Quotes About Intimacy

In short, the persons we see most clearly are not necessarily those we know best.

Connection and love: … We all want it. Most people settle for connection because love's too scary.

The quality of your life is in direct proportion to the quality of your relationships.

ANDREW: Not marriage, Inspector. Sex. Sex is the game with marriage the penalty.

It is only when we no longer compulsively need someone that we can have a real relationship with them.

Domestic music-making has declined in recent years; but those who still engage in it know that making music together is an irreplaceable way of achieving closeness. The members of a string quartet sometimes develop a special intimacy which they claim is unmatched by any other relationship.

Getting to know a difficult piece of music is comparable with getting to know a person who does not immediately reveal him- or herself, or who may appear to erect barriers against intimacy.

Intimate attachments are a hub around which a person's life revolves, not necessarily the hub.

Our expectation that satisfying intimate relationships should, ideally, provide happiness and that, if they do not, there must be something wrong with those relationships, seems to be exaggerated. . . It may be our idealization of interpersonal relationships in the West that causes marriage, supposedly the most intimate tie, to be so unstable. If we did not look to marriage as the principal source of happiness, fewer marriages would end in tears.

It is widely believed that interpersonal relationships of an intimate kind are the chief, if not the only, source of human happiness. Yet the lives of creative individuals often seem to run counter to this assumption.

It may be our idealization of interpersonal relationships in the West that causes marriage, supposedly the most intimate tie, to be so unstable. If we did not look to marriage as the principal source of happiness, fewer marriages would end in tears.

On ne parle pas assez quand il en est temps et les âmes se boucanent côte à côte.

The friend within the man is that part of him which belongs to you and opens to you a door which never, perhaps, is opened to another. Such a friend is true, and all he says is true; and he loves you even if he hates you in other mansions of his heart.

A life without love in it is like a heap of ashes upon a deserted hearth, with Life has taught us that love does not consist in gazing at each other but in looking outward together in the same direction.

And she is older, in my defense, the way Alison goes on you'd think I'd been fucking an undergraduate. In any case, once Astrid and I had established relations, I understood that they might cross paths, so we were exceptionally discreet about our . . . connection.

I had an ex like that. Wasn't happy unless my head was full of her words.

A relationship needs its games. If there is no sense of play, there is only desperation, the fear of being alone.

Our relationship developed under a cloud of paranoia. We ordered in rather than going out. When we did meet out in the world, we avoided anywhere that we might bump into anyone we knew. This might have seemed like overkill, but it was also fun, one of the games we played.

Love is a scandal of the personal sort.

I observed that after marriage people cease to be curious.

In a relationship when things are really great you don't need to say anything and just enjoy the other person. Sometimes with a couple, it gets dark and you don't know what to say and that silence can last all day. Other times you don't want to stop talking because you don't want to lose one another.

Capisce ora Shushanig, fino in fondo, il mistero della forza che unisce l'uomo e la donna che si sono scelti, per sempre. "Dove sei tu, ci sono anch'io." Nessuno può interrompere davvero il colloquio di due sposi amanti, né disciogliere le loro viscere che si sono intrecciate.

One discourse celebrates detachment with the image of a rhinoceros: 'One whose mind is enmeshed in sympathy for friends and companions, neglects the true goal. Seeing this danger in intimacy, wander alone like a rhinoceros. … As a deer in the wilds, unfettered, goes for forage wherever it wants: the wise person, valuing freedom, wanders alone like a rhinoceros.

If you have known someone your whole life, you can see them in the dark.