Quotes About Relationships

Children were vehicles for passing things along. These things could be kingdoms, rich wedding gifts, stories, grudges, blood feuds. Through children, alliances were forged; through children, wrongs were avenged. To have a child was to set loose a force in the world.

But this is wrong, nobody dies from lack of sex. It's lack of love we die from.

She said love was useless, because it led you into dumb exchanges in which you gave too much away, and then you got bitter and mean.

Messy love is better than none, I guess. I am no authority on sane living.

You can't keep a cool head when you're drowning in love. You just thrash around a lot and scream, and wear yourself out.

You know I love you. You're the only one. She isn't the first woman he's ever said that to. He shouldn't have used it up so much earlier in his life, he shouldn't have treated it like a tool, a wedge, a key to open women. By the time he got around to meaning it, the words sounded fraudulent to him and he'd been ashamed to pronounce them.

But maybe, underneath, she loves him too much. Maybe it's her excessive love that pushes him away.

Because you are never here but always there, I forget not you but what you look like You drift down the street in the rain, your face dissolving, changing shape, the colours running together My walls absorb you, breathe you forth again, you resume yourself, I do not recognize you You rest on the bed watching me watching you, we will never know each other any better than we do now

No mother is ever, completely, a child's idea of what a mother should be, and I suppose it works the other way around as well. But despite everything, we didn't do badly by one another, we did as well as most. I wish she were here, so I could tell her I finally know this.

Love is giving, marriage is buying and selling. You can't put love into a contract.

We get along by a symbiotic adjustment of habits and with a minimum of that pale-mauve hostility you often find among women.

More often than not, she acted as if she wanted to protect him, from the image of herself--herself in the past. She liked to keep only the bright side of herself turned towards him. She liked to shine.

friendship was always contingent.

I admired my mother in some ways, although things between us were never easy. She expected too much from me, I felt. She expected me to vindicate her life for her, and the choices she'd made. I didn't want to live my life on her terms. I didn't want to be the model offspring, the incarnation of her ideas. We used to fight about that. I am not your justification for existence, I said to her once.

I wasn't even sure I wanted a man in my life again; by that time I'd exhausted the notion that the answer to a man is another man, and I was out of breath.

Keep your friends close but your enemies closer. Having no friends, I must make do with enemies.

Because they were ready for us, and waiting. The moment of betrayal is the worst, the moment when you know beyond any doubt that you've been betrayed: that some other human being has wished you that much evil.

The stains on the mattress. Like dried flower petals. Not recent. Old love; there's no other kind of love in this room now.

It's lack of love we die from.

Books and characters in books, pictures and elements in pictures—they all have families and ancestors, just like people.

If someone wants to suck your toes, those toes should be worth sucking.

No mother is ever, completely, a child's idea of what a mother should be, and I suppose it works the other way around as well.

Why do we want other people to like us, even if we don't really care about them all that much?

otherwise, one of you, most likely the man, would go wandering off on a trajectory of his own, taking his addictive body with him and leaving you with bad withdrawal, which you could counteract by exercise. If you didn't work it out it was because one of you had the wrong attitude. Everything that went on in your life was thought to be due to some positive or negative power emanating from inside your head.