Quotes About Relationships

He hated being dumped, even though he himself had manoeuvred the event into place.

Roz is crying again. What she's mourning is her own good will. She tried so hard, she tried so hard to be kind and nurturing, to do the best thing. But Tony and the twins were right: no matter what you do, somebody always gets boiled.

Messy love is better than none. I guess. I'm no authority on sane living.

Besides, who would think of marrying a mothball? A question my mother put to me often, later, in other forms.

I was to be Martha, keeping busy with household chores in the background; she was to be Mary, laying pure devotion at Alex's feet. (Which does a man prefer? Bacon and eggs, or worship? Sometimes one, sometimes the other, depending how hungry he is.)

but love was undependable, it came and then it went; so it was good to have a money value, because then at least those who wanted to make a profit from you made sure you were fed enough and not damaged by too much. Also there were many who had neither love nor money value and having one of these things was better than having nothing.

We would lie in those afternoon beds, afterwards, hands on each other, talking it over. Possible, impossible. What could be done? We thought we had such problems. How were we to know we were happy?

A man is just a woman's strategy for making other women. Not

he was like smog: there were always some of his molecules in the air.

But if Crake wanted her to stay longer on any given night, do it again maybe, she'd make some excuse—jet lag, a headache, something plausible. Her inventions were seamless, she was the best poker-faced liar in the world, so there would be a kiss goodbye for stupid Crake, a smile, a wave, a closed door, and the next minute there she would be, with Jimmy.

your kiss no longer literature but fine print, a set of instructions.

I'm training to be an Aunt," I said. "I'm not really supposed to like anyone.

What fabrications they are, mothers. Scarecrows, wax dolls for us to stick pins into crude diagrams. We deny them an existence of their own, we make them to suit ourselves - our own hungers, our own wishes, our own deficiencies. Now that I've been one myself, I know.

Sometimes there would be couples, arm in arm—laughing, happy, amorous. Victims of an enormous fraud, and at the same time its perpetrators, or so I felt.

Love was its own transparent bubble-dome: you could see the two inside it, but you couldn't get in there yourself. That

The more difficult it was to love the particular man beside us, the more we believed in Love, abstract and total. We were waiting, always, for the incarnation. That word, made flesh. And sometimes it happened, for a time. That kind of love comes and goes and is hard to remember afterwards, like pain. You would look at the man one day and you would think, I loved you, and the tense would be past

at that time men and women tried each other on, casually, like suits, rejecting whatever did not fit.

He loved her so much when he made her unhappy, or else when she made him unhappy: at these moments he scarcely knew which was which.

Nothing is ever settled," says Jocelyn. "Every day is different. Isn't it better to do something because you've decided to? Rather than because you have to?" "No, it isn't," says Charmaine. "Love isn't like that. With love, you can't stop yourself." She wants the helplessness, she wants…

Now here's a good one: you're lying on your deathbed. You have one hour to live. Who is it, exactly, you have needed all these years to forgive?

Expand your world. (Stories about wizards and spells) are very frequently about power relationships...

You can fall in love with anybody — a fool, a criminal, a nothing. There are no good rules.

Hungry, and also sad. Maybe sadness was a kind of hunger, she thought. Maybe the two went together.

I'm ashamed of my own reluctance, my lack of desire; but the truth is that I would be terrified to get into bed with a woman. Women collect grievances, hold grudges and change shape. They pass hard, legitimate judgements, unlike the purblind guesses of men, fogged with romanticism and ignorance and bias and wish. I can understand why men are afraid of them, as they are frequently accused of being.