Human Bond Quotes

To be known so well by someone is an unimaginable gift. But to be imagined so well by someone is even better.

Writing is weaponized empathy. It's putting yourself in someone else's head. It's finding what's in them that relates to you.

My relationship to the Jewish people has become my strongest human bond, ever since I became fully aware of our precarious situation among the nations of the world.

No one is ever really a stranger. We cling to the belief that we share nothing with certain people. It's rubbish. We have almost everything in common with everyone.

Fiction, at its best, is a radical act of intimacy. It seeks to join, to merge, to know deeply; and, as with intimacy, there is a way in which it cannot be faked.

Life would split apart without letters.

Love is all we have, the only way that each can help the other.

Life is not what you alone make it. Life is the input of everyone who touched your life and every experience that entered it. We are all part of one another.

At the end of the day, we are all humans.

What is art? (...) Like a declaration of love: the consciousness of our dependence on each other. A confession. An unconscious act that none the less reflects the true meaning of life—love and sacrifice.

I think we go through the world feeling alone and singular, and you forget that your one story is probably the same as millions of people's stories. Maybe with different specifics. But a lot of people experience the same things.

It's always wonderful to get to know women, with the mystery and the joy and the depth. If you can make a woman laugh, you're seeing the most beautiful thing on God's Earth.

When we read together, we connect. Together, we see the world. Together, we see one another.

Human relationships are strange. I mean, you are with one person a while, eating and sleeping and living with them, loving them, talking to them, going places together, and then it stops.

What always strikes me in the story of Cain and Abel is how often the word "brother" is used. Cain killed his "brother." God says it was "the blood of your brother." The killing was done to another human being, a child of God like you, breaking that sacred bond of common humanity.

Having a sister or a friend is like sitting at night in a lighted house. Those outside can watch you if they want, but you need not see them. You simply say, "Here are the perimeters of our attention. If you prowl around under the windows till the crickets go silent, we will pull the shades. If you wish us to suffer your envious curiosity, you must permit us not to notice it." Anyone with one solid human bond is that smug, and it is the smugness as much as the comfort and safety that lonely people covet and admire.

We do not love anything more deeply than we love a story.

Love is when you meet someone who tells you something new about yourself.

Friendship, if somebody holds out his hand toward you, you've got to reach and take it... There are too many people alone, and if you're lucky enough for somebody to want you as a friend, it's an obligation.

Venerable are letters, infinitely brave, forlorn, and lost. Life would split asunder without them. 'Come to tea, come to dinner, what's the truth of the story? have you heard the news? life in the capital is wonderful; the Russian dancers....' These are our stays and props. These lace our days together and make of life a perfect globe.

Things that feel super personal actually feel really universal. It's sort of the more you really identify something specific within yourself, the more people connect to it because ultimately we are all connected in some way.

A city becomes a world when one loves one of its inhabitants.

I want somebody to hear my song and say, 'You know, man, I've been through that.'

[...]when two people have become present to each other, the waiting of one must be able to cross the narrow line between the living or dying of the other.