relationships Quotes

“It’s no good pretending that any relationship has a future if your record collections disagree violently or if your favorite films wouldn’t even speak to each other if they met at a party.”

“You’ve got to pick at it, keep it alive and in turmoil, you’ve got to pick at it and unravel it until it all comes apart and you’re compelled to start all over again. Maybe we all live life at too high a pitch, those of us who absorb emotional things all day, and as a consequence we can never feel merely content: we have to be unhappy, or ecstatically, head-over-heels happy, and those states are difficult to achieve within a stable, solid relationship.”

“I play ‘Got to Get You off My Mind’ by Solomon Burke, and everyone has a go, just out of duty, even though only the best dancers would be able to make something of it, and nobody in the room could claim to be among the best dancers, or even among the most average.”

“my friends don’t seem to be friends at all but people whose phone numbers I haven’t lost.”

“I don’t even feel as if I’m the center of my own world, so how am I supposed to feel as though I’m the center of anyone else’s?”

“All I’ve ever wanted was to be near you.”

“With me as the glaring exception, my father molded the world around him to his liking. The problem, of course, was that Baba saw the world in black and white. And he got to decide what was black and what was white. You can’t love a person who lives that way without fearing him too. Maybe even hating him a little.”

“He’s just Finn. We’ve been friends too long and I know him too well, you know? And he’s still a boy, Doda. If I ever find a man, he’ll have to be a man, really a man, to handle me”

“Last month, as Victor drove me home so I could rest, I told him that sometimes I felt like his life would be easier without me. He paused a moment in thought and then said, ‘It might be easier. But it wouldn’t be better.‘”

“When two people meet, each one is changed by the other so you’ve got two new people. Maybe that means — hell, it’s complicated.”

“It was here, while waiting for my brother, that I started this story, although, of course, at the time I did not know that stories of life are often more like rivers than books. But I knew a story had begun, perhaps long ago near the sound of water. And I sensed that ahead I would meet something that would never erode so there would be a sharp turn, deep circles, a deposit, and quietness.”

“When you love someone, you do not love them all the time, in exactly the same way, from moment to moment. It is an impossibility. It is even a lie to pretend to. And yet this is exactly what most of us demand. We have so little faith in the ebb and flow of life, of love, of relationships.”

“This is what one thirsts for, I realize, after the smallness of the day, of work, of details, of intimacy - even of communication, one thirsts for the magnitude and universality of a night full of stars, pouring into one like a fresh tide.”

Only someone who is ready for everything, who doesn’t exclude any experience, even the most incomprehensible, will live the relationship with another person as something alive and will himself sound the depths of his own being.

“The only real security is not in owning or possessing, not in demanding or expecting, not in hoping, even. Security in a relationship lies neither in looking back to what was in nostalgia, nor forward to what it might be in dread or anticipation, but living in the present relationship and accepting it as it is now. ”

“Talk to someone about themselves and they’ll listen for hours.”

“Help,” he said, “is giving part of yourself to somebody who comes to accept it willingly and needs it badly.” “So it is,” he said, using an old homiletic transition, “that we can seldom help anybody. Either we don’t know what part to give or maybe we don’t like to give any part of ourselves. Then, more often than not, the part that is needed is not wanted. And even more often, we do not have the part that is needed.”

“We can love completely what we cannot completely understand.”

“Relationships must be like islands, one must accept them for what they are here and now, within their limits - islands, surrounded and interrupted by the sea, and continually visited and abandoned by the tides.”

“Then he told me, “In the part I was reading it says the Word was in the beginning, and that’s right. I used to think water was first, but if you listen carefully you will hear that the words are underneath the water.” “That’s because you are a preacher first and then a fisherman,” I told him. “If you ask Paul, he will tell you that the words are formed out of water.” “No,” my father said, “you are not listening carefully. The water runs over the words. Paul will tell you the same thing.”

“He is social, but not in large groups. ‘I don’t go readily to cocktail parties, where people just come together and talk. I don’t tend to like that kind of thing. I’d rather sit down with somebody and find a mutual topic of interest, and explore it in depth with that person, or maybe two or three people. Not a conversation that says how do you feel.‘”

“Winnie’s shyness returned at once when she saw the big man with his sad face and baggy trousers, but as he gazed at her, the warm, pleasing feeling spread through her again. For Tuck’s head tilted to one side, his eyes went soft, and the gentlest smile in the world displaced the melancholy creases of his cheeks.”

“Why should you think it so strange that in some countries there are monkeys which insinuate themselves into the good graces of the ladies; they are a fourth part human, as I am a fourth part Spaniard.”

“But you see, Winnie Foster, when I told you before I’m a hundred and four years old, I was telling the truth. But I’m really only seventeen. And, so far as I know, I’ll stay seventeen till the end of the world.”

“Security in a relationship lies neither in looking back to what it was in nostalgia, nor forward to what it might be in dread or anticipation, but living in the present relationship and accepting it as it is now.”

“Be wiser than other people if you can; but do not tell them so.”

“The most exhausting thing in life, I have discovered, is being insincere. That is why so much of social life is exhausting; one is wearing a mask. I have shed my mask.”

