Aaron D. O'Connell Quotes

She existed in her friends; there she was. All the parts of herself she'd forgotten. She knew herself best when she was with them.

The ancient human question 'Who am I?' leads inevitably to the equally important question 'Whose am I?' - for there is no self outside of relationship.

Knowing where and who are intimately linked.

I am what is around me.

Where we are is vital to who we are.

The truth of who we are is that we are because we belong.

You know, we have two families: the one we're born into, and the one that we make for ourselves afterwards.

Humans are social beings, and we are happier, and better, when connected to others.

I think the themes of belonging and parentage and love are obviously universal.

In terms of an identity, an identity reflects an individuality, by definition. And, if there is a quality present, it is recognizable and it can be named. If you can't name it, it means you don't recognize it.

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

We are what we see. We are products of our surroundings.

We are what we love.

A soul-based workplace asks things of me that I didn't even know I had. It's constantly telling me that I belong to something large in the world.

Where you are defines what you're interested in.

I feel very French and I need my life here; I need all my friends and family.

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

Things don't happen in a vacuum, and artists don't make work in a vacuum.

I am who I am, you are who you are, and everything else is a perception based on acceptance, deception, smoke, mirrors, and so on. It's what's between us that seems to justify our accidental identities.

I am drawn to the ways in which we are shaped by people and by place.

Most everything you think you know about me is nothing more than memories.

A book is not an isolated being: it is a relationship, an axis of innumerable relationships

In my very own self, I am part of my family.

... I was reminded of a remark of Willa Cather's, that you can't paint sunlight, you can only paint what it does with shadows on a wall. If you examine a life, as Socrates has been so tediously advising us to do for so many centuries, do you really examine a life, or do you examine the shadows it casts on other lives? Entity or relationships? Objective reality or the vanishing point of a multiple perspective exercise? Prism or the rainbows it refracts? And what if you're the wall? What if you never cast a shadow or rainbow of your own, but have only caught those cast by others?

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.