David Wong Quotes

In Afghanistan, you don't understand yourself solely as an individual. You understand yourself as a son, a brother, a cousin to somebody, an uncle to somebody. You are part of something bigger than yourself.

We have a stake in one another ... what binds us together is greater than what drives us apart

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.

We cannot think of ourselves save as to some extent social being. Hence, we cannot separate the idea of ourselves and our own good from our idea of others and their good.

I've changed Sydney. It's my city, my people. I'm theirs. We belong to each other.

Independence ... is middle-class blasphemy. We are all dependent on one another, every soul of us on earth

All people owe their lives to surrounding society.

A border is not only a separation; it’s a connection.

Society is the body; individuals are its members, its limbs. Just as the various limbs help and co-operate with one another and thus are happy, so each must unite with others in being helpful to all in thought, speech and action... One may see to the good of one's own group, i.e., the group that is immediate to him, and then proceed to others.

I don't think about it. I have always been linked up with everybody.

We hunger for connection to a larger community.

We are members of one body. We are responsible for each other.

Not only who am I, but who are we? And where are we going? It's the "we." It's the social connections that are special to human beings.

We need others for our physical, emotional, and spiritual well-being. Without others we are nothing. Our sense that we are an island, an independent, self-sufficient individual, bears no relation to reality. It is closer to the truth to picture ourself as a cell in the vast body of life, distinct yet intimately bound up with all living beings. We cannot exist without others, and they in turn are affected by everything we do. The idea that it is possible to secure our own welfare while neglecting the welfare of others, or even at the expense of others, is completely unrealistic.

The welfare of each is bound up in the welfare of all.

Communion is the law of growth, and homes only thrive when they sustain relations with each other.

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.

Nobody exists in a vacuum.

Men fear that becoming 'we' will erase his 'I.' For women, our 'we' is our saving grace Women's relationships are like a renewable source of power.

We are members of one great body. Nature planted in us a mutual love, and fitted us for a social life. We must consider that we were born for the good of the whole.

But every one belongs to every one else

American individualism, much celebrated and cherished, has developed without its essential corrective, which is belonging.

I know enough to know that no man is an island.

No enterprise can exist for itself alone.