Both the physical and the electronic isolation from people we disagree with allow the forces of confirmation bias, groupthink, and tribalism to push us still further apart.

Because we are separated everything separates us, even our efforts to join each other.

When we suffer we have made it into a personal affair. We shut out all the suffering of mankind.

Perhaps we are no longer a kind people. More and more, we seem to have become numb to the suffering of others and ashamed of our own suffering. Yet suffering is one of the universal conditions of being alive. We all suffer. We have become terribly vulnerable, not because we suffer but because we have separated ourselves from each other.

People have separated from each other with walls of concrete that blocked the roads to connection and love. and Nature has been defeated in the name of development.

Instead of celebrating the richness of our diverse cultures, our distinguishing features became cruel dividing walls to keep us apart in ministering to the affairs of our common home.

The reason it hurts so much to separate is because our souls are connected.

The lonelier you are, the more you pull away, until humans seem an alien race, with customs and a language you can't begin to understand. (p145)

Fear makes us run away from each other or cling to each other but does not create true intimacy.

It's at the borders of pain and suffering that the men are separated from the boys.

We found ourselves veiled and separated from our friends.

More commonly suffering breaks people, crushes them, and is simply unilluminating. You see how gruesomely human beings are destroyed by pain, when they have the added torment of losing their humanity first, so that their death is a total defeat...

Solitude, isolation, are painful things, and beyond human endurance.

Attachment leads to suffering.