“When dealing with people, remember you are not dealing with creatures of logic, but with creatures bristling with prejudice and motivated by pride and vanity.”

“When you become addict in to MATERIAL things in life then the TRUE natural life start to run away from you, YES! it’s can give you certain pleasure in the society but in the same time it will sabotage your true HAPPINESS of life which we could have simply with GRATITUDE and FORGIVENESS”

“Jesus stands between us and God, and for that very reason he stands between us and all other men and things. He is the Mediator, not only between God and man, but between man and man, between man and reality.”

“They had tried to bring her up properly, with a true sense of right and wrong. They did not understand. And finally she had sobbed the only truth there was into her mother’s shoulder, the only explanation: the Tucks were her friends. She had done it because—in spite of everything, she loved them.”

“I thought if I came out here it would stop. Back home, every place reminded me of her. Filippe’s on Third Street. Balboa Park. Little Dom’s, the coffee shop, that... That’s a big one.”

“So,” said Tuck to himself. “Two years. She’s been gone two years.” He stood up and looked around, embarrassed, trying to clear the lump from his throat. But there was no one to see him. […] Tuck wiped his eyes hastily. Then he straightened his jacket again and drew up his hand in a brief salute. “Good girl,” he said aloud.”

“Well, talking to girls is easy. They’ll tell you everything. The secret to talking is listening”

“Because it’s a good dream. And it’s got cool animals in it and some pretty great people, too. And because I’m your father and I’m the only one you’ve got. And the line of people in this world who really care about you ends here. So stop moping around this place, man. And pick up a shovel and dig a hole. Do something. You just sit here and feel sorry for yourself, man. Help me with your sister. Help me, damn it.”

“What I’ve figured out is that when you love somebody that much, that hard, that long, you can never get away from them, no matter where you go. And that only comes once in a lifetime. Just can’t get a handle on it. I cannot let go.”

“You don’t choose who you fall in love with, do you? And once you do fall in love - that obsessive sort of love, that all-consuming love, where two people can’t stand to be apart from each other for even a moment - how are you supposed to let a love like that pass you by?”

“The only caresses it had ever received were the caresses of the whip-lash and of harsh and menacing throat-sounds that threatened the whip-lash. ”

“That’s what my dad is like-he really disappeared a long time ago, which is maybe why it didn’t bother me much.”

“We never really talked much or even looked at each other, but it didn’t matter because we were looking at the same sky together, which is maybe even more intimate than eye contact anyway. I mean, anybody can look at you. It’s quite rare to find someone who sees the same world you see.”

“Well, you never knew exactly how much space you occupied in people’s lives. Yet from this fog his affection emerged--the best contacts are when one knows the obstacles and still wants to preserve a relation.”

“We do not lead others into the light by stepping into the darkness with them.”

“You have not chosen one another, but I have chosen you for one another.”

″To relate effectively with a wife, a husband, children, friends, or working associates, we must learn to listen. And this requires emotional strength. Listening involves patience, openness, and the desire to understand -- highly developed qualities of character. It’s so much easier to operate from a low emotional level and to give high-level advice.″

“There are times to teach and times not to teach. When relationships are strained and the air charged with emotion, an attempt to teach is often perceived as a form of judgment and rejection. But to take the child alone, quietly, when the relationship is good and to discuss the teaching or the value seems to have much greater impact.″

″Making and keeping promises to ourselves precedes making and keeping promises to others…. it is futile to put personality ahead of character, to try to improve relationships with others before improving ourselves.″

“... after the initial euphoria has passed, there is so much unhappiness, so much pain in intimate relationships. They do not cause pain and unhappiness. They bring out the pain and unhappiness that is already in you.”

″‘Are you her boyfriend?’ ... ‘No, I’m her fiancé.’ Nate said. ‘We’ve been promised to each other since birth,’ Summer added. ‘Our wedding isn’t until March.‘”

“When we face pain in relationships our first response is often to sever bonds rather than to maintain commitment.”

“The most common ego identifications have to do with possessions, the work you do, social status and recognition, knowledge and education, physical appearance, special abilities, relationships, personal and family history, belief systems, and often also political, nationalistic, racial, religious, and other collective identifications. None of these is you.”

“But many of us seek community solely to escape the fear of being alone. Knowing how to be solitary is central to the art of loving. When we can be alone, we can be with others without using them as a means of escape.”

“Why, Troy? After all these years to come dragging this in to me now. It don’t make no sense at your age. I could have expected this ten or fifteen years ago, but not now. . . . I done tried to be everything a wife should be. Everything a wife could be. Been married eighteen years.”

“I gave everything I had to try and erase the doubt that you wasn’t the finest man in the world. And wherever you was going . . . I wanted to be there with you. Because you was my husband. Cause that’s the only way I was gonna survive as your wife.”

“For no matter what we achieve, if we don’t spend the vast majority of our time with people we love and respect, we cannot possibly have a great life.”

“You can’t be nobody but who you are, Cory. That shadow wasn’t nothing but you growing into yourself. You either got to grow into it or cut it down to fit you. But that’s all you got to make a life with. That’s all you got to measure yourself against the world out there.”

