Quotes About Connection

Our where determines our who," Reg Saner once wrote.

we might be able to intellectually understand that the West has lost 18% of its trees over the last 20 years, and at the same time be overcome by the quaking of a single Aspen leaf.

We speak of God because he first spoke to us.

It is an example of what films can do, how they can slip past your defenses and really break your heart.

When a woman tells you she's had a dream about you, you know what's going on, don't you? It means she likes you. It's her way of telling you that you're on her mind. Really on her mind.

I had a girlfriend once. All we ever talked about was our relationship. That's what we did instead of having one.

families from remote stations

Shy adults are paradoxically drawn to outgoing people, whose animated body language they find highly attractive.

Sex and love are inseparable, like life and consciousness. —D. H. LAWRENCE

The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances: if there is any reaction, both are transformed. —CARL JUNG

The trouble with people is they don't understand people.

He craved Mildred's body and he couldn't do without it, and that was the one and only reason he went on living with her.

Poetry is anything you read out loud alone.

human existence is itself a form of debt.

Or, to put it in a slightly different way: there is always a fundamental distinction between the way one relates to friends, family, neighbourhood, people and places that we actually know directly, and the way one relates to empires, nations and metropolises, phenomena that exist largely, or at least most of the time, in our heads.

One could in fact interpret this list as a subtle way of saying that the only way of "freeing oneself" from the debt was not literally repaying debts, but rather showing that these debts do not exist because one is not in fact separate to begin with, and hence that the very notion of canceling the debt and achieving a separate, autonomous existence was ridiculous from the start.

It's not that we owe "society." If there is any notion of "society" here—and it's not clear that there is—society is our debts.

Even the most extreme individualists only become individuals through the care and support of their fellows;

This is why I developed the concept of human economies: ones in which what is considered really important about human beings is the fact that they are each a unique nexus of relations with others—therefore, that no one could ever be considered exactly equivalent to anything or anyone else.

there is always a fundamental distinction between the way one relates to friends, family, neighbourhood, people and places that we actually know directly, and the way one relates to empires, nations and metropolises, phenomena that exist largely, or at least most of the time, in our heads.

Each of us is a mere symbolon of a man, the result of bisection, like the flat fish, two out of one, and each of us is constantly searching for his corresponding symbolon. —Plato, The Symposium

Solitary pleasures will always exist, but for most human beings, the most pleasurable activities almost always involve sharing something: music, food, liquor, drugs, gossip, drama, beds.

Friendship is neither a formality nor a mode it is rather a life.

They will care about our business only to the extent that we care about their overall welfare.