Quotes About Relationships

I can't wait for my little sisters to start dating, because it will really be fun to pick on their boyfriends.

I mean that it's all right to go to bed with an asshole but don't ever have a baby with one.

Love affairs that start in blood tend to end up in blood.

I had a girlfriend once. All we ever talked about was our relationship. That's what we did instead of having one.

Women can be kind of a blood sport.

families from remote stations

The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances: if there is any reaction, both are transformed. —CARL JUNG

The trouble with people is they don't understand people.

He told himself she wasn't really such a bad person, she was just a pest, she was sticky, there was something misplaced in her make-up, something that kept her from fading clear of people when they wanted to be in the clear.

He craved Mildred's body and he couldn't do without it, and that was the one and only reason he went on living with her.

One might ask, how could that most basic element of all human freedoms, the freedom to make promises and commitments and thus build relationships, be turned into its very opposite: into peonage, serfdom or permanent slavery? It happens, we'd suggest, precisely when promises become impersonal, transferable – in a nutshell, bureaucratized.

Bureaucracies, I've suggested, are not themselves forms of stupidity so much as they are ways of organizing stupidity--of managing relationships that are already characterized by extremely unequal structures of imagination, which exist because of the existence of structural violence.

The problem is, the moment one starts framing things in terms of debt, people will inevitably start asking who really owes what to whom.

Always owe somebody something, then he will be forever praying God to grant you a good, long and blessed life. Fearing to lose what you owe him, he will always be saying good things about you in every sort of company; he will be constantly acquiring new lenders for you, so that you can borrow to pay him back, filling his ditch with other men's spoil.

Or, to put it in a slightly different way: there is always a fundamental distinction between the way one relates to friends, family, neighbourhood, people and places that we actually know directly, and the way one relates to empires, nations and metropolises, phenomena that exist largely, or at least most of the time, in our heads.

The English word "free," for instance, is derived from a German root meaning "friend," since to be free meant to be able to make friends, to keep promises, to live within a community of equals.

What social forms would still exist, even among people who had no recognizable form of law or government? Would marriage exist? What forms might it take? Would Natural Man tend to be naturally gregarious, or would people tend to avoid one another? Was there such a thing as natural religion?

Even the most extreme individualists only become individuals through the care and support of their fellows;

So what is slavery? I've already begun to suggest an answer in the last chapter. Slavery is the ultimate form of being ripped from one's context, and thus from all social relationships that make one a human being. Another way to put this is that the slave is, in a very real sense, dead.

we now know that placing prisoners in solitary confinement for more than six months at a stretch inevitably results in physically observable forms of brain damage. Human beings are not just social animals; they are so intrinsically social that if they are cut off from relations with other humans, they begin to decay physically.

We are all communists with our closest friends, and feudal lords when dealing with small children. It is very hard to imagine a society where this would not be true.

How is it that moral obligations between people come to be thought of as debts and as a result, end up justifying behavior that would otherwise seem utterly immoral?

This is why I developed the concept of human economies: ones in which what is considered really important about human beings is the fact that they are each a unique nexus of relations with others—therefore, that no one could ever be considered exactly equivalent to anything or anyone else.

it is only by the threat of sticks, ropes, spears, and guns that one can tear people out of those endlessly complicated webs of relationship with others (sisters, friends, rivals Ã¢â'¬Â¦) that render them unique, and thus reduce them to something that can be traded.