Touch Quotes

“Visually and audibly, the world of today was designed to distract. Before you could give a name to your own feelings, there was something telling you what to think and want.”
― Courtney Maum, Touch

“The almost biological certainty that the more often you checked your cell phone, the more likely you were to find that one wondrous message or notification that would improve your entire life.”
― Courtney Maum, Touch

“When we start a relationship, professional, romantic or otherwise, even when we're born, we establish these threads of energy that connect us to another person...Even by just being here, you're creating one with me. Many times, as people grow or change, or hurt us, the energy that was flowing gets confused and trapped. Especially in the case of loss, where the energy doesn't have anywhere tangible to move forward. We can become very sick by storing up outdated energy. Cord cutting isn't always about severing completely from someone, but it is about separating ourselves off from the iteration of the relationship that no longer enriches our life. It's a ceremony, really. And a difficult one. But it's tremendously important.”
― Courtney Maum, Touch

“Americans didn't know why they'd become so obsessed with cacti-they just accepted the fact that drought-resistant plants were the new must-haves for office and home design in the mindless way they'd once accepted ferns, but really, what was going on was a socially sanctioned apathy toward the planet's overheating. it was apocalyptic acclimatization by way of indoor plants.”
― Courtney Maum, Touch

“You know what we say in America about people who assume things? That they have two hours to get the fuck out of my apartment.”
― Courtney Maum, Touch

“All these openings for closeness--all these humans with their disappointments and their desperate hearts, but it's so much easier, so convenient, to blame emotional distance on a lack of time.”
― Courtney Maum, Touch

“The possibility that he really did harbor some attraction to her couldn't pierce her core. It wasn't in the realm of things that were feasible these days. Bombings, bankruptcy, coastal flooding, all of these things, yes, but that he could feel some tenderness for this broken person, no.”
― Courtney Maum, Touch

“Also, she wasn't a fan of being scared, and it had to be petrifying to love someone more than yourself.”
― Courtney Maum, Touch

“When you're clear-sighted, you settle into experiences that feed you until they become so familiar and soul-filling that they're a nourishing routine, and as the routine continues, you up and surprise yourself with your righted life.”
― Courtney Maum, Touch

“One of the real problems with the breakdown of interpersonal relations in the digital age,” she continued, her voice steadier now, “is that people don’t know how to be intimate anymore. For example—” She stood up even straighter, projected to the crowd. “If we think about our youngest generation, they’re exposed to screens and swipes and scrolling before sticks and mud and dirt. And a lot of these toddlers—a certain demographic—are so scheduled and chaperoned, they’re not engaging in spontaneous play. They’re doing things of course, they’re learning, but they’re not necessarily engaged physically with their environment; they’re not scraping their knees. And what happens to a kid who’s been too supervised?” Her head was pounding. Across her frontal cortex, a throbbing of white light. “It dulls your instincts. And if you lose your instincts, you’re not developing confidence, so as these kids turn into adolescents, sports that require spontaneity and intuition and contact will be terrifying to them. Young people live in a two-dimensional environment,” she continued, despite the fury in her head. “If they make a fool of themselves in the real world, they make a fool of themselves online. Self-conscious adolescents will become self-conscious adults, who are just as worried about faltering in front of their peers as they were when they were teenagers. Eventually, these intimacy-starved humans are going to have to rely on experts to get any sense of comfort. What I’m talking about,” Sloane said, taking air, “is an entire generation of humans who are tactilely bereft.”
― Courtney Maum, Touch

“I see doctors regulating patients’ current levels of human contact as carefully as their blood pressure. I see it becoming trendy to have a flip phone that does little more than page people. I see it as the height of elegance to be without Wi-Fi. I see eye contact as the new stamina. Collaboration as ambition. I see a world—and it isn’t great news for the planet—where people are having more reproductive sex because it’s often through the holding of and raising and protecting of children that people remember how fucking good life is. I see a massive downturn in your profitability margin within two years. I see you churning out products that people are becoming courageous enough to realize they don’t want. I see people turning on Mammoth. Turning toward each other. Turning against tech.”
― Courtney Maum, Touch

“She could envision the opposite of the UpPaying trend making its way toward all of them: a movement in which people paid a premium for more contact, not less.”
― Courtney Maum, Touch

“There is something incredible about the phrase "I'm sorry." When it's used carelessly, the expression is impotent, and can even offend. But when you really, really mean it--even if your mother is night-gowned and bed-ready with a scrum of toothpaste still in her mouth, when the words rise up inside of you on the strength of every way in which you've changed, it can be enough.”
― Courtney Maum, Touch

“Love equals loss, loss equals you feeling incomplete for life.”
― Courtney Maum, Touch

“All these openings for closeness—all these humans with their disappointments and their desperate hearts, but it’s so much easier, so convenient, to blame emotional distance on a lack of time.”
― Courtney Maum, Touch

“the color-matching company had to make up for their dismal mistake with 2015, which they’d dubbed the year of “marsala,” which only ended up being true for mothers of the bride. All”
― Courtney Maum, Touch