Quotes About Relationships

Nobody steals books but your friends.

Love is a negative form of hatred.

Is food a substitute for love? No, love is a substitute for food. And a pretty poor substitute at that.

Distance was a dangerous thing, she knew. Distance changed people.

narcissists sense that their partner will inevitably see how inadequate they are and leave for someone else. Rather than wait for that reality, they'd rather control the inevitability and leave first.

Never offer him or her friendship. You will be used.

Nothing is more hated by a narcissist than an expression of intimacy like, "I love you.

Narcissists identify being loved with being possessed, engulfed, and inevitably discarded.

She knows she has treated Jerry cruelly at times, but she's lost respect for him because, as she states, "He's always there and just keeps coming back. What is the matter with him?" She's just met someone more intriguing at her Twelve Step meeting, and after all, Jerry will be much happier without her.

When we can't make sense of the way we are being treated, we wind up distorting our view of ourselves and our relationships.

All we know about ourselves comes from the way people loved us.

As a jealous man, I suffer four times over: because I am jealous, because I blame myself for being so, because I fear that my jealousy will wound the other, because I allow myself to be subject to a banality: I suffer from being excluded, from being aggressive, from being crazy, and from being common.

I encounter millions of bodies in my life; of these millions, I may desire some hundreds; but of these hundreds, I love only one.

To whom could I put this question (with any hope of an answer)? Does being able to live without someone you loved mean you loved her less than you thought...?

To try to write love is to confront the muck of language; that region of hysteria where language is both too much and too little, excessive (by the limitless expansion of the ego, by emotive submersion) and impoverished (by the codes on which love diminishes and levels it).

I make the other's absence responsible for my worldliness.

You keep telling yourself it will be different. Year after year, time after time, you keep telling yourself things might change. It's what makes people go back to people they shouldn't ever go back to.

When you have known someone your whole life you don't need a lot of warm-up time to get into a big argument. All the fore-play has been done years ago, and so the battle sits in your memory like stove gas awaiting the match. A wrong word, a careless allusion, and the old fire is suddenly raging.

You don't have to be alone to feel alone.

In the end, the only thing that really matters is family. -Jackson Freestone

Hate is not the opposite of love; apathy is.

Life comes from physical survival; but the good life comes from what we care about.

The "stuffed men" are bound to become more lonely no matter how much they "lean together"; for hollow people do not have a base from which to learn to love.

But they do not talk long before they make it clear that they expect the marriage partner, real or hoped-for, to fill some lack, some vacancy within themselves; and they are anxious and angry because he or she doesn't.