmistakable, glowing like a firefly in the darkness. If only they could pinpoint it and stop it there, right there, at the small but indelible spot that somehow they missed the first time around, if only, then perhaps their whole family could begin again.

There are a few people who will feel her touch—a chill up a spine, a hand in the air, a poem recalled—even if they won't exactly know it.

Reading is an exercise in empathy. To read is to enter another world in a way different from any other art form.

They shake hands and all my past selves stretch between them like a fragile chain of paper dolls.

Moments appear like scattered puzzle pieces. What belongs to what? Where are the corners? I can hold only bits and pieces in my hands, and even these are suspect. I can't bring my parents close. It's not possible to sit them back down again and ask them: What happened? Did you ever love each other? When did you stop? Your legacy is a daughter who tries and tries to remember you.

They stay like this, two bodies so at home with each other that it is as if each of them had grown and shifted to accommodate the other's shape over the years, like two grafted trees.