Quotes About Intimacy

What were we spending so much time doing if not getting to know each other?

I wanted to hit him. I wanted to hold him. I wanted to shout myself into his ear.

In the past seven years of love-making he had heard the words I love you so many times: from the mouths of widows and children, from prostitutes, family friends, travelers, and adulterous wives. Women said I love you without his ever speaking. The more you love someone, he came to think, the harder it is to tell them. It surprised him that strangers didn't stop each other on the street to say I love you.

If it had and answer, it wouldn't really be love, would it?

Before they had kids, if asked to conjure images of parenthood they would have said things like Reading in bed, and Giving a bath, and Running while holding the seat of a bicycle. Parenthood contains such moments of warmth and intimacy, but isn't them. It's cleaning up. The great bulk of family life involves no exchange of love, and no meaning, only fulfillment. Not the fulfillment of feeling fulfilled, but of fulfilling that which now falls to you.

She saw through the shell of me into the center of me

I felt it very moving to feel his touch, and to remember that hands can also show love.

Let's go to bed. Those four words differentiate a marriage from every other kind of relationship. We aren't going to find a way to agree, but let's go to bed. Not because we want to, but because we have to. We hate each other right now, but let's go to bed. It's the only one we have. Let's go to our sides, but the sides of the same bed. Let's retreat into ourselves, but together. How many conversations had ended with those four words? How many fights?

All that mattered was him looking at me

He knew that I love you also means I love you more than anyone else loves you, or has loved you, or will love you, and also, I love you in a way that no one else loves your, or has loved you, or will love you, and also, I love you in a way that I love no one else, and never have loved anyone else, and never will love anyone else. He knew that it is, by love's definition, impossible to love two people.

S]o if the device of the person in the ambulance detected the device of the person he loved the most, or the person who loved him the most, and the person in the ambulance was really badly hurt, and might even die, the ambulance could flash GOODBYE! I LOVE YOU! GOODBYE! I LOVE YOU!

She always saw through him, as if he were just another window. She always felt that she knew everything about him that could be known. Not that he was simple, but that he was knowable, like a list of errands, like an encyclopedia.

That's all anyone wants from anyone else, not love itself but the knowledge that the love is there.

I knew that we were sharing something with our eyes, but I didn't know what, and I didn't know if it mattered.

I wanted to shout myself into his ear.

Being with him made my brain quiet.

I'm not mad at you, she said. Not even a little? No. Do you still love me? It didn't seem like the perfect time to mention that I had already made copies of the key for the deliverer from Pizza Hut, and the UPS person, and, also the nice guys from Greenpeace, so they could leave me articles on manatees and other animals that are going extinct when Stan is getting coffee. I've never loved you more.

I put my hands into the pockets of all his jackets

How many hundreds of thousands of fingers brushing against each other does it take to make love? Why does anyone ever make love?

What's it about? she asked. It's about love. She laughed. They're all about love.

The more you love someone, he came to think, the harder it is to tell them.

They lay in silence, thinking their own thoughts, each trying to know the other's. They were becoming strangers on top of each other.

He was sculpting me. He was trying to make me so he could fall in love with me ..

They had never seen one another from afar. They had never known the deepest intimacy, that closeness attainable only with distance