Quotes About Connection

And he knew that he would never be able to tell her that he loved her as a foundering ship loves a lighthouse, even though the lighthouse is powerless to save it.

What had drawn a non-Jewish woman of her generation to this obscure life as a specialist in Jewish studies?

She sat back, lifting away her hand. The ghost of its warmth remained on Aaron's skin.

She said that standing between my mother and this man was like standing in the current of a river. She said it was a soft, endless . . . push, which slips you off your feet if you're not anchored to something.

they were so tightly knit together that no surgery could separate them without devastating both.

Love has mass and volume. Put it into your life; it must displace something. As it has displaced my notion of what was good and important in the world, and substituted this: The knowledge that there is nothing more important than people willing to stand up for the truth of each other. The understanding of what it is to protect another fragile being. The understanding that I, too, will grow old.

Alvaro, who could no more withhold love than he could resist taking in each next breath

that was the style of his generation, to communicate via the safety of pixels on a screen.

Friendship is a physick all its own, and most especially to those such as we, who through the peculiar paths of our thinking must ever be lonely men.

Wounding and healing are not opposites. They're part of the same thing. It is our wounds that enable us to be compassionate with the wounds of others. It is our limitations that make us kind to the limitations of other people. It is our loneliness that helps us to to find other people or to even know they're alone with an illness. I think I have served people perfectly with parts of myself I used to be ashamed of.

The most basic and powerful way to connect to another person is to listen. Just listen. Perhaps the most important thing we ever give each other is our attention…. A loving silence often has far more power to heal and to connect than the most well-intentioned words.

Perhaps the most important thing we bring to another person is the silence in us, not the sort of silence that is filled with unspoken criticism or hard withdrawal. The sort of silence that is a place of refuge, of rest, of acceptance of someone as they are. We are all hungry for this other silence. It is hard to find. In its presence we can remember something beyond the moment, a strength on which to build a life. Silence is a place of great power and healing.

When we know ourselves to be connected to all others, acting compassionately is simply the natural thing to do.

It is not that we have a soul, but that we are a soul.

It has been said that sometimes we need a story more than food in order to live. p 374

Everybody is a story. When I was a child, people sat around kitchen tables and told their stories. We don't do that so much anymore. Sitting around the table telling stories is not just a way of passing time. It is the way the wisdom gets passed along. The stuff that helps us to live a life worth remembering.

Martha giggled; the baby was holding her. Astounding. A person comes into the world with a fist—and a grasp, she thought. Yes, we are built to fight one another, but also to embrace. How cleverly we are created.

and Homan learned a language of pointing and jabbing and fist closing and finger flicking, frowning and shrugging and waving and saluting, brow raising and eye narrowing and lip pursing and head tilting. His anger ran off, and happiness moved in.

Ah, look at that sunrise!" Tim says at the first stoplight, lifting his arms toward the windshield. "Four billion sunrises, over the dinosaurs, the pharaohs, and now ours today. And no one's ever the same. Isn't it just the most remarkable thing? Each day is fresh and unique, yet each is also a link to every dawn all the way back to the Precambrian.

Cuando dos poetas se conocen y se dan la mano por vez primera, es como si dos corrientes trasangélicas tropezaran, fundiéndose.

But they were fated to misunderstand each other.

A lo largo de esa semana comprendió que los libros podían ser una tabla de salvación en un océano de silencio y pena. Y cuando se acostaba, con la espalda dolorida de tanto leer, sentía la mano de Rana en la oscuridad y viajaba con ella por el mundo de las historias leídas.

La actividad filosófica no es neutral. Desde la República de Platón hasta la íntima relación entre brahmino y ksatriya en las Upanisad la filosofía se encuentra íntimamente ligada con la política. No hace falta esperar a Marx para establecer esta conexión. Toda la historia de la filosofía es una confirmación de ello.

If we aren't here for one another, why are we here? - Grady Adams