Interaction Quotes

“The most beautiful part of your body
is where it’s headed. & remember,
loneliness is still time spent
with the world.”
― Ocean Vuong

“I am lonely, yet not everybody will do. I don’t know why, some people fill the gaps and others emphasize my loneliness.”
― Anaïs Nin

“People are afraid to merge on freeways in Los Angeles. This is the first thing I hear when I come back to the city. Blair picks me up from LAX and mutters this under her breath as she drives up the onramp. She says, "People are afraid to merge on freeways in Los Angeles." Though that sentence shouldn't bother me, it stays in my mind for an uncomfortably long time. Nothing else seems to matter. Not the fact that I'm eighteen and it's December and the ride on the plane had been rough and the couple from Santa Barbara, who were sitting across from me in first class, had gotten pretty drunk. Not the mud that had splattered on the legs of my jeans, which felt kind of cold and loose, earlier that day at an airport in New Hampshire. Not the stain on the arm of the wrinkled, damp shirt I wear, a shirt which looked fresh and clean this morning. Not the tear on the neck of my gray argyle vest, which seems vaguely more eastern than before, especially next to Blair's clean tight jeans and her pale-blue shirt. All of this seems irrelevant next to that one sentence. It seems easier to hear that people are afraid to merge than "I'm pretty sure Muriel is anorexic" or the singer on the radio crying out about magnetic waves. Nothing else seems to matter to me but those ten words. Not the warm winds, which seem to propel the car down the empty asphalt freeway, or the faded smell of marijuana which still faintly permeates Blaire's car. All it comes down to is the fact that I'm a boy coming home for a month and meeting someone whom I haven't seen for four months and people are afraid to merge.”
― Bret Easton Ellis, Less Than Zero

“Relationships may become wrecked by a quirky syndrome: the “Ain't broke, don't fix”-syndrome. When there is no interaction in the neural network and no breakthrough into the mind but only a shallow skin experience, living together might be very torturous. If a heartfelt bond has not been molded, nothing can be broken and thus nothing needs to be fixed. (“I wonder what went wrong.”)”
― Erik Pevernagie

“While we are expecting everybody to tell downright the truth, many are muddying the water, drowning questions in a river of words and trying to make us forget what actually the real issue is about. If paltering and deflecting matters might become a new way of telling the truth, interaction might be doomed to culminate in a cluster shell of suspicion and mutual trust to become frantically undermined. ( “Blame storming” )”
― Erik Pevernagie

“Relatedness and interaction between individuals may have lost their drive and liability. In our contemporary “brave new world", traditional trust or generous receptiveness has been replaced by ‘security devices’ and ‘safety gadgets’. (“Could we leave the door unlocked?”)”
― Erik Pevernagie

“Let us not wait until the specter of solitude and isolation crawls into the alleys of our lives. Let us not the veiled threat of despair thrust us into oppression through our deficiency in interaction, and expand the frailty and the anxiety of our existence. Let us reach out and talk instead and use an authentic language in an unambiguous wording, and connect the dots, without fear. ("Words had disappeared”)”
― Erik Pevernagie

“Life is a catwalk and brings us into the limelight of human and social interaction. It teaches us to watch sympathetically, listen responsively, and feel united with the world around us. ("With confidence »)”
― Erik Pevernagie

“Sometimes we may wonder what we have gotten ourselves into. Unfamiliar or unexpected incidents throw us off balance. Although we have always been stable like rocks in the surf, we feel trapped by our vulnerability. The router of our personality has broken down and no longer emits or receives any signals. We have no interaction with the world. We realize, at that moment, that we are interdependent beings, and our individuality only exists through a cluster of interactions. (“The infinite Wisdom of Meditation“)”
― Erik Pevernagie

“Life seemed even more of a guessing game than usual.”
― Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending

“When we cultivate healthy and balanced self-regard, foster self-respect, and embrace self-acceptance, we enjoy overall well-being and meaningful interaction. ("Being my best friend")”
― Erik Pevernagie

“If we can engage with both verbal and nonverbal signals, sensing the emotional texture of another’s actions, we are able to feel, comprehend, and care. Empathy requires an attunement to the subtleties of interaction. ( "Lost the Global Story." )”
― Erik Pevernagie

“The woman recovering from abuse or other stressful life situations may feel she's in no way in charge of anything, least of all her own world. She faces the horse with trepidation. The horse senses the fear and becomes tense and concerned. The wise instructor starts small. The woman is handed a soft brush and sent to fuss over the horse. It's pointed out that if she stands close to the animal, she will be out of range of a well-aimed kick. She is warned to watch for tell-tale signs of fear in herself and the horse. She's warned to keep her feet out from under the horse's stomping hoof. They're both allowed to back away and regroup and try again until they reach an accord regarding personal space. Calm prevails, and within a few minutes, hours or sessions, interaction becomes friendship. It happens almost every time a woman is allowed enough time and space to work through the situation.

