Quotes About Connection

Built like an oak tree, against which I could pitch my pillow and read; mornings, I could curl into the crook of your branches.

Half an ear cocked, something in me, all night, every night, is waiting for you to come home.

You restored me to the concept of home.

He was already intuiting that attachment - if only to a squirt gun - made him vulnerable.

I wonder if I wouldn't have been more moved if my own mother had taken me in her arms and said, 'I like you'. I wonder if just enjoying your kids company isn't more important.

I am a bundle of other people's histories, a creature of circumstance.

How much did you care about anything that went on in my head until it got out?

Discomfort begets discomfort in others.

Needing kindness myself, I am kinder now, and we get on amazingly well. [p. 110]

Only in retrospect do I appreciate that this "doing your bit" is a deadly misapprehension of the nature of familial ties. Better understanding them now, I find blood relationships rather frightening. What is wonderful about kinship is also what is horrible about it: there is no line in the sand, no natural limit to what these people can reasonably expect of you.

Got nothing to do with trying. You like someone, or you don't. If you're 'trying', you don't.

The word love was required to cover such a range of emotions that it almost meant nothing at all. Since the love we distill for each beloved conforms to such a specific, rarefied recipe, with varying soupcons of resentment, pity, or lust, and sometimes even pinches of dislike, you really needed as many different words for the feeling as there were people whom you cared for in your life.

Real love shares more in common with hatred and rage than it does with geniality or politeness

No tenemos mucho en común, pero, en general, disfruto con su compañía, la mera yuxtaposición de cuerpos calientes proporciona el más profundo de los consuelos animales.

But since we've been separated, I may most miss coming home to deliver the narrative curiosities of my day, the way a cat might lay mice at your feet: the small, humble offerings that couples proffer after foraging in separate backyards.

But since we've been separated, I may most miss coming home to deliver the narrative curiosities of my day, the way a cat might lay mice at your feet: the small, humble offerings that couples proffer after foraging in separate backyards.

So sturdy and solid, so wide, so thick, none of that delicate wristy business of my imaginings. Built like an oak tree, against which I could pitch my pillow and read; mornings, I could curl into the crook of your branches.

Likewise, the simple adjacency of warm bodies supplies the deepest of animal comfort.

Likewise the innards of my sole telephone socket are disgorged; my uncertain connection to the outside world dangles by two poorly soldered wires, and it often cuts off.

The romances between strangers are somewhere between inaccessible and incomprehensible to other people...

The feeling was not of being attractive precisely, but rather of not having to entertain. It was breathtaking: to be ensconced in another person's company, yet to be relieved of the relentless minute-by-minute obligation to redeem one's existence - for there is some sense in which socially we are all on the Late Show, grinning, throwing off nervous witticisms, and crossing our legs, as a big hook behind the curtains lurks in the wings.

To the degree that Lawrence's face was familiar, it was killingly so - as if she had been gradually getting to know him for over nine years and then, bang, he was known.

Reading is an act of possession. You read it, you own it.

Me paso el día sin hacer nada. Sería un consuelo para mí estar con alguien que tampoco hiciera nada.