Quotes About Connection

For me, the phone remains miraculous in a way that electronic communication just isn't. A phone brings the voice of a friend. It's live. Email is a movie—once you get it, nothing you do will change it. A call is theater—surprising and unpredictable. What's more, your presence is essential.

not. Both Mom and I had read it when it came out in 1999 and had recommended it to each other simultaneously. In

When we ask one another "What are you reading?" sometimes we discover the ways that we are similar; sometimes the ways that we are different. Sometimes we discover things we never knew we shared; other times we open ourselves up to exploring new worlds and ideas. "What are you reading?" isn't a simple question when asked with genuine curiosity; it's really a way of asking, "Who are you now and who are you becoming?

I do believe that my Holy Grail of books could be out there—and I intend to keep reading until I find it. Of course, I'll keep reading after I do, too, because—well, because I love to read. I also believe that the Holy Grail of books won't be the greatest book ever written—I am certain there isn't such a thing. I think it will simply be a book that speaks perfectly to me at the moment I most need it and continues to speak to me for the rest of my life.

Feasting the Heart by Reynolds Price,

Crossing to Safety,

And when people would say to Mom, "I'll include you in my prayers," it gave her great solace. It wasn't a platitude for her—when she knew people were praying for her, it was something concrete and immense.

One of Mom's favorite passages from Gilead was: "This is an important thing, which I have told many people, and which my father told me, and which his father told him. When you encounter another person, when you have dealings with anyone at all, it is as if a question is being put to you. So you must think, What is the Lord asking of me in this moment, in this situation?

Surely it doesn't have to be this way? Stretching up the hill ahead of me, I begin to see all of my future relationships, bearing me on and up like some escalator of the fleshly. Each step is a man, a man who will penetrate me with his penis and his language, a man who will make a little private place with me, secure from the world, for a month, or a week, or a couple of years. How much more lonely and driven is the serial monogamist than the serial killer?

Here we meet, on the page, naked and unadorned: shorn of class, race, gender, sexual identity, age and nationality.

I think with movies I am really connecting to the Joseph Campbell idea of the collective unconscious.

Love is the ultimate theme, but it's not just for women.

ready-made theories of control that are internalised by their followers, instructing them how to behave in order to achieve connection and status.

until we are willing and able to make the connections between what we are eating and what was required to get it on our plate, and how it affects us to buy, serve, and eat it, we will be unable to make the connections that will allow us to live wisely and harmoniously on this earth.When we cannot make connections, we cannot understand, and we are less free, less intelligent, less loving, and less happy.

As individuals and as a culture, our ability to heal, transform, and evolve beyond this old defiling mentality is tied to our food choices more than to anything else. To meditate for world peace, to pray for a better world, and to work for social justice and environmental protection while continuing to purchase the flesh, milk, and eggs of horribly abused animals exposes a disconnect that is so fundamental that it renders our efforts absurd, hypocritical, and doomed to certain failure.

As we free others, we become free; as we love others, we are loved; as we encourage others, we are encouraged; as we bless others, we are blessed; as we bring joy and healing to others, we find joy and healing in our lives.

He ran into God many times during the year: felt of him in the warm field-dirt of May; saw his face in the shiny harvest grain; heard his voice among the tops of the Norway pines.

There's an entry point to any relationship.

Whatever we had missed, we possessed together the precious, the incommunicable past.

Only solitary men know the full joys of frienship. Others have their family but to a solitary and an exile, his friends are everything.

He had the uneasy manner of a man who is not among his own kind, and who has not seen enough of the world to feel that all people are in some sense his own kind.

The dead might as well try to speak to the living as the old to the young.

But any story about human beings is bound to have an end, like this story about us, a pair of ingenuous people who fell in love and went journeying together through life, blundering by good luck in the right directions so that we came to a lasting wholeness and joy in each other. It has happened before; it will happen again; it happened to us. We belonged together.

The heart of another is a dark forest, always, no matter how close it has been to one's own.