“All too often women believe it is a sign of commitment, an expression of love, to endure unkindness or cruelty, to forgive and forget. In actuality, when we love rightly we know that the healthy, loving response to cruelty and abuse is putting ourselves out of harm’s way.”

“I married your daddy and settled down to cooking his supper and keeping clean sheets on the bed. When your daddy walked through the house he was so big he filled it up. That was my first mistake. Not to make him leave some room for me. . . . But at that time I wanted that.”

“To return to love, to get the love we always wanted but never had, to have the love we want but are not prepared to give, we seek romantic relationships. We believe these relationships, more than any other, will rescue and redeem us. ”

“Now I thought he was mad cause I ain’t done my work. But I see where he was chasing me off so he could have the gal for himself. When I see what the matter of it was, I lost all fear of my daddy. Right there is where I became a man . . . at fourteen years of age.”

“The wounded child inside many males is a boy who, when he first spoke his truths, was silenced by paternal sadism, by a patriarchal world that did not want him to claim his true feelings. The wounded child inside many females is a girl who was taught from early childhood that she must become something other than herself, deny her true feelings, in order to attract and please others.”

“When we understand love as the will to nurture our own and another’s spiritual growth, it becomes clear that we cannot claim to love if we are hurtful and abusive.”

“Bad decisions made with good intentions, are still bad decisions.”

“Anyone who falls in love is searching for the missing pieces of themselves. So anyone who’s in love gets sad when they think of their lover. It’s like stepping back inside a room you have fond memories of, one you haven’t seen in a long time.”

“Core values are essential for enduring greatness, but it doesn’t seem to matter what those core values are.”

“The people we interviewed from the good-to-great companies clearly loved what they did, largely because they loved who they did it with.”

“He saw her face each time he closed his eyes. She haunted his thoughts, made him wish to do grand and wonderful things in her name, made him want to be a man who deserved to wear a crown.”

“Sometimes the one who is running from the Life/Death/Life nature insists on thinking of love as a boon only. Yet love in its fullest form is a series of deaths and rebirths. We let go of one phase, one aspect of love, and enter another. Passion dies and is brought back. Pain is chased away and surfaces another time. To love means to embrace and at the same time to withstand many endings, and many many beginnings- all in the same relationship.”

“I must have loved you a lot.”

“I didn’t feel like I belonged with my family, and now I didn’t feel like I belonged with Adam, except unlike my family, who was stuck with me, Adam had chosen me, and this I didn’t understand.”

“‘All relationships are tough. Just like with music, sometimes you have harmony and other times you have cacophony.’”

“Going back to the Home was out … It’s not like it was when I first got there, shucks, half the folks that run it don’t even tell you their name and don’t remember yours unless you’re in trouble all the time or getting ready to move out. ”

“Mom always said that it was because Teddy saw me first, and because I cut his cord, that somewhere deep down he thought I was is mother.”

“How am I supposed to decide this? How can I possibly stay without Mom and Dad? How can I leave without Teddy? Or Adam?”

“You make me lovely, and it’s so lovely to be lovely to the one I love….”

“I took my morning walk, I took my evening walk, I ate something, I thought about something, I wrote, I napped and dreamt something too, and with all that something, I still have nothing because so much of sum’thing has always been and always will be you. I miss you.”

“‘Are you feeling okay?’ I try not to sound like the blaming girlfriend. Why won’t you spend time with me? Why won’t you call me back? Don’t you like me anymore?”

“You’ll be sick or feeling troubled or deeply in love or quietly uncertain or even content for the first time in your life. It won’t matter. Out of the blue, beyond any cause you can trace, you’ll suddenly realize things are not how you perceived them to be at all.”

″‘But I guess you’re different, aren’t you, Bud? I guess you sort of carry your family around inside of you, huh?’ ‘I guess I do. Inside my suitcase, too.‘”

“His breath was warm on her neck as he bent his head, resting his cheek against her hair. Her heart beat so quickly, and yet she felt utterly calm—as if she could have stayed there forever and not minded, stayed there forever and let the world fall apart around them. She pictured his fingers, pushing against that line of chalk, reaching for her despite the barrier between them.”

“Sir,” she said, “you are no gentleman!” “An apt observation,” he answered airily. “And, you, Miss, are no lady.”

“Because that’s what you and I do. Protect each other.”

“Take advantage of difficult economic times to hire great people, even if you don’t have a specific job in mind.”

“Stuart needs “space” and “time,” as if this were physics and not a human relationship.”

“Love of love written by the broken hearted, love of life written by the dead.”

“The greatest of love letters are always coded for the one and not the many.”

“Gale gave me a sense of security I’d lacked since my father’s death. His companionship replaced the long solitary hours in the woods. I became a much better hunter when I didn’t have to look over my shoulder constantly, when someone was watching my back…Being out in the woods with Gale…sometimes I was actually happy.”

“You don’t forget the face of the person who was your last hope.”

“Well, but I cannot speak with a woman,” objected Wang Lung mildly. He could make nothing of the situation in which he found himself, and he was still staring about him. “Well, and why not?” retorted the woman with anger.”

