David Brooks Quotes

It is my secrecy which makes you unhappy, my evasions, my silences. And so I have found a solution. Whenever you get desperate with my mysteries, my ambiguities, here is a set of Chinese puzzle boxes. You have always said that I was myself a Chinese puzzle box. When you are in the mood and I baffle your love of confidences, your love of openness, your love of sharing experiences, then open one of the boxes. And in it you will find a story, a story about me and my life. Do you like this idea? Do you think it will help us to live together?

It's hard for me to pry with people I know.

…often between ourselves and those nearest and dearest to us there exists a reserve which it is very hard to overcome.

At the same time, you have to find the right distance between people. Too close, and they overwhelm you, too far and they abandon you. How to hold them in the right relation?

Games are a compromise between intimacy and keeping intimacy away.

But you base everything on people you know.

I find it really hard to be close to anybody.

Your distance from your partner is the distance from your heart. The things that make relationships difficult are some of the most precious aspects to us.

I'm a person who doesn't necessarily enjoy feeling vulnerable, so I think my loved ones and my family make me feel vulnerable. Also, being connected with people when I'm working is a very vulnerable place to be.

...available people are the ones who are dangerous, because they confront us with the possibility of real intimacy.

More and more do I feel, as I advance in life, how little we really know of each other. Friendship seems to me like the touch of musical-glasses--it is only contact; but the glasses themselves, and their contents, remain quite distinct and unmingled.

Most guys I know are assholes. I have some great asshole friends, but that's not the point. Friendship has got nothing to do with that. It's can you hang, can you talk about this without any feeling of distance between you? Friendship is the diminishing of distance between people. That's what friendship is, and to me it's one of the most important things in the world.

I love being free enough that I can be so intimate with people, and that people are free enough that we can all be intimate with each other!

Fear destroys intimacy. It distances us from each other; or makes us cling to each other, which is the death of freedom.... Only love can create intimacy, and freedom too, for when all hearts are one, nothing else has to be one--neither clothes nor age; neither sex nor sexual preference; race nor mind-set.

There were people you could hug, and then there was Silas.

Only parts of us will ever touch only parts of others.

Why are there men and women that while they are nigh me the sunlight expands my blood? Why when they leave me do my pennants of joy sink flat and lank?

Closeness can lead to emotions other than love. It's the ones who have been too intimate with you, lived in too close quarters, seen too much of your pain or envy or, perhaps more than anything, your shame, who, at the crucial moment, can be too easy to cut out, to exile, to expel, to kill off.

The hardest thing to do is to trust people. Even if you know them from way back when, it's hard to trust people. There's a lot we have to deal with, and it's the price of fame.

Be courteous to all, but intimate with few.

There are people one knows and people one doesn't. One shouldn't cheapen the former by feigning intimacy with the latter.

Sex is such a personal thing - why do we insist on sharing it with another person?

I'm so interested in the fact that we really don't know anybody. We think we know the people close to us, but we don't, we really don't.

How many times have I wondered if it is really possible to forge links with a mass of people when one has never had strong feelings for anyone, not even one's own parents: if it is possible to have a collectivity when one has not been deeply loved oneself by individual human creatures. Hasn't this had some effect on my life as a militant--has it not tended to make me sterile and reduce my quality as a revolutionary by making everything a matter of pure intellect, of pure mathematical calculation?

I try to avoid people's eyes because I don't like to get that intimate with just anybody. i don't need the responsibility.