relationships Quotes

“My dear, I don’t give a damn.”

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

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

“If conversation was the lyrics, laughter was the music, making time spent together a melody that could be replayed over and over without getting stale.”

“Without another word they came together, as if it were the most natural thing in the world, and he put his arms around her, drawing her close.”

“She wanted something else, something different, something more. Passion and romance, perhaps, or maybe quiet conversations in candlelit rooms, or perhaps something as simple as not being second.”

“I wish I could give you what you’re looking for, but I don’t know what it is. There’s a part of you that you keep closed off from everyone, including me. It’s as if I’m not the one you’re really with. You mind is on someone else.”

“Relationships are the most important thing in life, and friends are a part of that.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“All I can say is that you make me... you make me into someone I couldn’t even imagine. You make me happy, even when you’re awful. I would rather be with you - even the you that you seem to think is diminished - than with anyone else in the world.”

“You are scored on my heart, Clark. You were from the first day you walked in, with your ridiculous clothes and your bad jokes and your complete inability to ever hide a single thing you felt.”

“I thought, briefly, that I would never feel as intensely connected to the world, to another human being, as I did at that moment.”

“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.”

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

“Happiness [is] only real when shared.”

“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.”

“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!”

“When the karma of a relationship is done, only love remains. It’s safe. Let go.”

“I have a history of making decisions very quickly about men. I have always fallen in love fast and without measuring risks. I have a tendency not only to see the best in everyone, but to assume that everyone is emotionally capable of reaching his highest potential. I have fallen in love more times than I care to count with the highest potential of a man, rather than with the man himself, and I have hung on to the relationship for a long time (sometimes far too long) waiting for the man to ascend to his own greatness. Many times in romance I have been a victim of my own optimism.”

“We’ve got a bond in common, you and I. We are both alone in the world.”

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

“Sir,” replied the commander, “I am nothing to you but Captain Nemo; and you and your companions are nothing to me but the passengers of the Nautilus.”

″‘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.‘”

He lived alone, and, so to speak, outside of every social relation; and as he knew that in this world account must be taken of friction, and that friction retards, he never rubbed against anybody.

“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.”

“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 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.”

“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.”

“‘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.’”

“If you like her, if she makes you happy, and if you feel like you know her--then don’t let her go.”

“I am always saying ‘Glad to’ve met you’ to somebody I’m not at all glad I met. If you want to stay alive, you have to say that stuff, though.”

“The thing is, it’s really hard to be roommates with people if your suitcases are much better than theirs.”

“Do any of us children, she wondered, ever stop to ask ourselves where our teachers go when school is over for the day? Do we wonder if they live alone, or if there is a mother at home or a sister or a husband?”

“He should never have invited Rachel to come here without first giving her a crash course in how to deal with his family. ‘Rich, Entitled, Delusional Chinese Families 101.’ Could he really be part of this family?”

You are only punishing yourself when you want to be in a relationship with a woman more than she wants to be a in a relationship with you.

“She had witnessed firsthand the scars that blatant parental interference could inflict; why, even those assembled here were a reminder of that —Daisy’s relationship with her sons was tenuous at best, while Lorena’s eldest daughter no longer spoke to her after immigrating to Auckland with her Kiwi husband.”

“She knew that there was no point making a scene, demanding an explanation. Any sort of explanation that could cause even the tiniest scratch on their picture-perfect life.”

“Being twenty-nine, she was by Chinese standards well into old-maid territory, and even though her busybody relatives were perpetually trying to set her up, she had spent the better part of her twenties focused on getting through grad school, finishing her dissertation, and jump-starting her career in academia.”

“Rachel couldn’t hide her look of surprise. Why had Nick never once mentioned this friend of his, this beautiful girl who inexplicably kept calling him Nico? Rachel gave Nick a measured look, but he simply smiled back, oblivious to the nagging thoughts filling her mind.”

″‘So disgraceful! Sharing a hotel room when they aren’t even married! You know, some people might think they eloped and are coming here for their honeymoon!’ Nadine Shaw chimed in, though secretly the thought of any potential scandal that might bring those high-and-mighty Youngs down a peg filled her with glee.”

“Human knowledge is never contained in one person. It grows from the relationships we create between each other and the world, and still it is never complete.”

“Death ends a life, not a relationship.”

“We are not here to fix, change or belittle another person. We are here to support, forgive and heal one another.”

“That Sam-I-am! That Sam-I-am! I do not like that Sam-I-am!”