“The idea of actually losing Peeta hit me again and I realized how much I don’t want him to die. And it’s not about the sponsors. And it’s not about what will happen back home. And it’s not just that I don’t want to be alone. It’s him. I do not want to lose the boy with the bread.”

“Then slowly she thrust her wet wrinkled hand into her bosom and she drew forth the small package and she gave it to him and watched him as he unwrapped it; and the pearls lay in his hand and they caught softly and fully the light of the sun, and he laughed. But O-lan returned to the beating of his clothes and when tears dropped slowly and heavily from her eyes she did not put up her hand to wipe them away; only she beat the more steadily with her wooden stick upon the clothes spread over the stone.”

“There is that about you which makes me think of one of the lords in the great house.” Wang Lung laughed loudly then and he said, “And am I always to look like a hind when we have enough and to spare?” But in his heart he was greatly pleased and for that day he was more kindly with her than he had been for many days.”

“Yes, I began my journey alone, and I ended it alone. But that does not mean that I walked alone.”

“‘Because you aren’t just someone I loved back then. You were my best friend, my best self, and I can’t imagine giving that up again.’ He hesitated searching for the right words. ‘You might not understand, but I gave you the best of me, and after you left, nothing was ever the same.’”

“There’s a lot of magic between you, ain’t no denying that. And magic makes forgettin’ hard.”

“When looking for a life partner, my advice to women is date all of them: the bad boys, the cool boys, the commitment-phobic boys, the crazy boys. But do not marry them. The things that make the bad boys sexy do not make them good husbands. When it comes time to settle down, find someone who wants an equal partner. Someone who thinks women should be smart, opinionated and ambitious. Someone who values fairness and expects or, even better, wants to do his share in the home. These men exist and, trust me, over time, nothing is sexier.”

“We teach females that in relationships, compromise is what a woman is more likely to do.”

“Katniss will pick whoever she thinks she can’t survive without.”

“I don’t know that I’ve ever felt as happy as I did that day, but then again, it was always like that when we were together. I never wanted it to end.”

“I knew I’d misjudged you. That you do love him. I’m not saying in what way. Maybe you don’t know yourself. But anyone paying attention could see how much you care about him.”

“She had become attached to you both. She worked very hard for you, Henry! I don’t think you quite realize what anything in the nature of brain work means to a girl like that. Well, it seems that when the great day of trial came, and she did this wonderful thing for you without making a single mistake, you two sat there and never said a word to her, but talked together of how glad you were that it was all over and how you had been bored with the whole thing. And then you were surprised because she threw your slippers at you!”

“Maybe I’ll be like that man in ‘The Hanging Tree’. Still waiting for an answer.”

“I gave you the best of me, he’d told her once, and with every beat of her son’s heart, she knew he’d done exactly that.”

“Were all first loves like that? Somehow she doubted it; even now it struck her as being more real than anything she’d ever known. Sometimes it saddened her to think that she’d never experience that kind of feeling again, but then life had a way of stamping out that intensity of passion; she’d learned all too well that love wasn’t always enough.”

“I find that the moment I let a woman make friends with me, she becomes jealous, exacting, suspicious, and a damned nuisance. I find that the moment I let myself make friends with a woman, I become selfish and tyrannical. Women upset everything.”

“Actually, he had always preferred the unreal to the real. Just as he felt better at demonstrations (which, as I have pointed out, are all playacting and dreams) than in a lecture hall full of students, so he was happier with Sabina the invisible goddess than the Sabina who had accompanied him throughout the world and whose love he constantly feared losing.”

“What the younger generation didn’t understand was that the grass was greenest where it’s watered, which meant that both Frank and Amanda had to get out their hoses if they wanted to make things better. But Amanda hadn’t asked.”

“That’s why I loved being with you. We could do the simplest things, like toss starfish into the ocean and share a burger and talk and even then I knew that I was fortunate. Because you were the first guy who wasn’t constantly trying to impress me. You accepted who you were, but more than that, you accepted me for me. And nothing else mattered-- not my family or your family or anyone else in the world. It was just us.”

“Our most meaningful relationships are often those that continued beyond the juncture at which they came closest to ending.”

“The easiest way to find out how you feel about someone. Say goodbye.”

“I want to wake up with you beside me in the mornings. I want to spend my evenings looking at you across the dinner table. I want to share every mundane detail of my day with you and hear every detail of yours. I want to laugh with you and fall asleep with you in my arms.”

“It took me a moment. And then I realized the difference. He was speaking to me in Yiddish.”

“Sometimes, Clark, you are pretty much the only thing that makes me want to get up in the morning.”

“I let him know a hurt had been mended in a way that he couldn’t have known, and for that alone there would always be a piece of me indebted to him.”

“A utopian vision of the patriarchal family remains intact despite all the evidence which proves that the well-being of children is no more secure in the dysfunctional male-headed household than in the dysfunctional female-headed household. ”

“I held him close and said nothing, all the while telling him silently that he was loved. Oh, but he was loved.”

“Everything I had worked for, all my years of study, had been to purchase for myself this one privilege: to see and experience more truths than those given to me by my father, and to use those truths to construct my own mind. I had come to believe that the ability to evaluate many ideas, many histories, many points of view, was at the heart of what it means to self-create. If I yielded now, I would lose more than an argument. I would lose custody of my own mind. This was the price I was being asked to pay, I understood that now. What my father wanted to cast from me wasn’t a demon: it was me.”

