Quotes About Connection

Loneliness is a source of loathsome ice-cold suffering, the suffering of unreality. At such times we need people to teach us that we're not really so far gone.

In a sense, the mentally deranged and feebleminded were my guardian angels, and when I hadn't seen any of them in a long time, the sight of an idiot gave me a sudden burst of health and strength.

Being with Steffens is to me like flashes of clear light; it is as if I see him, and myself, and the world, with new eyes." Steffens

Love is not a feeling.  It's an ability.

She loves me-she just doesn't know it yet.

No 'buts', Gilbert. You just make sense to me. It's nothing more special than that.

He sees me through the glass. We both nod like we give a small shit about each other.

smiles and friendly nods are like fabric softeners for the face.

When her mouth found mine I disassembled. Not exploded like a bomb or anything, but came apart. A few pieces at a time. They floated away, went into a kind of orbit. A splintering galaxy. An extravagant slow motion annihilation. The only center was her mouth, her hair. It was her. A reconstitution around the core of her.

Can you fall in love through a rifle scope?

Jasper's weight on my leg an aching absence.

She thought that one might not make a dent in the Great Sadness, but one could help make another person whole.

Because that's what it turned into: in front of a fine painting a viewer stopped looking and started watching, watching is more specific, watching is a hunt for something, a search, the way we search for a loved one's boat on the horizon, or an elk in the trees. Before a good painting they started watching for clues to their own life.

She collapsed. I stepped forward and caught her. I thought of two trees nearly unrooted and leaning against each other.

He really your dad? Yes. On my father's side.

You lose yourself and just about vanish and the painting asserts and fills and flows over the dam and down into the streambed of everything you have ever experienced and thought, and carries you both on a current that takes you into a country that neither of you have ever seen. Where you have never been.

the flies contain the ingenuity and craft of fine jewelry and the promise of hours, days, in pursuit of something even more beautiful: a connection to the beating heart of the living earth and maybe to one's own mastery.

She reached across, grabbed my hand. I'm not going anywhere, Hig, she said. Where would I go? Lots of places, I thought but I didn't say anything. To the other side for one. Or way way inside. A lot of places someone else can never follow.

He had learned that it was much less a distraction than a form of connection: of connecting to the best part of himself, and to a discipline that demanded he stay open to every sense, to the nuances of the season and to the instrument of his own body, his own agility or fatigue.

When you kill do you also conjoin somehow? In some horrible communion you will never shake? Is that why soldiers come home and scream at night and kill themselves? Because they have become their targets?

People need people, more than any other being needs any other being, and Jack thought as he sifted the remnants of the nightmare that the need makes us particularly vulnerable.

other in a key inaudible, usually, to the human ear. But probably you could hear it. Sometimes. If you quieted the pulse of your own blood. A rhythmic keening at the edge of sound. Wynn thought that if wolves sang, and coyotes, and elk and birds, and wind, and we, too, it was probably

I know now that I loved him more than anything on earth or off of it.

If they swapped jokes, she asked them what the Zero said to the Eight: "Nice belt!