“Relationships are the Holy Spirit’s laboratories in which He brings together people who have the maximal opportunity for mutual growth.”

″What may appear to be an arrow or a sword we can actually experience as a flower. Whether we experience what happens to us as obstacle and enemy or as teacher and friend depends entirely on our perception of reality. It depends on our relationship with ourselves.″

“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”

“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.”

“I must have loved you a lot.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.‘”

“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.”

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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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?”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

″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.″

″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.″

“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.”

″‘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.‘”

“... 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.”

“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 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.”

“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?”

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

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

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“‘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?”

″‘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.‘”

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

“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. ”

“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.”

“Blood does not define family. Love does.”

“It doesn’t matter how much you love someone, you are never going to be what that person wants you to be.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

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

“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.”

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

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“...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”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“If you take your happiness and put it in someone’s hands, sooner or later, she is going to break it. If you give your happiness to someone else, she can always take it away. Then if happiness can only come from inside of you and is the result of your love, you are responsible for your happiness.”

″ 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?’ ”

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

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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…”

“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.”

“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!”

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

“Once you give them the power to tell you you’re great, you’ve also given them the power to tell you you’re unworthy. Once you start caring about people’s opinions of you, you give up control.”

“There have always been people who have written me off. They’re not going away. I use that to motivate me. I’m driven to show them just how wrong they are.”

“One of the greatest days of my life was when I came to understand that other people’s approval and my happiness were not related.”

“It is one thing to fight other people, but fighting yourself is different. If you’re fighting yourself, who wins? Who loses?”

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

“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.”

“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.”

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

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

“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?”

“How far should a person go in the name of true love?”

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

“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.”

“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.”

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?”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

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

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

“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.”

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

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

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

“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. ”

“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.”

“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?”

“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.”

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

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

“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.”

“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.”

“It’s just the most amazing thing to love a dog, isn’t it? It makes our relationships with people seem as boring as a bowl of oatmeal.”

“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.”

“Remember that I believe in you. I’m infinitely sorry for the foolish grievance I held against you yesterday afternoon.”

“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.”

“Perhaps we were friends first and lovers second. But then perhaps this is what lovers are.”

“One of the biggest troubles of hitchhiking is having to talk to innumerable people, make them feel that they didn’t make a mistake picking you up.”

“We were so used to traveling we had to walk all over Long Island, but there was no more land, just the Atlantic Ocean, and we could only go so far. We clasped hands and agreed to be friends forever.”

“I had failed to understand the perverse comfort we sometimes get from choosing death in life, exempting ourselves from the challenge of using our gifts, of living our lives in authentic relationship with others.”

“Whatever happens between us, Elio, I just want you to know. Don’t ever say you didn’t know.”

“That was the way Dean found me when he finally decided I was worth saving. He took me home to Camille’s house. ‘Where’s Marylou, man?‘”

″‘Well, then, I’ll put it off.’ I had no money. I sent my aunt an airmail letter asking her for fifty dollars and said it would be the last money I’d ask; after that she would be getting money back from me, as soon as I got that ship.”

“Marylou was the only girl Dean ever really loved. He was sick with regret when he saw her face again, and, as of yore, he pleaded and begged at her knees for the joy of her being. She understood Dean; she stroked his hair; she knew he was mad.”

“He was a man of black and white. And she was color. All the color he had.”

“A moment later, he plopped down on the sand beside her, and when they accidentally touched, Gabby had the briefest flash of them sitting together just like this on a hundred different weekends in the future.”

“He felt as though he were failing in practically every area of his life. Lately, happiness seemed as distant and unattainable to him as space travel. He hadn’t always felt this way. There had been a long period of time during which he remembered being very happy. But things change. People change. Change was one of the inevitable laws of nature, exacting its toll on people’s lives. Mistakes are made, regrets form, and all that was left were repercussions that made something as simple as rising from the bed seem almost laborious. ”

“I love you, Gabby, more than you’ll ever know. You’re everything I’ve ever wanted in a wife. You’re every hope and every dream I’ve ever had, and you’ve made me happier than any man could possibly be. I don’t ever want to give that up. I can’t.”

“I want to sue (my parents) for the rights to my own body.”

“It should have been you two. I’m not pretending I didn’t always see that. Of course I did, as far back as I can remember. But I kept you apart. I’m not asking you to forgive me for that. That’s not what I’m after just now. What I want is for you to put it right. Put right what I messed up for you.”

