Donald E. Westlake Quotes

You don't have to give birth to someone to have a family. We're all family - an extended family.

I'm still really close with everyone at home and their parents - and their brothers and sisters. I was so, so, so lucky to grow up as part of a community and I don't take that for granted. I try very hard to stay part of it.

One's friends are that part of the human race with which one can be human.

My kids are part of the rest of my community and my wider family.

This is the part of us that makes our brief, improbable little lives worth living: the ability to reach through our own isolation and find strength, and comfort, and warmth for and in each other. This is what human beings do. This is what we live for, the way horses live to run.

We live in community, and we're created in community. We're created out of the unity of two people, and then we're made into a family. It's just inherent in who we are.

I'm not a spiritual person at all, but I do think that the world doesn't have to be as lonely as it is.

Christmas shows us the ties that bind us together, threads of love and caring, woven in the simplest and strongest way within the family.

Christmas is a necessity. There has to be at least one day of the year to remind us that we're here for something else besides ourselves.

The city of Oakland, since I got here, has been like my second family. They've taken me in and had my back through the hard times and they've celebrated with me through the good times. And so, I love Oakland.

I really care about people around me, and I can't live without my family and friends.

And it’s not just that ‘we all need somebody to lean on’; recent work on giving support shows that caring for others is often more beneficial than is receiving help. . . . We need the give and the take, we need to belong. An ideology of extreme personal freedom can be dangerous because it encourages people to leave homes, jobs, cities and marriages in search of personal and professional fulfillment, thereby breaking the relationships that were probably their best hope for such fulfillment.

Oh won't you stay Stay a while with your own ones Don't ever stray Stray so far from your own ones 'Cause the world is so cold Don't care nothing for your soul That you share with your own ones.

No one person can fulfill all your needs. But the community can truly hold you. The community can let you experience the fact that, beyond your anguish, there are human hands that hold you and show you God's faithful love.

We all need one another; much and often. Just as every human creature needs a place to be alone in, a sacred, private "home" of his own, so all human creatures need a place to be together in, from the two who can show each other their souls uninterruptedly, to the largest throng that can throb and stir in unison.

We cannot live without the knowledge that someone cares about us.

The happiest people are the ones with the most community.

We are awakening from the dream of isolation, from the dream of loneliness, and it's a terrible shock.

Mankind is a great, an immense family... This is proved by what we feel in our hearts at Christmas.

A person is a person through other persons. None of us comes into the world fully formed. We would not know how to think, or walk, or speak, or behave as human beings unless we learned it from other human beings. We need other human beings in order to be human. I am because other people are. A person is entitled to a stable community life, and the first of these communities is the family.

You are never alone in Afghanistan. You are always in the company of others, usually family. You don't understand yourself really as an individual, you understand yourself as part of something bigger than yourself. Family is so central to your identity, to how you make sense of your world, it is very dramatic, and therefore an amazing source of storytelling, a source of fiction for me.

So many of us are reaching out, hoping someone out there will grab our hands and remind us we are not as alone as we fear.

To know of someone here and there whom we accord with, who is living on with us, even in silence - - this makes our earthly ball a peopled garden.

How does one keep from "growing old inside"? Surely only in community. The only way to make friends with time is to stay friends with people.... Taking community seriously not only gives us the companionship we need, it also relieves us of the notion that we are indispensable.

Ubuntu is very difficult to render into a Western language. It speaks of the very essence of being human.... you are generous, you are hospitable, you are friendly and caring and compassionate. You share what you have. It is to say, 'My humanity is inextricably bound up in yours.' We belong in a bundle of life.