Quotes About Connection

We are all here on this earth for only one go-round. And everyone thinks their purpose is just to find their passion. But perhaps our purpose is also to find out what other people need. And maybe the world does not actually need to see you, my dear, reciting a tired old monologue from the Samuel French collection or pretending to be drunk and staggering around. Has that ever occurred to you?

Their life together, which had its distinct rhythms and drama, was generally invisible to everyone else; sometimes she thought they were like performers in a flea circus between shows, doing their microscopic tricks only for each other.

knew everything about him, the way wives do. I even knew the inside of him, having been there that day in Dr. Ruffner's office to review the footage of Joe's colon. We sat and watched light travel through his most intimate inner tubing, and after that we were really bound together for life.

It's funny how you can go for a long time in life not needing someone, and then you meet them and you suddenly need them all the time.

It was like some kind of full-mind, full-body fuck. That was what it was like when your entire self was engaged. That was what it was like to pay attention.

Walking into someone's house was like entering their body. You saw what they were made of, and what they had been stewing in all this time.

You had to train your mind to remember: human being lying here at my feet, not someone to feel contempt toward.

The more you were not with a person, the more your lives diverged.

It's so wonderful that all of you have so much more freedom than I did. But along with that freedom can sometimes come a sense that you don't need other women. And that isn't true.

All written words danced in a chain for her, creating corresponding images as clear as the boy from Iran's bouncing family.

Families always seem to me like this weird accident." "What do you mean?" Opal asked. "I don't know," said Erica. She gestured with both hands, fingers splayed. "It's almost as if a bunch of people who have absolutely no reason to be together all drew straws and somehow wound up on the same commune.

Families were like individual, discrete, moated island nations. The little group of citizens on the slab of rock gathered together instinctively, almost defensively, and everyone who was outside the walls—even if you'd once been best friends—was now just that, outsiders.

He couldn't tell her that what he wanted now, more than anything, was to fall asleep beside her. No touching, no kissing, no stimulation. No sensation, no consciousness. Just the act of sleeping beside someone you liked to be with. Maybe that was love.

People wanted one another to do something. They wanted someone to say the thing that they could then take into themselves and transform into something else.

It wasn't easy to understand how the love between two other people could diminish you. If those two people were still accessible to you, if they called you all the time, if they asked you to come into the city for the weekend as you'd always done, then why should you feel, suddenly, intensely lonely?

If love was real, then these bodily, human details could seem insignificant.

She clung marsupially,

Jonah was a skeptic, the way all decent scientists were, but his skepticism was outmaneuvered by the good feelings that he now connected with being here among these people. This was what a family felt like; this was what a family was.

Loveless, we lay together.

Greer, Zee, and Chloe were an unlikely trio, but she had heard this was typical of social life in the first weeks of college. People who had nothing in common were briefly and emotionally joined, like the members of a jury or the survivors of a plane crash

They crossed the Smith campus in clusters, these girls, as though they might simply tip over if forced to stand alone.

Maybe it'll be legal to marry places one day. And if so, then I will marry this one.

They wanted someone to say the thing that they could then take into themselves and transform into something else. A word might land in a certain way; or maybe not even a word. Maybe a gesture, or a moment of listening.

they talked day and night, as though inside them an endless scroll of paper were unraveling out through the mouth.