So a woman whose daily life is overwhelming her learns to step back. Is this a cure for her endless problems? Of course not. Simple is not simplistic.”
― Joanne M. Friedman, Horses in the Yard

“I wasn’t a nerd, mind you, but I’d spent a lot of my youth studying Epics, so I’d had limited experience with social interaction. I mixed with ordinary people about the same way that a bucket of paint mixed with a bag of gerbils.”
― Brandon Sanderson, Firefight

“Having to talk to people was the one thing, but soliciting conversation was something else. If I acted squirmy or didn't make eye contact, they would want to know what was wrong, and I would have to say, Nothing, since nothing really was wrong. Nothing is an easy thing to feel but a difficult thing to express”
― Hilary Thayer Hamann, Anthropology of an American Girl

“The concept of randomness and coincidence will be obsolete when people can finally define a formulation of patterned interaction between all things within the universe.”
― Toba Beta [Betelgeuse Incident], Betelgeuse Incident: Insiden Bait Al-Jauza

“The history of interactions among disparate peoples is what shaped the modern world through conquest, epidemics and genocide. Those collisions created reverberations that have still not died down after many centuries, and that are actively continuing in some of the world's most troubled areas.”
― Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies

“Perhaps the individual is so viable a god because he can actually understand the ceremonial significance of the way he is treated, and quite on his own can respond dramatically to what is proffered him. In contacts between such deities there is no need for middlemen; each of these gods is able to serve as his own priest.”
― Erving Goffman, Interaction Ritual - Essays on Face-to-Face Behavior

“Know that you get second chances so that you may change the art of your interaction, not so that others might finally treat you with the loving respect you deserve (and you do deserve loving respect).”
― Alexandra Katehakis, Mirror of Intimacy: Daily Reflections on Emotional and Erotic Intelligence

“One jests because one wants to contemplate.”
― Plotinus, The Essential Plotinus

“Regret and remorse represent a constant tension in our inner architecture and an ongoing interaction between self-knowledge and moral growth. ("Island of regret.- Island of remorse.")”
― Erik Pevernagie

“Morrie.. had developed his own culture - long before he got sick. He read books to find new ideas for his classes, visited with colleagues, kept up with old students, wrote letters to distant friends. He took more time eating and looking at nature..
He had created a cocoon of human activities - conversation, interaction, affection - and it filled his life like an overflowing soup bowl.”
― Mitch Albom, Tuesdays with Morrie: An Old Man, a Young Man, and Life's Greatest Lesson

“He seemed to think Marianne had acces to a range of different identities, between which she slipped effortlessly. This suprised her, because she usually felt confinedinside one single personlaity, which was always the same regardless of what she said or did or said. She had tried to be different in the past, as a kind of experiment, but it had never worked. If she was different with Connel, the difference was not happening inside herself, in her personhood, but between them, in the dynamic.”
― Sally Rooney, Normal People

“Against the resistance of other minds, one's thoughts are pulled out of their comfortable shapes, and true thinking begins.”
― Lauren Groff, The Vaster Wilds

“What is life without love and touch?”
― H.C. Roberts, Harp and the Lyre: Exposed

“And we experience miracles so often, we just take them for granted. We abuse the magic of life every single day by the way we talk to each other, by the way we treat each other. We are much - there is something greater than us, and we are much greater than we think we are.”
― Jeymes Samuel

“Like in a graceful dance, in their interactions, there had never been any stifling, awkward, or rough movements—just light, fleeting touches.”
― Torres and Firsht, Tell Me Your Plans: A gripping novel of love, ambition, and power in a high-stakes world

“People who are aligned with their spiritual nature enjoy being alone. However, out of a sense of love, compassion, and purpose, most spiritual people make it their business to interact with others.”
― Donna Goddard, Love Matters

“Every human interaction is a unique, moment in time in which we have the change to understand the person standing in front of us.”
― Tunde Oyeneyin, Speak: Find Your Voice, Trust Your Gut, and Get from Where You Are to Where You Want to Be

“The worst thing anxiety ever did was to turn everyone into a stranger, no matter how many times you interacted with them.”
― Michael Bassey Johnson, Stamerenophobia