Quotes About Relationships

Our great American philosopher William James has said - We have as many personalities as there are people who know us. To which I would add We have no personalities unless there are people who know us. Unless there are people we hope to convince that we deserve to exist.

Only in love is there trust - even the possibility of trust.

Betrayal is the deepest wound. Betrayal is what remains of love, when love has gone.

Time is the enemy of lovers. Worse even than the frank light of day.

Where there must be a choice, a girl will choose Daddy. Even if you are Mommy, you concede that this must be so: you remember when you were a girl, too.

Marianne laughed. But you can't disappoint me! I don't love you.

The fundamental truth of my life whether in fact it was truth or a burlesque of truth: when a man wants you, you're safe.

In all marriages there is the imbalance: one who loves more than the other. One who licks wounds in secret, the rust-taste of blood.

In marriage, the most intense conversations are often with oneself.

You spared the adults in your household. You learned how if a thing is not spoken of, even those closest to you, who love you, will assume that it doesn't exist.

Truths are the last thing you learn about your family. By the time you learn, you're no longer their child.

Were you wounded when your marriage collapsed? When your love collapsed? Or does love never "collapse," only just fade gradually away?

Loving our parents, we bring them into us. They inhabit us. For a long time I believed that I could not bear to live without Mom and Dad—I could not bear to "outlive" them—for to be a daughter without parents did not seem possible to me.

The things that link us deepest, we can't feel. Except if they're taken from us.

It struck her to the heart, left her weak, disoriented, that, to Michael Mulvaney, after all, his family wasn't quite enough.

So they'd fucked up her life, those guys she'd trusted, for fun. What the hell.

SO RISKY, to love another person! Like flaying your own, outermost skin. Exposed to the crude air and every kind of infection.

He has made a show of being a devoted family man but his life has been carefully arranged so that he spends as little time with his family as possible.

A familiar story, Marya instructs herself—a woman yearning to be completed in a man, by way of a man. As if she hadn't a soul of her own.

Love is not enough to keep us from harm.

A man is fearful of lonely in a woman

I could talk fast -- that's to say, without hesitating, stammering -- most of the time -- but there were categories of words, sentiments, I could never say, they'd have stuck in my throat. The embarrassment of it even whispering-teasing to Legs for instance 'Yeah you're my heart too!' or 'I love you' or 'I would die for you', nobody ever talked that way, mostly there was just my mother and me and we hardly talked at all.

The mysteries of the female sex! We men can never hope to fathom your depths, but only try not to drown in them.

Gossip - invented to injure feelings rather than illuminate the truth.