Quotes About Relationships

It's great to find that one special person you want to annoy for the rest of your life.

I know from experience that those least capable of truly assessing any marriage are the children who come out of it. We style them as we need them, to excuse our faults, to insulate ourselves from our own expendability or indispensability.

As I looked at [my future husband] I realized that, while I would never be my mother nor have her life, the lesson she had left was that it was possible to love and care for a man and still have at your core a strength so great that you never even needed to put it on display.

For those of us who suspect all the mysteries of life are contained in the microcosm of the family, that personal relationships prefigure all else, the work of Jane Austen is the Rosetta stone of literature.

What I expect from my male friends is that they are polite and clean. What I expect from my female friends is unconditional love, the ability to finish my sentences for me when I am sobbing, a complete and total willingness to pour their hearts out to me, and the ability to tell me why the meat thermometer isn't supposed to touch the bone.

Nearly everyone I meet expresses deep sympathy about the fact that I have never married. Sometimes I wonder why.

All the things we don't say, all the words we swallow, and it makes nothing but trouble.

Anyone familiar with the love affairs between men and women could have told them that theirs would soon be over.

For so long I'd thought about myself as a girl who'd walked away from her mother's life that it would be a long time before I would start to think about the other part of the bargain, how easily she'd let me go.

Get a life in which you are not alone. Find people you love, and who love you. And remember that love is not leisure, it is work. Each time I look at my diploma, I remember that I am still a student, still learning every day how to be human.

Maybe that was true of marriage everywhere. Between times, in their own living rooms, the men seemed to be resting for the next round of pontificating and so saved their strength by staying silent.

It's so easy to be wrong about the things you're close to. I know that now. I learned that then.

This is what it is like to be married: conversations in which no one actually speaks.

He sold his watch to buy her combs, and she sold her hair to buy a watch chain.

She thought that people sought marriage because it meant they could put aside the mascara, the bravado, the good clothes, the company manners, and be themselves, whatever that was, not try so hard. But what that seemed to mean was that they didn't try at all. 

No one, not even my father, not even my children, has ever loved me the way that man loved me, that's for sure. There's something satisfying in being loved that hard, maybe more than loving that hard yourself.

Don't ever forget what a friend once wrote to Senator Paul Tsongas when the senator had decided not to run for reelection because he'd been diagnosed with cancer: "No man ever said on his deathbed I wish I had spent more time at the office.

There are really only two commandments of Nanaville: love the grandchildren, and hold your tongue.

The truth was that their marriages were like balloons: some went suddenly pop, but more often than not the air slowly leaked out until it was a sad, wrinkled little thing with no life to it anymore.

But the truth is I didn't really think she had it in her. And being so wrong about her makes me wonder now how often I am utterly wrong about myself. And how wrong she might have been about her mother, how wrong he might have been about his father, how much of family life is a vast web of misunderstandings, a tinted and touched-up family portrait, an accurate representation of fact that leaves out only the essential truth.

The women I know who are happiest today are the ones who have close female friends. Maybe that's true of men, too, but essentially it's different.

It is interesting to discover how many people are disconcerted not because their parents are bad grandparents but because they are better grandparents than they were mothers and fathers.

Peter was easing up on seventy, an age when a man might be forgiven follicular failure. But Rebecca forgave him nothing. She told herself that this was not because he

And, above all, becoming a grandparent offers a chance to love in a different way, a love without the thorny crown of self-interest. I wish I could say I loved my children that way, but it wouldn't be true, and it wouldn't be true of anyone I know, either.