Quotes About Connection

So this is what he believes in your hands in the cool dirt until the earth gives back to you all that you've asked of it.

When you love a thing, little man, my dad said, you gotta love it with everything you got. Till you can't even tell where that thing you love begins and where you end.

Do you remember . . . ? someone's always asking and someone always does.

And sometimes,' Anne said softly, 'there's just plain love, Ellie. no reason for it, no need to explain' Then she leaned back on the couch, crossed her ankle over her knee and grinned. 'Perfect love,' she said. 'And what's that like?' 'When you find it, lil sis. You'll know.

And it's not even strange that it feels the way it's always felt like the place we belong to. Like home.

Imagine, my brother signed. Imagine if somebody built a bridge right outside our window and we could just walk across the highway and be on the other side.

Some people don't believe you can meet and know that's the person for you for the rest of your life. I'm not going to try to argue with them on that. I know what I know.

Afterward, he had held Iris so tightly. If she hadn't said, I can't even breathe right now, he would have still been holding on to her, wanting to pull her inside of him. Even bent in front of the side mirror, just inches from him, Iris still felt too far away.

My sister's clear soft voice opens up the world to me. I lean in so hungry for it.

We knew Down South. Everyone had one. Jamaica, Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico.

Stories can be windows, but also mirrors.

My grandmother tells us all this as we sit at her feet, each story like a photograph we can look right into, see our mother there marchers and dogs and kittens all blending

They're all inside of us,...past people and present people. And probably even the people we'll become.

He would give his own life to see Melody able to stay this young, to see her live her teenage life—all the years. He wanted to pull her to him now. Say, Hold on to yourself, Melody. Don't get lost. He wanted to say again what he'd said to her so many times before. You're loved, baby, you're loved.

he's not my hero, he's my dad, which means he's my every single thing.

Then for a moment like so many times before this I lost the words. Watched them drop . . . No. Dissipate . . . from the air between us. Dissipate. The word has shown up on my SAT prep tests again and again until it landed in this room with us. Between my mother. And me.

Maybe all over the world there were daughters who knew their mothers as young girls and old women, inside and out, deep. I wasn't one of them. Even when I was a baby, my memory of her is being only halfway here.

What's the thing, I ask her, that would make people want to live together? People have to want it, that's all.

When I used to dream about that somebody they never had a face. It was more like a feeling.

Jacqueline Woodson

After the chicken is fried and wrapped in wax paper, tucked gently into cardboard shoe boxes and tied with string... After the corn bread is cut into wedges, the peaches washed and dried... After the sweet tea is poured into mason jars twisted tight and the deviled eggs are scooped back inside their egg-white beds slipped into porcelain bowls that are my mother's now, a gift her mother sends with her on the journey...

And when she says, I love you, too the South is so heavy in her mouth my eyes fill up with the missing of everything and everyone I've ever known.

My mother has a gap between her two front teeth. So does Daddy Gunnar. Each child in this family has the same space connecting us.

I held on to my mama's Spelman College sweater. Wore it the first day I got there myself and still have it now. Held on to my own daddy's stethoscope until I pulled it out of its black leather case one winter and saw the rubber had melted into sticky pieces of nothing and the silver disk was flaked with rust. Seems all I had from them was the memories of fire and smoke.