Quotes About Connection

Every human being that works has to know that what they do matters to another human being.

I love this city. I love all cities. I'm in love with everyone and everything.

Our conversations were like sex, our sex like conversation.

She's a tall skinny old girl in a tweed jacket and brown corduroy trousers, long restless hands stained yellow, rings on every finger. Hair tied up in a bandanna and clear, fierce blue eyes like mine. You'd know us anywhere as brother and sister, lanky, beaky customers with these piercing eyes and silver hair.

We understood one another better before ever I opened my mouth.

man as part of a movement or a crowd is indifferent to me. He is inhuman. And I have nothing to do with nations, or nationalism. The only feelings I have – for what they are – are for men as individuals; my loyalties, such as they may be, are to private persons alone.

Surely man in general is born to be oppressed or solitary, if he is to be fully human;

I don't think of love in terms of relationships. It happens in terms of seconds, but it goes away like that, too. I pass a nurse, I love her, it ends when I go around a corner; at a restaurant I see a forlorn man at the table next to me, and I love him, and the conversation pulls me back, and it's ended. A patient comes in, and she is sick, and I love her, and then she dies, and I never see her again. This is what I live for. Don't think that it's sad.

Sometimes when our backs are up against the wall, we can surprise ourselves with what we are truly capable of. We can push off those walls and discover something deep within ourselves. We just have to make sure we do not create walls within ourselves, or between us and other people. Walls are for scaling. Or for knocking down and crumbling.

Human relationships are vast as deserts: they demand all daring, she seemed to suggest.

You don't do anything by yourself in this world, and if it's worth anything, it's not just for yourself, either. You're either lifting up the people around you, or you're pulling them down, whether you know it or not.

And yet always you feel as though you understood perfectly the people and why they do everything as they do.Still you are absolutely severed from them.

Poetry is a sort of homecoming.

Only one thing remained reachable, close and secure amid all losses: language. Yes, language. In spite of everything, it remained secure against loss.

in the air, there your root remains, there, in the air

One cannot have love without ownership

Because Job loved and was honest with God, he was able to stay engaged in their relationship.

Conflict is the price you pay for intimacy. Read that sentence again, and let it sink in. If you want to connect genuinely with other people, you have to risk conflict by being frank and firm in addition to gracious and loving.

We come to life in the middle of stories that are not ours.

A picture tells a thousand words. But you get a thousand pictures from someone's voice.

Television, I'm afraid, has isolated us more than race, class, or ethnicity.

When we have no families, we must find support elsewhere. Sometimes in strangers. We're all alone on this earth. We must take any hand that's offered us. I offer you mine...I'll be your friend, if you wish. The faithful kind. —Elva

Isn't that the essence of literature?...Our ability to identify with characters, no matter that they're separated from us by thousands of miles and hundreds of lifetimes. We may have no Mount Vesuvius looming over us. It may not be lava and ashes we fear. But we look at these forms, and we know what they felt.

The object in America is to avoid contact, to treat all as foes unless they're known to be friends. Here you have a million crabs living in a million crevices.