Quotes About Connection

Abra looked at his sunny hair, tight-curled now, and at the eyes that seemed so near to tears, and she felt the longing and itching burn in her chest that is the beginning of love. Also, she wanted to touch Aron, and she did. She put her hand on his arm and felt him shiver under her fingers.

They's a time of change, an' when that comes, dyin' is a piece of all dyin', and bearin' is a piece of all bearin', an' bearin' an' dyin' is two pieces of the same thing. An' then things ain't so lonely anymore. An' then a hurt don't hurt so bad.

Your audience is one single reader. I have found that sometimes it helps to pick out one person – a real person you know, or an imagined person – and write to that one.

People are felt rather than seen after the first few moments.

People are only interested in themselves. If a story is not about the hearer he will not listen…a great and lasting story is about everyone or it will not last. The strange and foreign is not interesting—only the deeply personal and familiar.

I wonder how many people I've looked at all my life and never seen.

In every bit of honest writing in the world," he noted in a 1938 journal entry," . . . there is a base theme. Try to understand men, if you understand each other you will be kind to each other. Knowing a man well never leads to hate and nearly always leads to love. There are shorter means, many of them. There is writing promoting social change, writing punishing injustice, writing in celebration of heroism, but always that base theme. Try to understand each other.

The other night I discovered that 50 feet from our house,through a break in the trees, you can see St Michael's Tor at Glastonbury...There is no question that there is magic here and all kinds of magic. (Bruton 1959)

Her fingers moved gently in his hair. She looked up and across the barn, and her lips came together and smiled mysteriously.

How can we live without our lives? How will we know it's us without our past? [...] How if you wake up in the night and know -and know the willow tree's not there? Can you live without the willow tree? Well, no, you can't. The willow tree is you

When two events have something in common, in their natures or in time or place, we leap happily to the conclusion that they are similar and from this tendency we create magics and store them for retelling.

Sure, cried the tenant men, but it's our land. We measured it and broke it up. We were born on it, and we got killed on it, died on it. Even if it's no good, it's still ours. That's what makes it ours-being born on it, working it, dying on it.

A writer out of loneliness is trying to communicate like a distant star sending signals. He isn't telling, or teaching, or ordering. Rather, he seeks to establish a relationship with meaning, of feeling, of observing. We are lonesome animals. We spend all our live trying to be less lonesome.

But now I been thinkin' what he said, an' I can remember-all of it. Says one time he went out in the wilderness to find his own soul, an' he foun' he jus' got a little piece of a great big soul. Says a wilderness ain't no good, 'cause his little piece of a soul wasn't no good 'less it was with the rest, an' was whole.

Horace Quinn remembered questioning Adam so very long ago, remembered him as a man in agony. He could still see Adam's haunted and horrified eyes. He had thought then of Adam as a man of such honesty that he couldn't conceive anything else. Adam had been set apart—an invisible wall cut him off from the world. You couldn't get into him—he couldn't get out to you. But in that old agony there had been no wall.

Those people might have been murderers, sadists, brutes, ugly apish subhumans for all I knew, but I found myself thinking, "What charming people, what flair, how beautiful they are. How I wish I knew them." And all based on the delicious smell of soup.

And then the men lay down and put their heads in the girls' laps and looked up into their faces. And they smiled at each other, a tired and peaceful and wonderful secret.

Don' keep ya guard up when nobody ain't sparrin' with ya.

Will you have a touch of ng-ka-py?" "You mean the drink that tastes of good rotten apples?" "Yes. I can talk better with it." "Maybe I can listen better," said Samuel.

If a story is not about the hearer he will not listen. And I here make a rule—a great and lasting story is about everyone or it will not last.

We got each other, that's what, that gives a hoot in hell about us.

They say a clean cut heals soonest. There's nothing sadder to me than associations held together by nothing but the glue of postage stamps. If you can't see or hear or touch a man, it's best to let him go.

Books ain't no good. A guy needs somebody to be near him

He liked to think he was in on the secrets she had. When she smiled slyly, he smiled slyly too, and they exchanged confidences in whispers. The world had drawn close around them, and they were in the center of it, or rather Rose of Sharon was in the center of it with Connie making a small orbit about her. Everything they said was a kind of secret.