Quotes About Connection

Because the different chance events which bring us into contact with certain people do not coincide with the time during which we are in love with them, but, extending beyond it, may occur before it begins and repeat themselves after it has ended, the earliest appearances in our lives of a person destined later to captivate us assume retrospectively in our eyes the significance of a warning, a presage. This

Life is strewn with these miracles for which people who love can always hope.

But normally, when Albertine was sleeping, she seemed to have recovered her innocence. In the position where I had placed her, but which in sleep she quickly made her own, she seemed to be trusting herself to me. Her face had lost any expression of deviousness or vulgarity, and when she raised her arm toward me or laid her hand upon me, each of us seemed entirely given up to the other, indissolubly joined.

Là comme partout, je connais tout le monde et je ne connais personne; beaucoup les choses et fort peu les personnes. Mais les choses elles-mêmes y semblent des personnes, des personnes rares, d'une essence délicate et que la vie aurait déçue.

It is I suppose comprehensible that the letters which we receive from a person are more or less similar and combine to trace an image of the writer so different from the person whom we know as to constitute a second personality.

perhaps indeed there exists but a single intelligence of which everyone is a co-tenant, an intelligence towards which each of us from out of his own separate body turns his eyes, as int a theatre where, if everyone has his own separate seat, there is on the other hand but a single stage.

an inverse operation multiplies to such a degree what concerns our welfare and divides by such a formidable figure what does not concern it, that the death of millions of unknown people hardly affects us more unpleasantly than a draught.

I looked at her, at first with the sort of gaze that is not merely the messenger of the eyes, but a window at which all the senses lean out, anxious and petrified, a gaze that would like to touch the body it is looking at, capture it, take it away and the soul along with it;

But we do not like to show off to them relations who have remained what we have tried hard to cease from being.

And so it is with things that we shall later love the most. We meet them first as strangers who give us only a feeling of surprise.

When you come to live with a woman, you will soon cease to see anything of what made you love her; though it is true that the two sundered elements can be reunited by jealousy.

having the slightest connection either in intensity or in quality with the unimaginable hell that Françoise had allowed me to glimpse when she said, "Miss Albertine has left." In order to represent an unknown situation, the imagination borrows elements already known, and for this reason fails to represent it.

Nas?l ki baz? yarat?klar, tabiat?n üretmekten vazgeçti?i bir canl? türünün son örnekleriyse, acaba –dil, kelimeler, dü?üncelerin çözümlenmesi icat edilmemi? olsa–ruhlar aras?nda mevcut olabilecek ileti?imin yegâne örne?i de müzik mi diye dü?ünüyordum. Müzik, devam? gelmemi? bir olas?l?k gibidir; insanl?k ba?ka yollara, konu?ma ve yaz? diline sapm??t?r.

And if she had appeared, would I have dared to speak to her?

never cease to kiss him. Every kiss provokes another. Ah, in those earliest days of love how naturally the kisses spring into life. How closely, in their abundance, are they pressed one against another; until lovers would find it as hard to count the kisses exchanged in an hour, as to count the flowers in a meadow in May.

When the compartments in which we live parts of our lives are too different from one another, we can expend ourselves on a person who, by the following day, may come to seem uninteresting. But we feel responsible for what we may have said the night before, and wish to honor it.

It has been said that silence is a force; in another and widely different sense it is a tremendous force in the hands of those who are loved.

With any one member of my little gang of girls, was I not bound to recall only the most recently glimpsed of her possible faces, given that the mind eliminates from our memories of anyone whatever does not contribute in an immediately useful way to our daily dealings with the person, even if—especially if!—these dealings are colored by a tincture of love, which, by being perpetually unsatisfied, lives forever in the coming moment?

De schoonzus van een van mijn vriendinnen heeft onlangs telefoon in haar huis laten aanleggen! [...] Ik zal je eerlijk bekennen dat ik listen en lagen verzonnen heb om ook eens een keer door het toestel te mogen komen spreken. Ik vind het heel aantrekkelijk, maar toch meer bij een vriendin dan bij mij thuis. Daar zou ik geloof ik niet graag een telefoon willen hebben. Als het eerste nieuwtje eraf is, wordt dat gebel waarschijnlijk een plaag.

the lie that tries to have us believe we are not inescapably alone in the world, and which, when we converse with someone, prevents us from admitting that it is not we who are speaking, that at such times we try to take on the semblance of other people, rather than be the self that differs from them.

But, just as we are devoid of that sense of direction with which certain birds are endowed, so we lack the sense of visibility as we lack that of distances, imagining as close the concerned attention of people who, on the contrary, never give us a thought, and not suspecting that during this same time we are the sole preoccupation of others.

Nothing so tempts us to approach another person as what is keeping us apart; and what barrier is so insurmountable as silence? It has been said also that silence is torture, capable of goading to madness the man who is condemned to it in a prison cell. But what an even greater torture than that of having to keep silence it is to have to endure the silence of the person one loves!

C'est peut-être de la même manière qu'une sorte de bouture prélevée sur un être, et greffée au cœur d'un autre, continue à y poursuivre sa vie, même quand l'être d'où elle avait été détachée a péri.

For it is a charming law of nature, which manifests itself in the heart of the most complex social organisms, that we live in perfect ignorance of those we love.