Quotes About Relationships

How could I possibly be a better person without her than with her? Later, I thought: but he is just echoing Nietzsche's line about what doesn't kill us making us stronger. And as it happens, I have long considered this epigram particularly specious. There are many things that fail to kill us but weaken us for ever. Look around at those emotionally damaged by mere ordinary life.

I thought—at some level of my being, I actually thought—that I could go back to the beginning and change things. That I could make the blood flow backwards. I had the vanity to imagine—even if I didn't put it more strongly than this—that I could make Veronica like me again, and that it was important to do so.

once, they had their love story. Everyone does. It's the only story.

The times we did, I would be hit by a sense of what I can only call pre-guilt: the expectation that she was going to say or do something that would make me feel properly guilty.

was my closest friend, and continued so for many years. He was the gentlest of us, the most thoughtful, the one who put most trust in others. And—perhaps because of these very qualities—he was the one who had most trouble with girls and, later, women. Was there something about his softness, and his inclination to forgive, which almost provoked bad behaviour in others? I wish I knew the answer to that, not least because of the time I let him down badly. I

You realise how sympathy and antagonism can coexist.

nowadays, in the digital landscape, friends and followers have come to mean different, watered-down things. Many people know one another without knowing them at all. And are happy with that superficiality.

Would you rather love the more, and suffer the more; or love the less and suffer the less?

he thought he probably wouldn't have sex again before he died. Probably. Possibly. Unless. But on balance, he thought not. Sex involved two people. Two persons, first person and second person: you and I, you and me. But nowadays, the raucousness of the first person within him was stilled. It was as if he viewed, and lived, his life in the third person. Which allowed him to assess it more accurately, he believed.

you begin lying to her. Why? Something to do with the need to create some internal space which you could keep intact—and where you could yourself remain intact. And this is how it is for you now. Love and truth—where have they gone? You ask yourself: Is staying with her an act of courage on your part, or an act of cowardice? Perhaps both? Or is it just an inevitability?

they continued under the same roof, with good days and bad weeks, swallowed rage, occasional outbursts and increasing social isolation. All this no longer made him feel interesting; instead, he felt a failure and an outcast.

Op het erf van de boerderij zag je soms de meest onwaarschijnlijke vormen van verbondenheid - de gans verliefd op de ezel, het katje veilig spelend tussen de poten van de vervaarlijke kettinghond. En op het erf van de mensheid bestonden vormen van verbondenheid die al even onwaarschijnlijk, en toch, voor de betrokkenen, nooit absurd waren.

What if Susan, from religious or moral scruple, had discouraged his interest, and taught him nothing more than tactical astuteness when playing mixed doubles? What if Macleod had continued to hold a sexual interest in his wife? None of this might have happened. But given that it had, then if you wanted to attribute fault, you were straight away into prehistory, which now, in two of their three cases, had become inaccessible.

Šeimynin?s laim?s paslapt? sudaro ne jos pilnumas ar bent jau ne gyvenimas kartu su visais jos nariais

Due altre cose ha detto nel corso degli anni: che certe donne non sono affatto misteriose ma vengono rese tali dall'incapacità degli uomini di capirle. da Il senso di una fine

Sex as civic duty? I thought, somehow, this was very Dutch. Also, sort of adorable.

Susan had pointed out that everyone has their love story. Even if it was a fiasco, even if it fizzled out, never got going, had all been in the mind to begin with: that didn't make it any the less real. And it was the only story.

We tend to slot any new relationship we come across into a preexisting category. We see what is general or common about it; whereas the participants see—feel—only what is individual and particular to them.

Nowadays we talk about transactional sex, and recreational sex. No one, back then, had recreational sex. Well, they might have done, but they didn't call it that. Back then, back there, there was love, and there was sex, and there was a commingling of the two, sometimes awkward, sometimes seamless, which sometimes worked out, and sometimes didn't.

when I see pairs of young lovers, vertically entwined on street corners, or horizontally entwined on a blanket in the park, the main feeling it arouses in me is a kind of protectiveness. No, not pity: protectiveness. Not that they would want my protection. And yet—and this is curious—the more bravado they show in their behaviour, the stronger my response. I want to protect them from what the world is probably going to do to them, and from what they will probably do to one another.

But he knew that she used to read his diary. So he would deliberately write into it, for a date a few weeks ahead, 'Suicide'. Or, sometimes, 'Marriage

I know already that she and her husband have separate beds, indeed separate rooms, and their marriage has been unconsummated—or rather, sex-free—for almost twenty years; but I haven't pressed her for reasons or particulars.

But then lovers always assume that people are on their side.

But if you think these are the only categories of sex that exist, you find you are mistaken. Because there is a category which you had not known to exist, something which isn't, as you might have guessed had you heard about it before, merely a subcategory of bad sex; and that is sad sex. Sad sex is the saddest sex of all.