Quotes About Connection

Eye contact was a delicate matter. A quarter second of a shared glance was a violation of agreements that made the city operational.

Why shouldn't the death of a person you love bring you into lurid ruin? You don't know how to love the one you love until they disappear abruptly. Then you understand how thinly distanced from their suffering, how sparing of self you often were, only rarely unguarded of heart, working your networks of give-and-take.

In the subways, in many of the streets, in corners of the park at night, contact could be dangerous. Contact was not a word or a touch but the air that flashed between strangers.

Shit is universal no matter which language.

Her death would leave me scattered, talking to chairs and pillows. Don't let us die, I want to cry out to that fifth-century sky ablaze with mystery and spiral light. Let us both live forever, in sickness and health, feebleminded, doddering, toothless, liver-spotted, dim-sighted, hallucinating. Who decides these things? What is out there? Who are you?

I would spend the rest of my life turning to speak to her.

Some people are lucky. They become who they are supposed to be. This did not happen to me until I met (your mother). One day we started to talk and it never stopped, this conversation.

It's not enough to hate your enemy. You have to understand how the two of you bring each other to deep completion.

What did it mean, the first time, a thinking creature looked deeply into another's eyes? Did it take a hundred thousand years before this happened or it was the first thing they did, transcendingly, the thing that made them higher, made them modern, the gaze that demonstrates we are lonely in our souls?

We can't get outside the aura. We're part of the aura. We're here, we're now.

The self. What is the self? Everything you are, without others, without friends or strangers or lovers or children or streets to walk or food to eat or mirrors in which to see yourself. But are you anyone without others?

The grasp of objects that bind us to some betokening.

it occurred to me that perhaps in this city the crowd was essential to the individual; without it, he had nothing against which to scrape his anger, no echo for grief, and not the slightest proof that there were others more lonely than he. it was just a passing thought.

Is it very different at home, or on the street, or waiting at the gate to board a flight? I maintain myself on the puppet drug of personal technology. Every touch of a button brings the neural rush of finding something I never knew and never needed to know until it appears at my anxious fingertips, where it remains for a shaky second before disappearing forever.

Technology is lust removed from nature.

You and I. We're here. So might as well.

Days like this. I look at you and feel electric. Tell me you don't feel it too.

Mainly we looked at people in other cars, trying to work out from their faces how frightened we should be.

When it rains out, it also rains in.

If Greek and Latin characters are paving stones, Arabic is rain.

I want to eat lunch. You want to eat lunch. We're people in the world. We need to eat and talk.

They know him at molecular level. He lives in them like chains of matter that determine who they are.

A surface separates inside from out and belongs no less to one than the other.

A film can be undermined by the person you're seeing it with, there in the dark, a ripple effect of attitude, scene by scene, shot by shot.