Quotes About Connection

It may seem strange, falling in love with someone because of a gesture, but sometimes you can read an entire person in a single moment. The way you can study a grain of sand and understand the universe. Love at first sight might or might not be a thing, but love in a single moment is.

That, I suppose, is a price we pay for love: the absorbing of another's pain as if our own.

All a writer can do is provide a match, and hopefully a dry one. The reader has to strike the flame into being.

I'm having a pretty shit time too, if we're doing the Misery Olympics.

So every human inhabitant on this freak wonder of a planet shares the same core. I am you and you are me. We are alone, but not alone. We are trapped by time, but also infinite. Made of flesh, but also stars.

We kissed and I closed my eyes and inhaled lavender and her, and I felt so terrified and so in love that I realised they - the terror, the love - were one in the same thing.

Other animals don't have progress, they say. But the human mind itself doesn't progress. We stay the same glorified chimpanzees, just with ever bigger weapons. We have the knowledge to realise we are just a mass of quanta and particles, like everything else is, and yet we keep trying to separate ourselves from the universe we live in, to give ourselves a meaning above that of a tree or a rock or a cat or a turtle.

Forcing yourself to see the world through love's gaze can be healthy. Love is an attitude to life. It can save us.

We have the knowledge to realise we are just a mess of quanta and particles, like everything else is, and yet we keep trying to separate ourselves from the universe we live in, to give ourselves a meaning above that of a tree or a rock or a cat or a turtle.

This was, I realized, a beautiful planet. Maybe it was the most beautiful of all. But beauty creates its own troubles. You look at a waterfall or an ocean or a sunset, and you find yourself wanting to share it with someone.

It wasn't just the loss of people I had known but also the loss of myself. The loss of who I had been when I had been with them.

No drug in the universe will make you feel better, at the deepest level, than being kind to other people.

You have the power to stop time. You do it by kissing. Or listening to music.

The greatest stories appeal to our deepest selves, the parts of us snobbery can't reach, the parts that connect the child to the adult and the brain to the heart and reality to dreams. Stories, at their essence, are enemies of snobbery. And a book snob is the enemy of the book.

It is the simplest, purest joy on earth, I realize, to make someone you care about laugh

Because the possibility of pain is where love stems from.

Read poetry. Especially poetry by Emily Dickinson. It might save you. Anne Sexton knows the mind, Walt Whitman knows grass, but Emily Dickinson knows everything.

I think life always provides reasons to not die, if we listen hard enough. Those reasons can stem from the past—the people who raised us, maybe, or friends or lovers—or from the future—the possibilities we would be switching off.

Let's occasionally look up from the spot in which we are because, wherever we happen to be standing, the sky above goes on for ever.

Life is the people who love you.

Language gives us the power to voice our experience, to reconnect with the world, and to change our own and other people's lives

You are not the only one with sorrows in this world. Don't hoard them like they are precious. There is always plenty of them to go around.

Love now. Love right now. If you have someone to love, do it this instant LOVE FEARLASSLY.

Sex can damage love but love can't damage sex.