Jenny Downham Quotes

I think that human beings are often looking for a reason to relate.

A toddling little girl is a centre of common feeling which makes the most dissimilar people understand each other.

When you're all singing together, it brings things together. I know the songs that my grandfather and my father sang.

There's something about being with a group of people who become like family that must be needed in society.

What differentiates us from animals is the fact that we can listen to other people's dreams, fears, joys, sorrows, desires and defeats - and they in turn can listen to ours.

We've seen that there are a lot of people out there - teenagers in Topeka, housewives in Long Island, millionaire Internet start-up moguls - that all want to connect with each other about what it is to be human.

We're all connected, related, part of one another's lives through the stories we tell ourselves and each other. For good and for bad.

Memories come out only when you spend time with a person.

TV can be a thread between all of us, and it can be a powerful tool to examine life and love and what we all have in common as humans.

We think that this is just our world and we don't know what other people are thinking. Music actually is a phenomenal connector in that respect. It's a special language that defines certain boundaries and connects people in a particular way, a very emotional way, I have found.

Humanity has this need to hear stories because they connect us with other people, they teach us about our own feelings. We feel less lonely when we see other people going through the same things, even if they're fictional characters.

For pleasure has no relish unless we share it.

Things that feel super personal actually feel really universal. It's sort of the more you really identify something specific within yourself, the more people connect to it because ultimately we are all connected in some way.

I think that it's a universal urge to have our pain not be felt alone and to have our joys not be felt alone.

We shared. Parents. Home. Pets. Celebrations. Catastrophes. Secrets. And the threads of our experience became so interwoven that we are linked. I can never be utterly lonely, knowing you share the planet.

I often think that drama helps people feel less lonely about things.

Togetherness has to do with focused attention. It is giving someone your undivided attention. As humans, we have a fundamental desire to connect with others. We may be in the presence of people all day long, but we do not always feel connected.

Then I tell my own story. The two things that people really need to transform is language to understand their experience and to know they're not alone. It's the combination of the researcher-storyteller part.

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.

My story is important not because it is mine, God knows, but because if I tell it anything like right, the chances are you will recognize that in many ways it is also yours.

It is somethingit can be everything-to have found a fellow bird with whom you can sit among the rafters while the drinking and boasting and reciting and fighting go on below.

The point of life for me is just to make connections with people and share experiences with people.

The truth of my experience is that we are all a lot more alike than we are different.