“[Roger] Waters has suggested that empathy is the central theme of all the band[Pink Floyd]'s classic, mature works beginning with [the album] Meddle. Waters singles out the following lines from "Echoes": Strangers passing in the street / By chance two seperate glances meet / And I am you and what I see is me.”
“I once lost five years listening to a Pink Floyd album.”
“What I want is for the two of us to meet somewhere by chance one day, like, passing on the street, or getting on the same bus.”
“But I can stop on any corner at the intersection of two busy streets, and before me are thousands of lives headed in all four directions, uptown downtown east and west, on foot, on bikes, on in-line skates, in buses, strollers, cars, trucks, with the subway rumble underneath my feet... and how can I not know I am momentarily part of the most spectacular phenomenon in the unnatural world? ...The city may begin from a marketplace, a trading post, the confluence of waters, but it secretly depends on the human need to walk among strangers.”
“A man. All men. He will pass up a hundred chances to do good for one chance to meddle where meddling is not wanted. He will overlook and fail to see chances, opportunities, for riches and fame and welldoing, and even sometimes for evil. But he won't fail to see a chance to meddle.”
“If we come from the water, I conclude that we come from different kinds of it. I will meet a person and in his eyes see an ocean, deep and never ending; then I will meet another person and feel as though I have stepped into a shallow puddle on the street, there is nothing in it. Or maybe some of us come from the water, and some of us come from somewhere else; then it's all a matter of finding those who are the same as us.”