“Mama: Oh—So now it’s life. Money is life. Once upon a time freedom used to be life—now it’s money. I guess the world really do change . . . Walter: No—it was always money, Mama. We just didn’t know about it. Mama: No . . . something has changed. You something new, boy. In my time we was worried about not being lynched . . . You ain’t satisfied or proud of nothing we done. I mean that you had a home; that we kept you out of trouble till you was grown; that you don’t have to ride to work on the back of nobody’s streetcar—You my children—but how different we done become.”

“There are moments when mental overload can render words impossible.”

“Maybe it’s because Jesse isn’t all that different from me, choosing fire as his medium, needing to know that he could command at least one uncontrollable thing.”

“In a dog’s life, some plaster would fall, some cushions would open, some rugs would shred. Like any relationship, this one has its costs. They were costs we came to accept and balance against the joy and amusement and protection and companionship he gave us.”

“Mama: There is always something left to love. And if you ain’t learned that, you ain’t learned nothing.”

“Walter: (Violently) No! ‘Cause ain’t nobody with me! Not even my own mother!”

“How far would you go to keep the hope of love alive?”

“He leaned closer, their faces drawing near, and he could feel the heat of her breath mingling with his. He closed his eyes against the memory of a thousand other kisses and touched his lips to hers. He felt a kind of spark, and all at once he felt her slowly coming back to him. She was the arm that held him close in times of trouble, she was the whisper on the pillow beside him at night.”

“Spending time with you showed me what I’ve been missing in my life.”

“’I will have you without armor, Kaz Brekker. Or I will not have you at all.’”

“You admitted that you’ve always considered Kate’s health, not Anna’s, in making these choices. ... So how can you claim to love them both equally? How can you say that you haven’t been favoring one child in your decisions?”

“It was just a normal day, a day like any other. But most of all it was a day in which everything was exactly the way it should be.”

“I was in love with her, even though I didn’t know her. Kind of like love before first sight.”

“Love is a wonderful thing. It makes life worthwhile. I love being in love.”

“Mama: If you a son of mine, tell her! (WALTER picks up his keys and his coat and walks out. She continues, bitterly) You…you are a disgrace to your father’s memory. Somebody get me my hat!”

“I believed that Fufi was my dog but of course that wasn’t true. Fufi was a dog. I was a boy. We got along well. She happened to live in my house. That experience shaped what I’ve felt about relationships for the rest of my life: You do not own the thing that you love.”

“You know that expression, ‘It hit me like a ton of bricks’? It’s true. The minute she turned the car around and ended up on my doorstep in her purple pajamas, that’s how I felt about Lena.”

“If you don’t want to be my sister anymore, that’s one thing. But I don’t think I could stand to lose you as a friend.”

“If you have a sister and she dies, do you stop saying you have one? Or are you always a sister, even when the other half of the equation is gone? ”

“Of course Anna should be honored for donating her bone marrow. Of course she deserves recognition. But the thought of rewarding someone for their suffering, frankly, never entered my mind.”

“It made me wonder, thought, what would have happened if Kate had been healthy. ... Certainly, I would not be part of this family.”

“Last night you said, ‘I need you.’ You never said the word ‘love,’ so I only know how I feel.” I swallow hard, blinking at the part in her hair. “I love you, Marlena. I love you with my heart and soul, and I want to be with you.”

“Knowing they were in the same city again made the missing him flare up inside her. In her stomach. Why were people always going on and on about the heart? Almost everything Levi happened in Cath’s stomach.”

“Don’t start doing that.” “What?” “Agreeing with me. Sure path to destruction.”

“‘I don’t trust anybody. Not anybody. And the more that I care about someone, the more sure I am they’re going to get tired of me and take off.’”

“He was one of the most honorable men I have ever known.”

“Walter: We have decided to move into our house because my father—my father—he earned it for us brick by brick. We don’t want to make no trouble for nobody or fight no causes, and we will try to be good neighbors. And that’s all we got to say about that. We don’t want your money.”

“We’re not [supposed to be together]. You’re a Mortal. You can’t understand. I don’t want to see you get hurt, and that’s what will happen if you get too close to me.”

“The heart is an arrow. It demands aim to land true.”

“He needed to tell her…what? That she was lovely and brave and better than anything he deserved. That he was twisted, crooked, wrong, but not so broken that he couldn’t pull himself together into some semblance of a man for her. That without meaning to, he’d begun to lean on her, to look for her, to need her near. He needed to thank her for his new hat.”

