Quotes About Relationships

He was perfect, was how she'd put it to herself. And then that clear-eyed, calm-faced boy would shine forth from Red's sags and wrinkles, from his crumpled eyelids and hollowed cheeks and the two deep crevices bracketing his mouth and just his general obtuseness, his stubbornness, his infuriating belief that simple cold logic could solve all life's problems, and she would feel unspeakably lucky to have ended up with him.

with your family, if with no one else, you have to keep on trying.

the quality you marry a person for will end up being what you hate them for, most often.

Even the simplest interaction racked him with anxiety. He was always missing cues, it seemed. And yet Mercy loved him. He had never asked her why; he was afraid that if she reflected too deeply, she would realize her mistake. He just kept the thought close to his chest, and polished it and cherished it as he had since the day she had said yes to him: Mercy loves me.

Didn't it often happen, she thought, that aged parents die exactly at the moment when other people (your husband, your adolescent children) have stopped being thrilled to see you coming? But a parent is always thrilled, always dwells so lovingly on your face as you are speaking. One of life's many ironies.

Oh, my. I guess it's true what they say about how you have to skip a generation to appreciate some of your relatives.

Oh, Robin. She's brokenhearted. You remember how it feels." "No, I do not remember. She's fifteen years old. She's going to fall for some new boy before the week is out; you watch." "She says nobody understands her and she wants to die," Mercy told him. Then she asked, "Can I have the rest of your salad?

Thinking back on that conversation now, he began to believe that people could, in fact, be used up—could use each other up, could be of no further help to each other and maybe even do harm to each other. He began to think that who you are when you're with somebody may matter more than whether you love her. (P. 362)

marriages have stages. They have incarnations, almost. You can be in a good marriage and you can be in a bad marriage, and they can both be the same one but just at different times.

Sometimes Willa felt she'd spent half her life apologizing for some man's behavior. More than half her life

Other people showed love by offering compliments; Abby offered pity. It was not an attractive quality, in her children's opinion.

You can never take it for granted that family members will like each other.

Sometimes, she said, it seems to me there's just these certain types of people that come around and around in our lives, know what I mean? Easy types and hard types; we run into them over and over.

that the quality you marry a person for will end up being what you hate them for, most often.

Seems like you are always loving the people that fly away from you, Ben Joe, and flying away from the people that love you.

If we had been any different, would they have loved us?

She seemed to have fallen in love again. In love with her own husband! The convenience of it pleased her—like finding right in her pantry all the fixings she needed for a new recipe.

There's my downfall, son. I mean with anyone, any one of these lady friends, I just can't resist a person I make happy.

Something was wrong with him. Something was wrong with all of her children. They were so frustrating—attractive, likable people, the three of them, but closed off from her in some perverse way that she couldn't quite put her finger on. And

He saw millions of houses, viewed from an airplane, and every couchc in every tiny house was occupied by someone from yet another house. Everyone was shuffled around helter-skelter-Ben Joe on Shelley's couch, Gary on Ben Joe's couch, and God knew who was on Gary's couch.

We could have gone on longing for one another and pretending not to notice forever. This obsession with dignity can ruin your life if you let it.

The question was not death; living things die. It was love. Not that we died, but what we cared wildly, then deeply, for one person out of billions. We bound ourselves to the fickle, changing, and dying as if they were rock.

Once, a great handful of a girl out west told him - I never did love you. […]How mean of her to salve her spit curled conscience by trying to take away their past! In the kitchen he had started to use those very words on Lou - they sprang readily to mind, as wounding words do - but he stopped himself.

I'm here to learn. And what you have taught me is to avoid love as long as possible.