Quotes about Connection

"I celebrate myself, and what I assume you shall assume, For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you. I loafe and invite my soul, I lean and loafe at my ease... observing a spear of summer grass."

Young man I think I know you—I think this face is the face of the Christ himself,Dead and divine and brother of all, and here again he lies.

In the faces of men and women I see God, and in my own face in the glass, I find letters from God dropped in the street, and every one is signed by God's name. And I leave them where they are, for I know that wherever I go, others will punctually come for ever and ever.

I have learned that to be with those I like is enough

Whoever you are, now I place my hand upon you/ That you may be my poem/ I whisper with my lips close to your ear/ I have loved many women and men, but I love none better than you.

Smile. Have you ever noticed how easily puppies make human friends? Yet all they do is wag their tails and fall over.

Good listeners, like precious gems, are to be treasured.

Humanness depends on being faithfully heard. And being faithfully heard depends on risky speech of self-disclosure uttered in freedom before a faithful listener.

First, in the witness to Jesus by the early Christians in the New Testament, they relied heavily on Old Testament "anticipations" of the coming Messiah. But second, Jesus did not fit those "anticipations" very well, such that a good deal of interpretive imagination was required in order to negotiate the connection between the anticipation and the actual bodily, historical reality of Jesus.

But the pull of God's largeness summons all of us, often through the words and presence of "the other." The old teaching of exclusion cannot fully protect us from God's pull to be a neighbor.

A woman's whole life is a history of the affections.

A mother is the truest friend we have . . .