“It seems that horses have no relations; at least, they never know each other after they are sold.”

“Blood does not define family. Love does.”

“Ill fares the husband mated with a shrew, And her embraces very soon wax cold.”

“To become masters of love, we have to practice love. The art of relationship is also a whole mastery, and the only way to reach mastery is with practice.”

“The presence of the other boys did not comfort me; our dead come for their vengeance regardless if witnesses.”

“...Nothing that your partner does is personal. Your partner is dealing with her own garbage. If you don’t take it personally, it will be so easy for you to have a wonderful relationship with your partner”

“This was a man who moved like the gods were watching: every gesture he made was upright and correct. There was no one else it could be but Hector”

“There was something tender and gentle about our love, something a little shy, that was like early spring.”

“By naming sexism as the problem it went directly to the heart of the matter. Practically, it is a definition which implies that all sexist thinking and action is the problem, whether those who perpetuate it are female or male, child or adult. ”

“We reached for each other and I thought of how many nights I had lain awake in this room loving him in silence.”

“The one who has the little need is the one who controls the whole relationship. You can see this dynamic so clearly because usually in every relationship there is one who loves the most and the other who doesn’t love, who only takes advantage of the one who gives his or her heart. You can see the way they manipulate each other, their actions and reactions, and they are just like the provider and the drug addict.”

“Maybe her gods are kinder than ours, and she will find rest”

“Humans cover themselves, and protect themselves, and when someone says, “You are pushing my buttons,” it is not exactly true. What is true is that you are touching a wound in his mind, and he reacts because it hurts.”

“He did not fear ridicule, he had never known it.”

“And what is the right woman, the right man? Someone who wants to go in the same direction as you do, someone who is compatible with your views and your values-- emotionally, physically, economically, spiritually.”

“Whatever one of us asked the other to do - it was assumed the asker would weigh all the consequences - the other would do.”

“Estella, to the last hour of my life, you cannot choose but remain part of my character, part of the little good in me, part of the evil. But, in this separation I associate you only with the good, and I will faithfully hold you to that always, for you must have done me far more good than harm, let me feel now what sharp distress I may. O God bless you, God forgive you!”

“‘Where are you?’ asked Taya when I finally got a hold of her. ‘I got arrested.’ ‘All right,’ she snapped. ‘Whatever.’ I can’t say I blamed her for being mad. It wasn’t the most responsible thing I’ve ever done. Coming when it did, it was just one more irritant in a time filled with them—our relationship was rapidly going downhill.”

″ When men and women are able to respect and accept their differences then love has a chance to blossom.”

“When she says ‘I feel like you are not even here,’ he says ‘What do you mean I’m not here? Of course I am here. Don’t you see my body?’ ”

“Forgiveness is not about forgetting, Mack. It is about letting go of another person’s throat. Forgiveness does not establish relationship. It is to release you from something that will eat you alive, that will destroy your joy and your ability to love fully and openly.”

“It is not enough to merely be authentic in sharing yourself; to succeed in dating you need to consider how you will be interpreted as well.”

“As a man matures he also learns that he may be giving up himself, but his major change is becoming more aware of how he can succeed in giving. Likewise, as a woman matures she also learns new strategies for giving, but her major change tends to be learning to set limits in order to receive what she wants.”

“If I seek to fulfill my own needs at the expense of my partner, we are sure to experience unhappiness, resentment, and conflict. The secret of forming a successful relationship is for both partners to win.”

“In a culture which holds the two-parent patriarchal family in higher esteem than any other arrangement, all children feel emotionally insecure when their family does not measure up to the standard.”

“When the student is ready the teacher appears. When the question is asked then the answer is heard. When we are truly ready to receive then what we need will become available.”

“Trust is the fruit of a relationship in which you know you are loved. Because you do not know that I love you, you cannot trust me.”

“As long as women are using class or race power to dominate other women, feminist sisterhood cannot be fully realized.”

“Life takes a bit of time and a lot of relationship.”

″ I did not need to know if he could love me. I needed to know if he could need me.”

“There was more to say, but for once we did not say it. There would be other times for speaking, tonight and tomorrow and all the days after that. He let go of my hand.”

“It is very difficult for a man to differentiate between empathy and sympathy. He hates to be pitied.”

“Life is filled with rhythms-day and night, hot and cold, summer and winter, spring and fall, cloudy and clear. Likewise in a relationship, men and women have their own rhythms and cycles.”

“Simply put, feminism is a movement to end sexism, sexist exploitation, and oppression. This was a definition of feminism I offered in Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center more than 10 years ago. It was my hope at the time that it would become a common definition everyone would use. I liked this definition because it did not imply that men were the enemy.”

“I like to see people reunited, maybe that’s a silly thing, but what can I say, I like to see people run into each other, I like the kissing and the crying, I like the impatience, the stories that the mouth can’t tell fast enough, the ears that aren’t big enough, the eyes that can’t take in all of the change, I like the hugging, the bringing together, the end of missing someone…”

“It is also broad enough to include an understanding of systemic institutionalized sexism. As a definition it is open-ended. To understand feminism it implies one has to necessarily understand sexism.”

