Quotes About Intimacy

I can't believe I just asked you to hold my hand,' said Ira, but Mike had already taken it.

Imagine a wife and a mistress sharing the same toothbrush forever and ever, never knowing.

Learn that you have a way of knowing each other which somehow slips out and beyond the ways you have of not knowing each other at all.

Visit a place at night, she knew, and it was yours.

It's not that men fear intimacy,' I said to Eleanor. 'It's that they're hypochondriacs of intimacy: They always think they have it when they don't. Gerard thinks we're very close but half the time he's talking to me like he met me forty-five minutes ago, telling me things about himself I've known for years, and asking me questions about myself that he should know the answers to already. Last night he asked me what my middle name was. God, I can't talk about it.

The whiskey was going down sweet.  That was what happened after a while, with no meal to assist — it had to do the food work on its own.  There.  We talked about death. That's talking about death?

There is something comforting, thinks Mack, in embracing someone the same size as you.

How quickly bodies came to love each other, promise themselves to each other always, without asking permission. From the mind! If only she could give up her mind, let her heart swell, inflamed, her brain stepping out for whole days, whole seasons, her work shrinking to limericks.

She gave him books of poetry: Wordsworth, Whitman, all the W's. When she'd ask him how he liked them, he would say, Fine. I'm on page… and then he would tell her what page he was on and how many pages he'd accomplished that day.

She would turn from him in bed, her hands under the pillow, the digital clock peeling back the old skins of numbers.

I steal back into dreams of you, your unmade bed a huge open-faced sandwich.

Even his I love you's, she said, were like tiny daggers, like little needles or safety pins. Beware of a man who says he loves you but is incapable of a passionate confession; of melting into a sob.

There was sex where you were looked in the eye and beautiful things were said to you, and then there was what Ira used to think of as yoo-hoo sex: where the other person seemed spirited away, not quite there, their pleasure mysterious and crazy and only accidentally involving you. "Yoo-hoo?" was what his grandmother always called before entering a house where she knew someone but not well enough to know whether they were actually home.

By about the sixth week the smallness of the class, and whatever makeshift intimacy had sprung up there, became suddenly oppressive to me… suddenly I wanted the anonymity of a large class, where class members did not really have faces and names and problems. In six weeks with Susan, Lodeme, Betty, Valerie, Ellen, Frances, Pat, Marie, Bridget, and Barney, (…) brought to the stubborn limits of our knowability, we were now left with the jagged scrape of our differences.

The couple sat side by side on cushions on the floor, quietly eating breakfast from the low table. They munched in happy and enjoyable silence, of the kind that grows like a vine through the long years of a good marriage, so that when everything that needs to be said has already been pronounced, it is mutually understood that there is an intimate silence that has its own loquacity.

Love is what is left when the passion has gone

A family is a place where a body can share the no-account things, can talk of the little matters important only to ourselves, where we can laugh and cry and tell of the day-by-day happenings and then forget them.

He was the only man she had ever known who made her feel protected. He made her feel safe, secure. And the feeling was strange to her.

He sometimes daydreamed about sitting beside her in a beautiful meadow and just counting her freckles.

My heart is breaking." "I can fix that," said Sam. She turned to him. He took hold of both of her hands, and kissed her.

It's an industry of lonely people in a crowd, Bill Margold was saying. 'They're scared to get close to each other. You're far better off having someone to sleep next to then having someone to sleep with because you have to trust someone you sleep next to.

Love will make you show your heart someday...

She was] kept there in the sort of embrace a man gives to the dearest creature the world holds for him.

often between ourselves and those nearest and dearest to us there exists a reserve which it is very hard to overcome.