When I look at relationships, my own and others, I see a wide range of reasons for people to be together and ways in which they are together. I see ways in which a relationship - which means something that exists between two or more people - for the most part reinforces people's separateness as individual entities.
Love requires Context.
I could not spend the rest of my life sitting in Brazil writing down who called whom uncle and aunt.
And it was just the three of us - three bodies and two people - the three who knew what had happened and too many layers between all of us too much keeping us from one another.
Intimate relationships are a gold mine for literature to explore, to understand, to describe.
Intertwingularity is not generally acknowledged - people keep pretending they can make things deeply hierarchical, categorizable and sequential when they can't. Everything is deeply intertwingled.
Maybe relationships could have fractals, too. And maybe the sense of loss was when you're becoming a fractal of what you once were to each other.
No mind, however loving, could bear to see plainly into all the recess of another mind.
I thought of the infinitely many points that can divide the space between two human hearts.
Human interaction is not a simple thing.
People are complicated. Our behavior towards one another is strange. So I like opportunities to investigate that.
You feel like telling him you're not single in the way that he thinks you're single. After all, you have yourself.
There's no traditional three act structure - or beginning, middle and end - to a family tree. By its nature, it has almost infinite different branches, or episodes, to explore in every direction.
It is easier to tell a story of how people wound one another than of what binds them together.
Nearly all of us recognize that as intricacies of human relationships increase, so power to govern them also must increase--power to stop evil; power to do good.
I'm the daughter of a sister whose the mother of a brother who's the brother of another.
She wondered if, when human souls try to get too near each other, they do not inevitably become mere blurs to each other's vision.
A man can know his father, or his son, and there might still be nothing between them but loyalty and love and mutual incomprehension.
I was brought up with two sisters, so I do know about a three-way dynamic. It's a complex one, because it's easy for one to get left out and the others to gang up. In my family, we were all pretty up for it, but the dynamics would constantly change.
No one could understand the bond between me and my brother. I struggled to understand the forces that drove his soul in one direction and mine in another.
In a way, 'Like Crazy' keys into our generation, this idea of now we can still be in communication. Where do the boundaries of relationships end?
Everybody knows the mother-daughter relationship is one of the most complex there is.
As soon as a friendship passed a certain point - some obscure and secret boundary - a woman quite automatically became overwhelmed by a raging compulsion to complicate things.
I'm concerned about the unknowability of other people.
Families are complex organisms.