“So many people enter and leave your life! Hundreds of thousands of people! You have to keep the door open so they can come in! But it also means you have to let them go!”

“I thought, it’s a shame that we have to live, but it’s a tragedy that we get to live only one life, because if I’d had two lives, I would have spent one of them with her.”

“...There are too many idiots in this world. And having said it, I have the burden of proving it.”

“Well, you see, there are some people whom one loves, and others whom it’s almost more fun to be with.”

“A huge majority of parents use some form of physical or verbal aggression against children. Since women remain the primary caretakers of children, the facts confirm the reality that given a hierarchal system in a culture of domination which empowers females (like the parent-child relationship) all too often they use coercive force to maintain dominance.”

“You control what you can control—your image, the way you conduct yourself, the way you let men talk to and approach you—and use that to get the relationship you want.”

“Stop heaping your own definition of love on men and recognize that men love differently.”

“It never ceases to amaze me how much people talk about relationships, think about them, read about them, ask about them - even get in them without a clue how to move them forward.”

“It’s not the guy who determines whether you’re a sports fish or a keeper — it’s you.”

“You could be the most perfect woman on the Lord’s green earth—you’re capable of interesting conversation, you cook a mean breakfast, you hand out backrubs like sandwiches, you’re independent (which means, to him, that you’re not going to be in his pockets)—but if he’s not ready for a serious relationship, he’s going to treat you like a sports fish.”

“Any astronomer can predict with absolute accuracy just where every star in the universe will be at 11.30 tonight. He can make no such prediction about his teenage daughter.”

“Love comes in every color—and if a person finds love and that person is of a different race from him or her, it shouldn’t matter because the two of them found love.”

“Your objective is to avoid being on a string. The first step, I think, is to get over the fear of losing a man by confronting him. Just stop being afraid, already. The most successful people in this world recognize that taking chances to get what they want is much more productive than sitting around being too scared to take a shot. The same philosophy can be applied to dating: if putting your requirements on the table means you risk him walking away, it’s a risk you have to take. Because that fear can trip you up every time; all too many of you let the guy get away with disrespecting you, putting in minimal effort and holding on to the commitment to you because you’re afraid he’s going to walk away and you’ll be alone again. And we men? We recognize this and play on it, big time.”

“Don’t be afraid to lose him, because if a man truly loves you, he’s not going anywhere.”

“A man fishes for two reasons: he’s either sport fishing or fishing to eat, which means he’s either going to try to catch the biggest fish he can, take a picture of it, admire it with his buddies and toss it back to sea, or he’s going to take that fish on home, scale it, fillet it, toss it in some cornmeal, fry it up, and put it on his plate. This, I think, is a great analogy for how men seek out women.”

“Men respect standards- get some!”

“The sadistic person is as dependent on the submissive person as the latter is on the former; neither can live without the other.”

“Boys Shack, MEN build homes ”

“Thou blind fool, Love, what dost thou to mine eyes, That they behold, and see not what they see?”

“Love is often nothing but a favorable exchange between two people who get the most of what they can expect, considering their value on the personality market.”

“When my love swears that she is made of truth, I do believe her though I know she lies, That she might think me some untutor’d youth, Unlearned in the world’s false subtleties.”

“Imagine living in a world where there is no domination, where females and males are not alike or even always equal, but where a vision of mutuality is the ethos shaping our interaction.”

“What most people in our culture mean by being lovable is essentially a mixture between being popular and having sex appeal.”

“The oppressed will always believe the worst about themselves.”

“For if you were by my unkindness shaken, As I by yours, you’ve pass’d a hell of time.”

“In the nineteenth century the problem was that God is dead; in the twentieth century the problem is that man is dead.”

“Immature love says: “I love you because I need you.” Mature love says: “I need you because I love you.”

“That first night I sit there and all I know, as I look up, is the kitchen light is on, on the cliff, to the right, where somebody’s just built a cabin overlooking all the horrible Sur, somebody up there’s having a mild and tender supper that’s all I know...”

″ In a culture of domination everyone is socialized to see violence as an acceptable means of social control. ”

“The soul of our politics is the commitment to ending domination.”

“We knew that there could be no real sisterhood between white women and women of color if white women were not able to divest of white supremacy, if feminist movement were not fundamentally anti-racist.”

“In love the paradox occurs that two beings become one and yet remain two.”

“In the World through which I travel, I am endlessly creating myself.”

“Brett was happy. Mike had a way of getting an intensity of feeling into shaking hands. Robert Cohn shook hands because we were back.”

“You see, women are like fires, like flames. Some women are like candles, bright and friendly. Some are like single sparks, or embers, like fireflies for chasing on summer nights. Some are like campfires, all light and heat for a night and willing to be left after. Some women are like hearthfires, not much to look at but underneath they are all warm red coal that burns a long, long while.”

Dan understood that I loved Owen, and that I wanted to talk with him—most of all—but that it was a conversation, for both Owen’s sake and mine, that was best to delay. But before we finished loading the baseball cards in the car, Dan Needham asked me, “What are you giving him?” “What?” I said. “To show him that you love him,” Dan Needham said. “That’s what he was showing you. What have you got to give him?”

