Quotes About Relationships

It is through our anger and hatred that we transform people into enemies.

Anger is an uncivil attempt to make another feel guilty or a cruel way of trying to correct them.

Love in this world doesn't come out of thin air. It is not something thought up. Like ourselves, it grows out of the ground. It has a body and a place.

No relationship can continue very long at its highest emotional pitch. But fidelity prepares us for the return of these moments

And now in my tenderness of remembering it all again, I think I am still there with him too. I am there with all the others, most of them gone but some who are still here, who gave me love and called forth love from me. When I number them over, I am surprised how many there are. And so I have to say that another of the golden threads is gratitude. I was grateful because I knew, even in my fear and grief, that my life had been filled with gifts.

Our human and earthly limits, properly understood, are not confinements but rather inducements to formal elaboration and elegance, to fullness of relationship and meaning.

Even old, your husband is the young man you remember now. Even dead, he is the man you remember, not as he was but as he is, alive still in your love. Death is a sort of lens, though I used to think of it as a wall or a shut door. It changes things and makes them clear. Maybe it is the truest way of knowing this dream, this brief and timeless life.

The survivors of the old life come to pay their respects. The neighbors, old and young, come. People who have moved away, maybe a long time ago, come back. You see people you knew when you were young and now don't recognize, people who may never come back again, people you may never see again. We feel the old fabric torn, pulling apart, and we know how much we have loved each other.

But this is not the story of a life. It is the story of lives, knit together, overlapping in succession, rising again from grave after grave.

Or in the latter part of a late-winter Saturday afternoon, his mind turning (as he would not say, but as we knew) to the prospect of a visit to his might-as-well-be wife, Kate Helen Branch, he would stand up and stretch. "Well, boys, I reckon I better get on home and shine, shave, clean up, and sandpaper my tool.

Love in this world doesn't come out of thin air. It is not something thought up. Like ourselves, it grows out of the ground. It has a body and a place.

Mr. Feltner—who would not be "Mat" to me for a long time—turned to me and stuck out his hand. "Mr. Crow, I'm Mat Feltner. I'm glad to know you. I knew your mother's people. I remember the Daggets very well." There was nothing glancing or sidling about the way he looked at you. He looked right through your eyes, right into you, as a man looks at you who is willing for you to look right into him.

Cecelia, as with every look and gesture she let us know, was entirely at ease only in the company of her equals—a company that included, besides herself, only her sister. And of course Cecelia held some secret doubts about herself; you can't dislike nearly everybody and be quite certain that you have exempted yourself.

But if nobody can ever quite be nothing to you in Port William, then everybody finally has got to be something to you.

If Cecelia was my enemy, that was because (as I now believe) she saw me as her enemy. As the town's barber, as the host of that mostly masculine enclosure, the barbershop, and as the town's permanent bachelor, a piece of raw material permanently raw, forever to be unimproved by a woman of her discriminating powers, I must have seemed to her to be the very gatekeeper of that unregulated other world that Roy eased away into whenever he eased away.

No matter what laws or governments say, men can only know and come to care for one another by meeting face to face, arduously, and by the willing loss of comfort.

The love he bore to me was his own, but also it was a love that had been borne to him, by people he knew, people I now knew, people he loved. That, I think, is what put tears in his eyes when he looked at me. He must have wondered if I would love those people too. Well, as it turned out, I did. And I would know them as he had never known them, for longer than he knew them. I knew them old, in their final years and days. I know them dead.

Whereas his father only ruled him, Aunt Molly owned him outright, at least when he was in the house where she could get at him.

To have the two of them there, at opposite corners of the table, with their long endurance in their faces, and their present affection and pleasure, was a blessing of another kind.

It is not that we want to deceive... but with other people we cannot help our human condition of obscurity. We are not wholly there for them, nor they for us. We are simply not able to be so. Nor should we be. No human occasion calls for our total presence, even were it within our power to offer it.

Here you seem to have won your aunt's affection; I think I served you well there, for I believe she would do anything to spite me.

As far as the Wagners were concerned, Kaye would just disappear. Within a month she would become another statistic, one of thousands of teenagers who walk out on their families every year.

Why are old lovers able to become friends? Two reasons. They never truly loved each other, or they love each other still.

I never think anyone in love is foolish. We do the best we can.