Quotes About Connection

I was named after Bob Dylan. Did I ever tell you that?

Speaking to a human you cared about, I realised, was so fraught with hidden danger that it was a wonder people bothered speaking at all.

I miss you,' she said into the air, as if the spirits of every person she'd loved were in the room with her.

That is what we were like. In a way we argued because we knew it would have no fundamental impact. When you can be yourself around someone, you project your dissatisfied self outward.

Si vous êtes le type de personne qui pense trop aux choses, alors rien n'est plus solitaire au monde que d'être entouré d'un tas de gens qui ne sont pas sur la même longueur d'ondes.

There was never a single moment, though, where I would have said—or felt—that I didn't love her. I loved her totally. Friendship-love and love-love.

Nora felt a warm glow. Not just from the pictures, which were indisputably lovely, but from the contact with Izzy.

she'd studied enough existential philosophy to believe loneliness was a fundamental part of being a human in an essentially meaningless universe

Mrs Elm had short grey hair and a kind and mildly crinkled oval face sitting pale above her turtle-green polo neck. She was quite old. But she was also the person most on Nora's wavelength in the entire school, and even on days when it wasn't raining she would spend her afternoon break in the small library.

They live in your mind, the way they always lived inside you. You keep their light alive. If you remember them well enough, they can still guide you, like the shine of long-extinguished stars could guide ships in unfamiliar waters. If you stop mourning them, and start listening to them, they still have the power to change your life. They can, in short, be salvation.

Words are seeds. Language is a way back to life. And it is sometimes the most vital comfort we have.

Foundation Other people matter. But there is no point becoming someone else in order to find friends. In order to find the people who like you, it is first necessary to be you.

She had known three types of silence in relationships. There was passive-aggressive silence, obviously, there was the we-no-longer-have-anything-to-say silence, and then there was the silence that Eduardo and she seemed to have cultivated. The silence of not needing to talk. Of just being together, of together-being. The way you could be happily silent with yourself.

And I felt an urge to tell someone how good it felt, in human form, to laugh. The release of it. And I wanted to tell someone about it

Love is where you find the meaning.

on earth, I realise, to make someone you care about laugh.

I felt so terrified and so in love that I realised they – the terror, the love – were one and the same thing.

there are millions going through an equivalent experience at any one time.

Books might be one way to recover some space. Stories. Fiction. When I was eleven, friendless, struggling to fit in at school, I read The outsiders and Rumble Fish and Tex by S.E. Hinton, and I suddenly had friends again. Her books were friends.. And the stories they inhabited could be places I could hide inside. And feel safe. In a world that can get too much, a world where we are running out of mind space, fictional worlds are essential. They can be an escape from reality.

I miss you,' she said into the air, as if the spirits of every person she'd loved were in the room with her.

But know this. Men are not from Mars. Women are not from Venus. Do not fall for categories. Everyone is everything. Every ingredient inside a star is inside you, and every personality that ever existed competes in the theater of your mind for the main role.

she wondered if her parents had ever been in love or if they had got married because marriage was something you did at the appropriate time with the nearest available person. A game where you grabbed the first person you could find when the music stopped.

So this was love. Two life-forms in mutual reliance. I was meant to be thinking I was watching weakness, something to scorn, but I wasn't thinking that at all.

How do I stay alive for other people if I have no one?" The answer is that you stay alive for other versions of you. For the people you will meet, yes, sure, but also the people you will be.