“God’s relationship with us and with our world is just that: a relationship. As with every relationship, there’s a certain amount of unpredictability, and the ever-present likelihood that you’ll get hurt.”

“Has your relationship with God changed the way you live your life?”

“My mother stopped the car and hugged him, and kissed him, and told him he was always welcome to come with us, anywhere we went; and I rather awkwardly put my arm around him, and we just sat that way in the car, until he had composed himself sufficiently for his return to 80 Front Street, where he marched in the back door, past Lydia’s room and the maids fussing in the kitchen, up the back stairs past the maids’ rooms, to my room and my bathroom, where he closed himself in and drew a deep bath. He handed me his sodden clothes, and I brought the clothes to the maids, who began their work on them.”

“His dad barreled into the kitchen and scooped his mom into his arms. They did this every night, too. Full-on make-out sessions, no matter who was around.”

“every time God forgives us, God is saying that God’s own rules do not matter as much as the relationship that God wants to create with us.”

“She wrote to my father in Israel almost every day on expensive French stationary, and when she ran out of that she wrote to him on graph paper torn out of a notebook.”

“Since we weren’t married, we couldn’t kiss each other in public, or even give one another a friendly hug to express our extreme joy. We risked imprisonment and being whipped.”

“What matters today, the issue which blocks the horizon, is the need for a redistribution of wealth. Humanity will have to address this question, no matter how devastating the consequences may be.”

“Mastery of language affords remarkable power.”

“You been passing the buck. This disgust with mendacity is disgust with yourself. You!—you dug the grave of your friend and kicked him in it!—before you’d face the truth with him!”

“I buried a nickel under the porch when I was 8, she said, but one day my grandma died & they sold the house & I never got to go back for it. A nickel used to mean something, I said.She nodded. It still does, she said & then she started to cry.”

“You’d rather make up a fantasy version of somebody in your head than be with a real person.”

“George (Long silence) : It will be better. Martha (Long silence): I don’t…know. George: It will be…maybe. […] Martha: Just…us? ”

“I’ve never gotten a love letter before. But reading these notes like this, one after the other, it feels like I have. It’s like...it’s like there’s only ever been Peter. Like everyone else that came before him, they were all to prepare me for this.”

“But it’s like trying to hold on to a fistful of sand: all the little bits slip out of your hands, and then you’re just clutching air and grit.”

“I’m not a superstitious person, but when I wake up from this dream, this painfully clear memory of John, I have the most horrible feeling in my chest. I would rather die than see them hurt you. And I have a sudden fear that somehow, some way, what he said in the dream will come true.”

“I wonder what it’s like to have that much power over a boy. I don’t think I’d want it; it’s a lot of responsibility to hold a person’s heart in your hands.”

“Peter Kavinsky just kissed me. He kissed me, and I liked it. I’m pretty sure I liked it. I’m pretty sure I like him.”

“Nick: I wouldn’t say there was any…particular passion between us, even at the beginning…of our marriage, I mean.”

“Tess,” I say. “I’m going to head down to the water.I’ll be back in a minute.” “You sure you can make it by yourself?” she asks. “I’ll be fine.” I smile. “If you see me floating unconscious out to sea, though-by all means, come and get me.”

″ I am black, not because of a curse, but because my skin has been able to capture all the cosmic effluvia. I am truly a drop of sun under the earth.”

“Negrophobes exist. It is not hatred of the Negro, however, that motivates them; they lack the courage for that, or they have lost it. Hate is not inborn; it has to be constantly cultivated, to be brought into being, in conflict with more or less recognized guilt complexes. ”

“Do you think there’s a difference? Between belonging with and belong to, I mean?”

“They realize at last that change does not mean reform, that change does not mean improvement.”

“Margot would say she belongs to herself. Kitty would say she belongs to no one. And I guess I would say I belong to my sisters and my dad, but that won’t always be true. To belong to someone - I didn’t know it, but now that I think about it, it seems like that’s all I’ve ever wanted. To really be somebody’s , and to have them be mine.”

“I smile, because it’s so cute. And for a second, just for a second, I forget. I forget that this isn’t real.”

“I don’t have to be so afraid of goodbye, because goodbye doesn’t have to be forever.”

“The fact that she stayed home all day in her pajamas translating books by mostly dead people didn’t seem to help matters much.”

“You only like guys you don’t have a shot with, because you’re scared. What are you so scared of?”

“I have been treated better than I should have been---not by life in general nor by the machinery of things but by women.”

“I kiss him one more time and I feel like I’m flying.”

“Martha: I swear…if you existed I’d divorce you…I haven’t been able to see you for years…you’re a blank, a cipher.”

“Everything can be explained to the people, on the single condition that you want them to understand.”

“Sister’s are supposed to fight and make up, because they are sisters and sisters always find their way back to each other.”

″‘Where are you planning to sleep, the Arctic Circle?’ she asked. I thought, There or maybe the Peruvian Andes, since that’s where Dad once camped. I started to keep a notebook called How to Survive in the Wild.”

