communion

He has sincerely wanted to die, but he has never sincerely wanted Marianne to forget about him. That's the only part of himself he wants to protect, the part that exists inside her.

Sally Rooney, Normal People

Look into the self and discover that it is made only of non-self elements.

Thich Nhat Hanh, The Heart of the Buddha's Teaching

In the end, it cannot be doubted that each of us can see only a part of the picture. The doctor sees one, the patient another, the engineer a third, the economist a fourth, the pearl diver a fifth, the alcoholic a sixth, the cable guy a seventh, the sheep farmer an eighth, the Indian beggar a ninth, the pastor a tenth. Human knowledge is never contained in one person. It grows from the relationships we create between each other and the world, and still it is never complete.

Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air

My real family, she thought, are those people I just happened to meet in that coffee shop. My descendants are the independent children in my institution.

Yoko Tawada, The Emissary

(2.1) No one can implicate me in ugliness. We were born to work together, to obstruct each other is unnatural.

Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

The sharing of joy, whether physical, emotional, psychic, or intellectual, forms a bridge between the sharers which can be the basis for understanding much of what is not shared between them, and lessens the threat of their difference.

Audre Lorde, The Uses of the Erotic

A lot of what we see today in art is fragments of what has already been done long ago — people were interested in these same problems, these same significances, shapes, situations. Nothing is new, but everything's new. That's what keeps us living and pulls us along. I think in a way it's the artist's duty to pull people along with him. That's why we do art, thinking that we might enrapture people somehow. Art is a continuous search. There's no end to it, and that is what makes it so marvelous.

Isamu Noguchi

And I know that the hand of God is the elderhand of my own, And I know that the spirit of God is the eldest brother of my own, And that all the men ever born are also my brothers... and the women my sisters and lovers, And that a kelson of the creation is love

Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass