Quotes About Connection

Talking can keep people in their heads and safely away from their emotions.

He glances toward his cell, which is vibrating again, but I don't follow his gaze. I stay with him, trying to hold on so he won't get pulled away whenever an unwanted feeling appears and go numb. People often mistake numbness for nothingness, but numbness isn't the absence of feelings; it's a response to being overwhelmed by too many feelings.

It's easy to conflate the intimate experience of romance or sex with the intimate experience of having somebody pay undivided attention to the details of your life, accept you fully, support you without competing agendas, and know you so deeply.

Why are we essentially outsourcing the thing that defines us as people?" Turkle asked in the video. Her question made me wonder: Was it that people couldn't tolerate being alone or that they couldn't tolerate being with other people?

The psychoanalyst Erich Fromm had made this point more than fifty years earlier: "Modern man thinks he loses something—time—when he does not do things quickly; yet he does not know what to do with the time he gains except kill it." Fromm was right; people didn't use extra time earned to relax or connect with friends or family. Instead, they tried to cram more in.

Across the country—at coffee with friends, in meetings at work, during lunch at school, in front of the cashier at Target, and at the family dinner table—people were texting and Tweeting and shopping, sometimes pretending to make eye contact and sometimes not even bothering.

Will you see my vulnerabilities, my lies, my shame? Will you see the human in my being?

I have a feeling that there's a lot of buried love between John and Margo because I know this: love can often look like so many things that don't seem like love.

Is there anything that makes us feel more vulnerable than asking someone, Do you like me?

Every person you've been close to lives on somewhere inside you.

It's important to disrupt the depressive state with action, to create social connections and find a daily purpose, a compelling reason to get out of bed in the morning.

Sitting-with-you-in-your-pain is one of the rare experiences that people get in the protected space of a therapy room, but it's very hard to give or get outside of it—even for Jen, who is a therapist.

It's impossible to grow without first becoming vulnerable.

We grow in connection with others. Everyone needs to hear that other person's voice saying, I believe in you. I can see possibilities that you might not see quite yet. I imagine that something different can happen, in some form or another. In therapy we say, Let's edit your story.

impossible to grow without first becoming vulnerable.

Every relationship is a dance. The Dude does his dance steps (approach/retreat), and Charlotte does hers (approach/get hurt)—that's how they dance. But once Charlotte changes her steps, one of two things will happen—the Dude will be forced to change his steps so that he doesn't trip and fall down, or he'll simply walk off the dance floor and find somebody else's feet to stomp on.

was more to a guy than a handsome face, a chiseled body and a big penis. Having a great sense of humor and the ability to carry on a meaningful conversation definitely counted for a lot.

Ruby is my sister. And strangely, undeniably, my child.

I believe it was the Lord...for who else could know your trouble and ours and bring us together in this right way?

But Rose has been my sister. I think that's heroic.

What is it about sadness that can be so fulfilling?

the only thing left to do is love

In sleep, my sister and I found a common breath. In dreams, we knew the moon.

If I could manage to fall in love without having to actually meet someone, that would be ideal.