Quotes About Relationships

This was the affair which had ended quietly and decently, without fuss or scenes or hysteria. When you were nineteen, and it was the first time you had been let down, you did not make scenes. You felt as if your back was broken, as if you would never move again. But you did not make a scene. That started later on, when the same thing had happened five or six times over, and you were supposed to be getting used to it.

C'est que la sincérité est effrayante; j'entends non pas celle qui dit aux autres leurs vérité, mais celle qui s'applique à nos propres pensées. Auprès des êtres qui nous touchent de près, nos aveux sont irréparables; nous sommes-nous découvertes en face d'eux, il faut que nous demeurions à nu le reste de nos jours, il n'y a plus d'abri ni d'ombre

I don't like answering private questions. The answers are often ambiguous and can be interpreted in different ways. Even when the other person is close to you.

Of course, every new caress would only have taken us closer to the inevitable: break-ups, tears, disillusionment, sadness, anguish, loathing. It wouldn't have made the slightest difference to the mess that human beings make of this world.

What is more humiliating than finding the object of your love unworthy?

I think now that being free is not being powerful or rich or well regarded or without obligation but being able to love. To love someone else enough to forget about yourself even for one moment is to be free.

It may be that you are settled in another place it may be that you are happy but the one who took your heart wields final power.

What a strange world this is when you can have as much sex as you like but love is taboo.

I like being on my own better than I like anything else, but I can't give up love. Maybe it's the tension between longing and aloneness that I need. My own funicular railway, holding in balance the two things most likely to destroy me.

You never give away your heart; you lend it from time to time. If it were not so how could we take it back without asking?

This is not a love story, but love is in it. That is, love is just outside it, looking for a way to break in.

You said, 'I love you.' Why is it that the most unoriginal thing we can say to one another is still the thing we long to hear?

As far as I was concerned men were something you had around the place, not particularly interesting, but quite harmless. I had never shown the slightest feeling for them, and apart from my never wearing a skirt, saw nothing else in common between us.

I miss God. I miss the company of someone utterly loyal. I still don't think of God as my betrayer. The servants of God, yes, but servants by their very nature betray. I miss God who was my friend. I don't even know if God exists, but I do know that if God is your emotional role model, very few human relationships will match up to it.

She had made him possible. In that sense she was his god. Like God, she was neglected.

When I say 'I will be true to you' I am drawing a quiet space beyond the reach of other desires. No one can legislate love; it cannot be given orders or cajoled into service. Love belongs to itself, deaf to pleading and unmoved by violence. Love is not something you can negotiate. Love is the one thing stronger than desire and the only proper reason to resist temptation.

Going back after a long time will make you mad, because the people you left behind do not like to think of you changed, will treat you as they always did, accuse you of being indifferent, when you are only different.

I keep telling this story - different people, different places, different times - but always you, always me, always this story, because a story is a tight rope between two worlds.

The truth is that you can divide your heart in all sorts of interesting ways - a little here, a little there, most banked at home, some of it coined out for a flutter. But love cleaves through the mind's mathematics. Love's lengthways splits the heart in two - the heart where you are, the heart where you want to be. How will you heal your heart when love has split it in two?

We live in a world of buy it or leave it. Love does not signify.

I love badly. That is too little or too much. I throw myself over an unsuitable cliff, only to reel back in horror from a simple view out the window.

I love you. You've loved other people but you still left them. It's not that simple. I don't want to be another scalp on your pole.

I was never bored except in the company of others.

We heal up through being loved, and through loving others. We don't heal by forming a secret society of one - by assessing about the only other 'one' we might admit, and being doomed to disappointment.