Gary Chapman Quotes

The last page of [Lincoln in the Bardo] - without giving too much away - involves somebody entering somebody else. Not in a sexual way. But it says one of the simplest things you could ever say, which is that we must try and be inside each other. We must have some kind of feeling for each other and enter into each other's experience.

I know the feeling of being with a person with whom I have nothing in common, and yet there they are, and there we are, together, sharing pieces of our lives.

What differentiates us from animals is the fact that we can listen to other people's dreams, fears, joys, sorrows, desires and defeats - and they in turn can listen to ours.

Something about telling that story made my gut grow back together." What?" Oh, nothing. Just thinking out loud." That's who you really like. The people you can think out loud in front of." The people who've been in your secret hiding places." The people you bite your thumb in front of." Hi." Hi." ..." ..." Wow. My first Lindsey." My second Colin." That was fun. Let's try it again." Sold." ..." ..." ...".

People never know each other until they have eaten a certain amount of salt together.

We've seen that there are a lot of people out there - teenagers in Topeka, housewives in Long Island, millionaire Internet start-up moguls - that all want to connect with each other about what it is to be human.

I try to make really close bonds with people.

I think that human beings are often looking for a reason to relate.

Humanity has this need to hear stories because they connect us with other people, they teach us about our own feelings. We feel less lonely when we see other people going through the same things, even if they're fictional characters.

All my life I've been interested in other people's stories. I wanted to know them, understand them, feel them.

If you and I are friends, there is an expectancy that exists within our relationship. When we see each other or are apart, there is an expectancy of being together, of laughing and talking. The expectancy has no concrete definition; it is alive and dynamic and everything that emerges from our being together is a unique gift shared by no one else.

Perhaps what makes friendship and love exciting is the continuing discovery of another personality.

The more you join with people in their joys and their sorrows, the more nearer and dearer they come to be to you.

In our opposed forms of loneliness and self-recognition and recognition of the other, we touched each other often as we spoke; and on shore in explorations of the past, we strolled with our arms linked.

The more I live, the more I think, two people together is a miracle.

We shared. Parents. Home. Pets. Celebrations. Catastrophes. Secrets. And the threads of our experience became so interwoven that we are linked. I can never be utterly lonely, knowing you share the planet.

The point of life for me is just to make connections with people and share experiences with people.

With some of the bad things that come with love, there's also a lot of good. For example that connection... which I struggle to have with most people.

I realize that I will never fully understand the millions of bizarre ways that music brings people together.

Sympathy wanting, all is wanting; its personal magnetism is the conductor of the sacred spark that lights our atoms, puts us m human communion, and gives us to company, conversation, and ourselves.

The most incredible gift you can give someone in a video is to help them feel less alone... The things that make us feel the most alone, have the greatest power to connect us

Then I tell my own story. The two things that people really need to transform is language to understand their experience and to know they're not alone. It's the combination of the researcher-storyteller part.

Whether it's friendship or love. The essence of is two people trying to share something. When I think of how I met my best friends, it was always like love at first sight.

When a novelist manages to describe or evoke something you thought or felt, without realizing that other people also found themselves in the same situation and had the same feelings, it creates that same solidarity. Maybe it's better to think of humor not as a tool to express the solidarity, but a kind of by-product. Maybe the realization "I'm not on my own on this one" is always, or often, funny.

A toddling little girl is a centre of common feeling which makes the most dissimilar people understand each other.