" TO LOVE YOU JUST AND JUST AND SOLELY…sorely "

" ‘IF THE GIRL HAD BEEN WORTH HAVING SHE’D HAVE WAITED FOR YOU?’

NO, SIR, THE GIRL REALLY WORTH HAVING WON’T WAIT FOR ANYBODY. "

by F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise

" MY HEART IS UNREGRETTABLY PALLIATING AT THE ECHOES OF YOUR MERE BREATHING. "

by Frida Kahlo, from The Diary Of Frida Kahlo: An Intimate Self-Portrait

" YOU CAN TALK WITH SOMEONE FOR YEARS, EVERYDAY, AND STILL, IT WON’T MEAN AS MUCH AS WHAT YOU CAN HAVE WHEN YOU SIT IN FRONT OF SOMEONE, NOT SAYING A WORD, YET YOU FEEL THAT PERSON WITH YOUR HEART, YOU FEEL LIKE YOU HAVE KNOWN THE PERSON FOR FOREVER. CONNECTIONS ARE MADE WITH THE HEART, NOT THE TONGUE. "

by C. Joybell C

" I PUT MY HAND ON HIM. TOUCHING HIM WAS ALWAYS SO IMPORTANT TO ME. IT WAS SOMETHING I LIVED FOR. I NEVER COULD EXPLAIN WHY. LITTLE, NOTHING TOUCHES. MY FINGERS AGAINST HIS SHOULDER. THE OUTSIDES OF OUR THIGHS TOUCHING AS WE SQUEEZED TOGETHER ON THE BUS. I COULDN’T EXPLAIN IT, BUT I NEEDED IT. SOMETIMES I IMAGINED STITCHING ALL OF OUR TOUCHES TOGETHER. HOW MANY HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS OF FINGERS BRUSHING AGAINST EACH OTHER DOES IT TAKE TO MAKE LOVE? "

by Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close

" YOU ARE SO BRAVE AND QUIET I FORGET YOU ARE SUFFERING. "

by Ernest Hemingway

" THOUGH I MAY SEEM AT TIMES SOMEWHAT DISTANT FROM YOU, THROUGH THE GRAY MIST OF MY OWN MOODS, I AM NEVER FAR; MY THOUGHTS ALWAYS CIRCLE AROUND YOU. "

by Friedrich Nietzsche

" MAYBE NOT NOW, BUT MAYBE LATER WE’LL FALL BACK IN PLACE TOGETHER. "

" IT WAS PROBABLY NOTHING BUT IT FELT LIKE THE WORLD. "

" IF IT WERE UP TO ME

I WOULD LIVE WHERE YOU LIVE

IN A SMALL DARK CORNER OF YOUR SOUL

MORNINGS I WOULD WATER

THE ROSES AND THE POPPIES,

AND EVEN THE WILD FLOWERS THAT GROW

ON THE BANKS OF YOUR REMEMBERINGS "

by Silvia Antonia Brandon Pérez

" I ADORE THE STRUGGLE YOU CARRY IN YOURSELF. I ADORE YOUR TERRIFYING SINCERITY. "

by Anaïs Nin in a letter to Henry Miller

" I LOVE YOUR SILENCES, THEY ARE LIKE MINE. YOU ARE THE ONLY BEING BEFORE WHOM I AM NOT DISTRESSED BY MY OWN SILENCES. YOU HAVE A VEHEMENT SILENCE, ONE FEELS IT IS CHARGED WITH ESSENCES, IT IS A STRANGELY ALIVE SILENCE, LIKE A TRAP OPEN OVER A WELL, FROM WHICH ONE CAN HEAR THE SECRET MURMUR OF THE EARTH ITSELF. "

by Anaïs Nin, Under the Glass Jar

 

“THERE’S A CURIOSITY IN YOU THAT WILL MOVE MOUNTAINS SOME DAY

AS EFFORTLESSLY AS YOU’VE MOVED ME FOR YEARS.”

