Quotes About Connection

Clare wasn't worried anymore about their being mean to each other. She imagined that someday she'd be part of a friendship in which she and the friend thought so highly of each other and were so sure of this that they could say anything.

I think love is an imperative. It obligates you.

When it comes to Clare, sometimes, the past isn't past. The past can get as present as any present ever was, so near that I feel its breath.

That no matter what happens, loving someone to the best of your ability is the right thing to do. It's the only thing to do.

Honestly, William, time ?' his mother had snapped. ' Distance ? Those things have nothing whatsoever to do with love. Who knows that better than you?

He wasn't looking at her, was at such an oblique angle to her that his face was little more than a sliver, but she knew him at once. "It was like reading," she would try to explain later, and she wasn't talking about phonics. She didn't break him into syllables—shoulders, hair, shirt collar, hand, nose, cheekbone—and put him back together again; she didn't sound him out. He was a language she knew, and it was whole-word recognition: Will.

Conversationally, we were Fred and Ginger -- spin, slide, shuffle, bend.

Back when we were in love, even after we'd been together for years, that smile never stopped taking me by surprise. It was found money, an arrowhead, a shooting star, a great, shiny stroke of luck every single time.

There were people who could live on their own and be happy, and then there were people like Pen and Margaret who needed the falling together, the daily work of giving and taking and talk and touch.

Honestly, the idea of wanting to spend time with people one did not love absolutely mystified her.

We were friends. It was as big a deal as being in love." She tried to think of a way to make Amelie understand. "It was a revelation, being friends like that. God, it was holy to me. But it wasn't being in love.

It's just that without wanting to or trying to—and for years I was deliberately trying not to—I held on to love. Or it held on to me. Not active love; not love, the verb form. It was more just there, a small, unshakable thing, leftover, useless, as vestigial as wisdom teeth or a tailbone, but still potent enough so that when I heard his voice on the phone, my heart gave a tiny jump of hope that made me want to slap it.

in my family I have comrades-hearty and loyal-when what I need are intimates, and I've never figured out how to get us all to make the switch. I've never found a way in.

If you never share the worst thing you've ever done with a single person, if you just carry it all by yourself, maybe it comes between you and everyone you meet, even if it's years later.

As Will stood watching Pen, just before he turned away, his initial astonishment shifted into something quieter. Soon, she will see me; we'll sit someplace and talk, he thought. He felt like a kid who falls asleep on a long car trip, wakes up, and looks out the window to find that he's in a new place, or home, and that it's morning.

You mean you're not on your way home?" asked Pen. Will could hear the joy in her voice. "Not unless you mean you," he told her. "I'm on my way to you.

Cornelia pulled love around me like a coat, tugged it shut, and did up the buttons, as if I belonged to her. And so I did.

Maybe love comes in at the eyes, but not nearly as much as it comes in at the ears...

You're his blue sky. When everything else is darkness. But is he yours?

Not tailgating acknowledges the mystery and humanity of strangers. It's one of those small habits that speaks volumes.

And then, one day, Edith gave me a house.

I know the pull of a dark, complicated man, the kind who has trouble loving anyone but you. But let me tell you this: the ones who look like home are home.

The woman who picked us up when we fell down or wiped our faces or fed us lunch or yelled us down from treetops or out of mud (all of it so casually, with barely a break in the conversation or an extra breath) may have been our mother but could just as easily have been someone else's. We hardly noticed. The women merged into a kind of laughing, chatting, benevolent blur, a network of distracted love and safekeeping.

He pictured the black dot on the map again. Not very long ago, Dev had believed in the dot's randomness, but now the dot was houses, friends, trees, poems, fiery leaves snagged in his rake, his bike wheels on asphalt. He imagined the dot grown larger and printed with the words on his Milky Way poster: YOU ARE HERE.