Quotes About Connection

To say we love one, and not pray for him, is a solecism.

He ran his fingers back and forth over the broad crown of the head of a coon dog named Sounder.

It's a pretty good rule to remember that every time we come into contact with another person, even though just walking a block, our job is to lead him to a higher plane than that one on which we found him.

time cannot do to ordinary things what we timelessly do to one another.

I dreamed my lips would drift down your back like a skiff on a river. I'd follow a vein with the point of my finger, hold your bare feet in my naked hands.

Because if we were each as identical as twins, I would scratch your face to say the scratch set you apart and made you more interesting, and gave you a purpose in life: to scratch me back a thousand times.

Works of art are meant to be lived with and loved, and if we try to understand them, we should try to understand them as we try to understand anyone—in order to know them better, not in order to know something else.

Birthdays, like weddings, anniversaries, baptisms, bar mitzvahs, wakes, are occasions to retie family ties, renew family feuds, restore family feeling, add to family lore, tribalize the psyche, generate guilt, exercise power, wave a foreign flag, talk in tongues, exchange lies, remember dates and the old days, to be fond of how it was, be angry at what it should be, and weep at why it isn't.

yes, words were superior; they maintained a superior control; they touched without your touching; they were at once the bait, the hook, the line, the pole, and the water in between.

I was a dog in a past life. Really. I'll be walking down the street and dogs will do a sort of double take. Like, Hey, I know him.

Family is, after all—however irritating—family.

loneliness is endemic to the human condition, and it is more intense in our society, where we are taught to call our loneliness "freedom of the individual.

Who hath a better friend than a cat?

The mystic possesses his or her knowledge of God not from books or academic study, but from experience, from the experience of being loved intimately, intensely, by God.

As we learn about each other, so we learn about ourselves

Poetry is all that is worth remembering in life.

Poetry is the universal language which the heart holds with nature and itself. He who has a contempt for poetry, cannot have much respect for himself, or for anything else.

There are no rules for friendship. It must be left to itself. We cannot force it any more than love.

Just as much as we see in others we have in ourselves.

Books let us into their souls and lay open to us the secrets of our own.

My feathered friends were so much to me that I am constantly tempted to make this sketch of my first years a book about birds and little else.

Being a father, being a friend, those are the things that make me feel successful.

It is not enough to raise consciousness. One must lower the spirit into the earth to embody a change in things as basic as food, shelter, and livelihood.

Although the Anatolians and the people of the Indus Valley knew each other's products, it is not known whether or not they met each other face-to-face; rather, they would have been separated by an unknown number of middlemen.