Quotes from Merle Shain

Friends are like windows through which you see out into the world and back into yourself... If you don't have friends you see much less than you otherwise might.

Loving can cost a lot but not loving always costs more, and those who fear to love often find that want of love is an emptiness that robs the joy from life.

The people in your life are like the pillars on your porch. Sometimes they hold you up, and sometimes they lean on you. Sometimes it's enough to know they are standing by.

Loving someone means helping them to be more themselves, which can be different from being what you'd like them to be, although often they turn out the same

Until you divest yourself of the notion that you are a collection of needs, an empty vessel that someone else must fill up, there will be no safe place to harbor yourself, no safe shore to reach. As long as you think mostly of getting, you will have nothing real to give.

It has been said that a lot of women of our generation "grew up to be the men they always wanted to marry

We are all persons courtesy of someone else, and since we need others to perceive us in order to experience ourselves, it is very hard to like yourself when those nearest you seem to doubt your worth. And when those around you don't see you as you want to see yourself, it is only too easy to lose the way and start auditioning instead for them.

Whether the melon falls on the knife or the knife falls on the melon, it's the melon that suffers." And so it would appear to me

I overheard a young man once saying to his wife, "I can't control you. That's the problem and it's been the problem ever since day one!" And then I heard her answer him and heard her terrible voice. "No!" she said. "The problem isn't that you can't control me, the problem is that you're trying to. Why don't you stop worrying about controlling me and start worrying about controlling yourself?

There isn't a more perfect person somewhere, only a more perfect person we might become, and there isn't a paradise someone can lead us to unless it's the world we make for ourselves when we stop expecting it to be delivered by someone else.

Power is anathema to intimacy, as it is to love, because when you have power, you have fear. So if you are trying to get closer to someone than you are right now, try recognizing their power rather than showing them yours.

And they say that there is no intimacy unless there is mutual acceptance and mutual trust, no matter whatever else there is, and I would side with them.