Quotes About Connection

The person who loves their dream of community will destroy community, but the person who loves those around them will create community. — Dietrich Bonhoeffer

The Spiritual Disciplines in and of themselves have no merit whatsoever. They possess no righteousness, contain no rectitude. Their purpose—their only purpose—is to place us before God. After that they have come to the end of their usefulness. But it is enough.

Love needs time, and time is the air love breathes, and people have no time.

Family business stays in the family, her mother had always said right after she'd told them, When all is said and done, family is all you got.

a relationship isn't good because it lasts a lifetime. A relationship is good if it gives you the wisdom of a lifetime.

But how could they be together on any permanent basis when she only felt comfortable with him in her bedroom?

Librarians are your very best friend. And don't ever think otherwise.

She is my companion on my many genealogical hunts, and I will be forever indebted to her for the knowledge that she bequeathed to me. And I can think of nobody I would rather traipse through a cemetery with, and that says a lot about a person.

We were drinking a memory, one that would be forever associated with the memory of this trip.

More people saying what they believe would be a great improvement. Because I often do I am unfit for common intercourse.-Nero Wolfe in "Blood Will Tell

When we turned right on Thirty-fifth Street our suffix came along. By the time we rolled to the curb in front of Wolfe's house there wasn't even hyphen between us.

Everything about her, the way she walked, the way she stood, her eyes and mouth and whole face, seemed to be saying, without trying or intending to, that if you happened to be hers, and she yours, life would be full of pleasant and interesting surprises.

though it is a form of intimacy I don't care for, since I have a tendency to fight shy of bonds.

She leveled the eyes at me, and, finding it difficult to meet them casually, I met them consciously.

When I finished, explaining that I had let him go because I was human, as he had said, he held it for another minute and then opened his eyes. He grunted. "You are not more human than I am. You are merely more susceptible, more sociable, and more vulnerable.

As I closed the door behind me he started to scorch me with an indignant look for being gone so long, but when he saw my face, which he knows better than I do, he abandoned it. 'Well?' he asked mildly.

Just because they aren't with us doesn't mean we don't have parents anymore.

Juana ran her hand over her mother's face. "One day

But then Mago touched my belly button and added something to the story my mother had never told me. She said that my umbilical cord was like a ribbon that connected me to Mami. She said, "It doesn't matter that there's a distance between us now. That cord is there forever.

What separates man from divine Reality is the slightest of barriers: God is infinitely close to man, but man is infinitely far from God. The barrier is, for man, a mountain; he stands before a mountain which he must remove with his own hands. He digs away the earth, but in vain; the mountain remains. Man, however, goes on digging, in the name of God. And the mountain vanishes. It was never there.

A need to tell and hear stories is essential to the species Homo sapiens--second in necessity apparently after nourishment and before love and shelter. Millions survive without love or home, almost none in silence; the opposite of silence leads quickly to narrative, and the sound of story is the dominant sound of our lives, from the small accounts of our day's events to the vast incommunicable constructs of psychopaths.

In the next long minute, he felt an understanding spread deep down inside him, an understanding that he'd only felt with animals before--with poor old Hilda and the hawks he'd seen in tall bare trees and that buck deer, long ago in the woods, that spoke Ben's name and told him the world was a fine place to live, hard but fine.

Islam] is the dynamic conviction that a person's spiritual and worldly responsibilities are one and the same, that an individuals duty to the community is indistinguishable from his or her duty to God.

Minds are not changed merely through acquiring data or information (if that were the case it would take no effort to convince Americans that Obama is, in fact, a Christian). Rather, it is solely through the slow and steady building of personal relationships that one discovers the fundamental truth that all people everywhere have the same dreams and aspirations, that all people struggle with the same fears and anxieties.