“This is Abraham’s grandson, Jacob. He is our honored guest and has come a very long way to be here. I hope you will treat him accordingly.”

“Meeting you was a disaster. But I am grateful every day for that disaster.”

“Many boys will bring you flowers. But someday you’ll meet a boy who will learn your favorite flower, your favorite song, your favorite sweet. And even if he is too poor to give you any of them, it won’t matter because he will have taken the time to know you as no one else does. Only that boy earns your heart.”

″ ‘Speak’, she begged silently. ‘Give me a reason to stay’. For all his selfishness and cruelty, Kaz was still the boy who had saved her. She wanted to believe he was worth saving, too.”

“My grandmother had bought my dad this ridiculous pink bunny costume, and he put it on and sat by the driveway waiting for Grandpa Portman to come home from five o’clock until nightfall, but he never did.”

“Wholehearted intimacy can develop only where two people are equally forthcoming and self-revelatory. To take the risk of loving, we must become vulnerable enough to test the radical proposition that knowledge of another and self-revelation will ultimately increase rather than decrease love. It is an awe-ful risk.”

“When you’re feeling overwhelmed or your body is giving you signs that you’re overdoing it,: stop,breathe, and remember one thing: everything can wait. Fall in love with you. Love, support, validate, and nourish a relationship with yourself.”

“Based on her experience with men, most assumed that when you talked to them about a problem or dilemma, they were expected to offer an opinion, even when all you wanted was for them to listen.”

“Stick two different people with two different sets of expectations under one rood and it ain’t always going to be shrimp and grits on Easter.”

“Pietro Crespi took the sewing basket from her lap and he told her, “We’ll get married next month.” Amaranta did not tremble at the contact with his icy hands. She withdrew hers like a timid little animal and went back to her work. “Don’t be simple, Crespi.” She smiled. “I wouldn’t marry you even if I were dead.”

“Paying attention is the bedrock opposite of taking for granted, which is a major cause of death of long relationships.”

“The final key to the way I promote is bravado. I play to people’s fantasies. People may not always think big themselves, but they can still get very excited by those who do. That’s why a little hyperbole never hurts. People want to believe that something is the biggest and the greatest and the most spectacular. I call it truthful hyperbole. It’s an innocent form of exaggeration, and a very effective form of promotion.”

“He completed her in a way that she’d never thought possible. Knowledge isn’t everything, she told herself, and she knew then that, in Nana’s words, he was the toast to her butter.”

“‘Because every now and then, I’d meet a guy and think that we were getting along great, and suddenly I’d stop hearing from him. Not only did he stop calling, but if I happened to bump into him sometime later, he always acted like I had the plague. I didn’t understand it. I still don’t. And it bothered me. It hurt me. With time, it got harder and harder to keep blaming the guys, and I eventually came to the conclusion that there was something wrong with me. That maybe I was simply meant to live my life alone.’”

“You are damaged and broken and unhinged. But so are shooting stars and comets.”

“Only the brave and the broken are kind in this world.”

“They have realized that their success depends on having the time and energy resources to go deep with a few relationships, and they have to end the wish to go deep with everyone, as it leads to skimming the surface with almost everyone.”

“Parenthood has the power to redefine every aspect of life - marriage, work, relationships with family and friends. Those helpless bundles of power and promise that come into our world show us our true selves- who we are, who we are not, who we wish we could be.”

“Always be honest about the way someone makes you feel about yourself.”

“One minute they talk as if I ran everything and overheard everything and was extremely dangerous. The next moment they think they can take me in by tricks that a baby would see through.”

“People come in and out of your life. For a time they are your world; they are everything. And then one day they’re not.”

“I know now that I don’t want to love or be loved in half measures. I want it all, and to have it all, you have to risk it all.”

“There are two kinds of girls in this world. The kind who breaks hearts and the kind who gets her heart broken.”

“He looks at me in such a way that I know for sure-he’s never looked at another girl quite like this. And then I’m in his arms, and we’re hugging and kissing, and we’re both shaking, because we both know-this is the night we become real.”

“‘Us,’ Peter corrects. ‘I did it for us.’ He links our fingers together. ‘It’s you and me, kid.’”

“‘You’re not first,’ Peter says. ‘But you’re the most special to me, because you’re the girl I love, Lara Jean.’”

“And then, when you look at me the way you do, I feel like the luckiest girl in the world.”

“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.”