Whose life did you touch? Who did you love, and who loved you back?

"So you never know who you touch. You never know how or when you'll have an impact, or how important your example can be to someone else" (20).

But I suppose you must touch life in order to spring from it.

If you have the courage to touch life for the first time, you will never know what hit you. Everything man has thought, felt and experienced is gone, and nothing is put in its place.

Is this then a touch? quivering me to a new identity

One touches and, in the act of touching, one's touched.

It is because the human spirit knows, deep down, that all lives intersect. That death doesn't just take someone, it misses someone else, and in the small distance between being taken and being missed, lives are changed.

"It is because the human spirit knows, deep down, that all lives intersect. That death doesn't just take someone, it misses someone else, and in the small distance between being taken and being missed, lives are changed."

"...We think such thngs are random. But there is a balance to it all. One withers, another grows. Birth and death are part of a whole." "It is why we are drawn to babies..." "And to funerals."

Life should touch you, even if life smothers you, it's better than remaining untouched by life

Our lives disconnect and reconnect, we move on, and later we may again touch one another, again bounce away. This is the felt shape of a human life, neither simply linear nor wholly disjunctive nor endlessly bifurcating, but rather this bouncey-castle sequence of bumpings-into and tumblings-apart.

Touching is a powerful act

So word by word, and line by line,
The dead man touch'd me from the past,
And all at once it seem'd at last
The living soul was flash'd on mine,

And mine in his was wound, and whirl'd
About empyreal heights of thought,
And came on that which is, and caught
The deep pulsations of the world,

Æonian music measuring out
The steps of Time — the shocks of Chance — The blows of Death. At length my trance
Was cancell'd, stricken thro' with doubt.

Trouble makes us one with every human being in the world - and unless we touch others, we're out of touch with life.

How shall I touch you unless it is everywhere?