“He took my hand and stared at it for the longest time. His own hand was soft and warm. Mine was sweating like crazy. He was saying, “Hm” and tracing the lines of my palm with his finger. It gave me the shivers, but not in an entirely unpleasant way. The sun was beating down on us, and I thought it might be nice to stay there forever with him just running his finger along my palm like that.”

“When we narrow our focus, the problem seems everything. We forget when we were lonely, dreaming of a partner. We forget first beholding the beauty of another. We forget the comfort of first being seen and held and heard. When our view shuts down, we’re up in the night annoyed by the way our lover pulls the covers or leaves the dishes in the sink without soaking them first.”

“I believe He wants us to love others so much that we go to extremes to help them.”

“God’s definition of what matters is pretty straightforward. He measures our lives by how we love.”

″ It was too rare to be normal, any true thing between two people is too rare. ”

“I’m bursting to explain everything to him, not even Big Sur but the past several years, but there’s no chance with everybody yakking -- And in fact I can see in Cody’s eyes that he can see in my own eyes the regret we both feel that recently we haven’t had chances to talk whatever, like we used to do driving across America and back in the old road days, too many people now want to talk to us and tell us their stories, we’ve been hemmed in and surrounded and outnumbered -- The circle’s closed in on the old heroes of the night.”

″‘Nonsense,’ said Mama. ‘Old age isn’t such a tragedy. If he was the only old man in the world -- yes. But he has other old men to keep him company.‘”

“It is amazing to me, now, how such wild imaginings and philosophies—inspired by a night charged with frights and calamities—made such perfectly good sense to Owen Meany and me; but good friends are nothing to each other if they are not supportive. ”

“I like men of your age . . . young boys are so idiotic. They tell me how much champagne they drink at college, and how much money they lose playing cards. Men of your age know how to appreciate women.”

“Those who truly love us will never knowingly ask us to be other than we are”

“But Cody’s oldfashioned family tiptoe sneak carries that strange apocalyptic burst of gold he somehow always manages to produce, like I said elsewhere the time in Mexico he drove an old car over a rutted road very slowly as we were all high on tea and I saw golden Heaven, or the other times he’s always seemed so golden like as I say in a davenport of some sort in Heaven in the golden top of Heaven.”

“Hearing about him made me even miss practicing that stupid shot; and so I wrote to him, just casually—since when would a twenty-year-old actually come out and say he missed his best friend?”

“But compassion is a deeper thing that waits beyond the tension of choosing sides. Compassion, in practice, does not require us to give up the truth of what we feel or the truth of our reality. Nor does it allow us to minimize the humanity of those who hurt us. Rather, we are asked to know ourselves enough that we can stay open to the truth of others, even when their truth or their inability to live up to their truth has hurt us.”

“Do you know that nothing you do in this life will ever matter, unless it is about loving God and loving the people he has made?”

“My name in his voice sends a jolt through me, creates me in the way he sees me and feels about me and the way I would be with my name in his mouth forever. Finally I understand the power in names, the power that we give people when we tell them our names.”

″ African-Americans themselves in certain parts join with Euro-Americans, to keep out of school, teachers who may be bold enough to teach the truth as it is. They usually say the races here are getting along amicably now, and we do not want these peaceful relationships disturbed by teaching of new political thought. What they mean to say with respect to the peaceful relation of the races, then, is that the African-Americans have been terrorized to the extent that they are afraid even to discuss political matters publicly.”

“Butterflies are stupid, fragile things that have beautiful and tragically short lives. Electricity kills people.”

“I didn’t fall in love with you. I walked into love with you, with my eyes wide open, choosing to take every step along the way. I do believe in fate and destiny, but I also believe we are only fated to do the things that we’d choose anyway. And I’d choose you; in a hundred lifetimes, in a hundred worlds, in any version of reality, I’d find you and I’d choose you.”

“Sticking with your family is what makes it a family.”

“What we have now makes me happy. And I can live in that happy, and feel safe there, knowing that even if things change, I’ll always have had this.”

“‘So, I’m not strange anymore?’ he asks. ‘What?’ ‘You’re riding in my car, which must mean I’m not a stranger anymore.’ ‘Actually, the more I’m around you, the stranger you get.’”

“And I realized when you look at your mother, you are looking at the purest love you will ever know.”

“From then on, I took an even greater pride in my work. I’d bring the most difficult locks home and time myself. Then I’d cut the time in half and practice until I got there. I’d keep at it until I couldn’t feel my fingers.”

“PayPal cofounder and Facebook board member Peter Thiel—really the only significant Silicon Valley voice to support Trump—was warned by another billionaire and longtime Trump friend that Trump would, in an explosion of flattery, offer Thiel his undying friendship. Everybody says you’re great, you and I are going to have an amazing working relationship, anything you want, call me and we’ll get it done!”

“You have to fight because you can’t count on anyone else fighting for you. And you have to fight for people who can’t fight for themselves. To get anything of real value, you have to fight for it.”

“When a daughter loses a mother, she learns early that human relationships are temporary, that terminations are beyond her control, and her feelings of basic trust and security are shattered. ”

“No matter how much you think you love somebody, you’ll step back when the pool of their blood edges up too close.”