Ken Liu Quotes

I really like people and I keep friendships. I have people from all parts of my life.

I think the hardest thing about my life is that I've met so many people all over the world who I love, but they're not friends with each other.

What makes a fulfilling relationship or fulfilling life is not simply found in another. It's found in a group of others.

Friendships are among the most fundamental of human needs.

I consider everybody I know to be my family.

I am impressed by how much of my grandparent's life depended on continuities, contacts, connections, friendships, and blood relationships.

However self-sufficient we may fancy ourselves, we exist only in relation - to our friend, family, and life partners; to those we teach and mentor; to our coworkers, neighbors, strangers; and even to forces we cannot fully conceive of, let alone define. In many ways, we are our relationships.

The people we get along with, trust, feel simpatico with, are the strongest links in our networks

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.

Relationships keep us alive and our lives meaningful.

Our happiness is completely and utterly intertwined with other people: family and friends and neighbors and the woman you hardly notice who cleans your office. Happiness is not a noun or verb. It's a conjunction. Connective tissue.

We all possess, like it or not, the people we know, and are possessed by them in turn.

We can't all be friends and relatives as the world is; most of us have to be strangers.

No man is an island.

We don't really make friends, they make us.

Life's meaning heavily benefits from lifelong bonds.

When I think about [characters], I like to think of them in their relationships to each other. In the same way, I think that's how humans are ultimately defined. We are our relationships to one another. And a lot of what's interesting about us happens in the context of other people.

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.

Community is a place where the connections felt in our hearts make themselves known in the bonds between people, and where the tuggings and pullings of those bonds keep opening our hearts.

Whenever we look at life, we look at networks.

I've always known that life is better when you share it. I now realize it gets even sweeter when you expand the circle.

Happiness, for me, is a function of the number of people I love, and I think joy and happiness is directly related to how many people are in our lives and how deeply we are bonded with those people. And so I'm happy if I'm with Ann; I'm happier if I'm also with my family and my grandchildren.

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.

Which is why we have spouses and children and parents and colleagues and friends, because someone has to know us better than we know ourselves. We need them to tell us. We need them to say, "I know you, Al. You are not the kind of man who.

People must not choose their neighbors; they must take the neighbors that God sends them. The neighbor is just the person who is next to you at the moment, the person with whom any business has brought you into contact.