" I WANTED TO KNOW YOU MOVED AND BREATHED IN THE SAME WORLD WITH ME. "

by F. Scott Fitzgeral

There are thousands of ambitions that each such wish could consume my life. My desires, and I experience them all intensely, aren’t enough for this one lifetime. All these desires now drive my heart and I could die of each that no matter how much I suffer from them, it’s still not enough. So don’t cry, my love, you didn’t cause this pain. It was my fault that I fell so intensely in love with you.

" THAT’S WHAT IT FEELS LIKE WHEN YOU TOUCH ME. LIKE MILLIONS OF TINY UNIVERSES BEING BORN AND THEN DYING IN THE SPACE BETWEEN YOUR FINGER AND MY SKIN. SOMETIMES I FORGET. "

by Iain Thomas, I Wrote This For You

" YOU CAN KEEP AS QUIET AS YOU LIKE, BUT ONE OF THESE DAYS SOMEBODY IS GOING TO FIND YOU. "

by Haruki Murakami

 

" EVERYTHING IS ENERGY AND THAT’S ALL THERE IS TO IT. MATCH THE FREQUENCY OF THE REALITY YOU WANT AND YOU CANNOT HELP BUT GET THAT REALITY. IT CAN BE NO OTHER WAY. THIS IS NOT PHILOSOPHY. THIS IS PHYSICS. "

by Albert Einstein

" I SAT WATCHING A FLOWER AS IT WAS WITHERING. I WAS EMBARRASSED BY ITS HONESTY. "

 

 REMEMBER THAT THE BEST RELATIONSHIP IS ONE IN WHICH YOUR LOVE FOR EACH OTHER EXCEEDS YOUR NEED FOR EACH OTHER. "

by The Dalai Lama

" ALL I WANTED TO DO WAS SNEAK OUT INTO THE NIGHT AND DISAPPEAR SOMEWHERE, AND GO AND FIND OUT WHAT EVERYBODY WAS DOING ALL OVER THE COUNTRY. "

by Jack Kerouac, On the Road

" LET ME GLIMPSE INSIDE YOUR VELVET BONES. "

by Edgar Allan Poe

On the capacity for transformation and it’s prerequisite of letting go.

In a relationship, one mind revises the other; one heart changes its partner. This astounding legacy of our combined status as mammals and neural beings is limbic revision: the power to remodel the emotional parts of the people we love, as our Attractors [coteries of ingrained information patterns] activate certain limbic pathways, and the brain’s inexorable memory mechanism reinforces them.

…I thought

that pain meant

I was not loved.

It meant I loved.

" - Louise Glück, from First Memory

 

Who we are and who we become depends, in part, on whom we love.

Sarah Paretsky

 

 

 

 

 

Henri Cartier Bresson one of the greatest in the profession was into it too. He was of course French and as is their wont, the French elevate everything to high art. So in French a loafer is called a flaneur; a far more respectable terminology. Balzac another Frenchman, described the flaneur as the sort of person who is a connoisseur of the smells, the sounds, the drama of the streets he walks in and he described the activity of loafing as the ‘’gastronomy of the eye’’.

Conversations, as they tend to play out in person, are messy—full of pauses and interruptions and topic changes and assorted awkwardness. But the messiness is what allows for true exchange. It gives participants the time—and, just as important, the permission—to think and react and glean insights. “You can’t always tell, in a conversation, when the interesting bit is going to come,” Turkle says. “It’s like dancing: slow, slow, quick-quick, slow. You know? It seems boring, but all of a sudden there’s something, and whoa.”

Occasional dullness, in other words, is to be not only expected, but celebrated. Some of the best parts of conversation are, as Turkle puts it, “the boring bits.” In software terms, they’re features rather than bugs.

The logic of conversation as it plays out across the Internet, however—the into-the-ether observations and the never-ending feeds and the many, many selfies—is fundamentally different, favoring showmanship over exchange, flows over ebbs. The Internet is always on. And it’s always judging you, watching you, goading you. “That’s not conversation,” Turkle says.

She wants us to reclaim the permission to be, when we want and need to be, dull.

She advocates limiting our device usage in “sacred spaces” like the dinner table, the places where phones and their enticements may impede intimacy and interaction. She wants us to look into each other’s eyes as we talk. She wants us to read each other’s movements. She wants us to have conversations that are supremely human.