Quotes About Relationships

Each contact with a human being is so rare, so precious, one should preserve it.

Age does not protect you from love. But love, to some extent, protects you from age.

I know why familles were created, with all their imperfections. They humanize you. They are made to make you forget yourself occasionally, so that the beautiful balance of life is not destroyed.

Many couples, many people, are not living with real human beings, but with their ghosts. Who has not followed for years the spell of a particular tone of voice, from voice to voice, as the fetishist follows a beautiful foot, scarcely seeing the woman herself? A voice, a mouth, an eye, all stemming from the original fountain of our first desire, directing it, enslaving us, until we choose to unravel the fatal web and free ourselves.

There were silences in my head. I could abandon myself completely to the pleasure of multiple relationships, to the beauty of the day, to the joys of the day. It was as if a cancer in me had ceased gnawing me. The cancer of introspection.

Does one ever know what another person is really like, even someone very close to us? Do we know what we are like ourselves? What we are today may not be what we are tomorrow.

Conchita Clossen in Edith Wharton's unfinished novel of transatlantic husband hunting, The Buccaneers.

Alva embodied a curious contradiction in that she felt she cared deeply for women as a class while nursing venomous contempt for the women she actually knew.

When I got back to Marceline, I did not conceal from her how tedious I found all these acquaintances. They are all alike, I said to her. When I talk to one, I feel as if I were talking to the whole lot. But, my dear, said Marceline, you can't expect each of them to be different from the others. The greater their likeness to each other, the more unlike they are to me.

She already loved me too much to see me as I was.

I have often noticed with married couples how intolerably irritating the slightest protuberance of character in the one may be to the other, because in the course of life in common it continually rubs up against the same place. And if the rub is reciprocal, married life is nothing but a hell.

These scenes, when one of the parties offers more of his heart than the other wants, are always painful.

If, as I say, I did not love my betrothed, at any rate, I had never loved any other woman.

Ces scènes où l'un offre plus de son cÅ"ur qu'on ne lui demande, sont toujours pénibles

I think he must have made my mother very unhappy, and yet he loved her—that is, if he ever really loved anyone.

it was not so much friends I loved as friendship (pp 15 - The Immoralist)

Tell me whom you haunt and I'll tell you who you are.

Love is when you meet someone who tells you something new about yourself.

It's been six months, Nancy.' 'What's your hurry? It took me a year to get used to living with Carl. I mean, what do men do anyway? They work, eat, drink, and play games. Sex for them is in the sports and recreation category. You can't live with a man and not be lonely.' 'You think so?' 'Absolutely. Besides, once you have kids, it all changes anyway. Everything seems to make sense then.

Men can be pitiless towards a woman whose body has eluded them, particularly if this is thanks to their own cowardice.

It was through Peter that she first understood that the world existed before her, without her. For a few days she could not forgive him for this.

Moltabano, for a moment, felt moved. That astonishing, wholly feminine capacity for deep understanding, for penetrating one's feelings, for being at once mother and lover, daughter and wife.

If you're looking for pity, forget it, Connie retorted. You've passed up more dates than I care to count. You're married to your work. A pause. And maybe to the past.

Someday you'll have to tell me the whole story behind you two. Maybe. But first, I have to figure it out myself.