Quotes About Relationships

Why try to slot fractured families into neat little boxes in this day and age?

It seemed to her that everyone had too much self-protective pride to truly strip down to their souls in front of their long-term partners. It was easier to pretend there was nothing more to know, to fall into an easygoing companionship.

Erika shrugged. The movement of her shoulders felt unnatural. She wasn't going to tell him what she'd overheard. It would only upset him. And it shamed her. She didn't want Oliver to know that her closest friend didn't really care for her.

The middle-aged woman she would have become, so sure of herself and her place in the world, bossy and loving, condescending and impatient with her dear old mum,

It sometimes seemed so peculiar and wrong to her that you could be that intimate with someone, to go to sleep with him and wake up with him, to do really quite extraordinarily personal things together on a regular basis, and then, suddenly, you don't even know his telephone number, or where he's living or working, or what he did today or last week or last year.

everyone had too much self-protective pride to truly strip down to their souls in front of their long-term partners.

It is so strange that you can end up having such polite, awkward conversations with somebody with whom you once shared such intimate moments.

Jimmy is looking adoringly down at Connie's dark head. What would it have been like to have a man love you like that? Would it have changed something fundamental in your psyche to wake up each morning knowing that you were loved, that someone wanted to touch your body even when it got all old and wrinkly?

Every marriage, every family, has its mysteries.

How in the world had Bonnie managed to get Madeline's ex-husband out of bed at that time of morning to go to work in a homeless shelter? Nathan wouldn't get up before eight a.m. in the ten years they'd been together. Bonnie must give him organic blow jobs. "Abigail

Marriage was a form of insanity; love hovering permanently on the edge of aggravation. Connor would be asleep now, in his neat apartment smelling of garlic and laundry

Such was the paradoxical nature of sibling relationships: they could tease her for the sappiness and spelling of her suicide notes while being terrified she'd write new ones.

She'd learned that with her daughters. Don't say a word. Don't ask a question. Give them enough time and they'll finally tell you what's on their minds. It was like fishing. It took silence and patience. (Or so she'd heard. Cecilia would rather hammer nails into her forehead than go fishing.) Silence didn't come naturally to her. Cecilia was a talker.

Great. Now Renata would have even more reason to dislike her. Jane would have an enemy. The last time she had had anything close to an enemy, she was in primary school herself. It had never crossed her mind that sending your child to school would be like going back to school yourself.

The time will come, my darling, we'll get frail and sick and stubborn and your stomach will twist with love and terror each time we call, but plenty of time, don't get ahead of yourself, we're not there yet.

When you divorce someone, you divorce the whole family.

Marriage to Perry meant she was always ready to justify her actions, constantly monitoring what she'd just said or done, while simultaneously feeling defensive about the defensiveness, her thoughts and feelings twisting into impenetrable knots, so that sometimes, like right now, sitting in a room with normal people, all the things she couldn't say rose in her throat and for a moment she couldn't breathe.

It starts out small. You put up with little things in a relationship and then … the little things gradually get bigger.

I'll tell you something, something important. Love is a decision. Not a feeling.

Every time she fell out of love with him, he saw it happen and waited it out. He never stopped loving her, even those times when he felt deeply hurt and betrayed by her, even in that bad year when they talked about separating, he'd just gone along with it, waiting for her to come back to him, thanking God and his dad up above each time she did.

Conversations with women about work could be so fraught.

It was almost as though something interesting and unusual had happened to him and he'd forgotten to tell Cat about it until now.

It was stupid to feel hurt that he had not told her he was going out, because this was the way they were living right now, but still her heart felt newly hurt, as tender and soft as bruised fruit.

A woman wants to be adored but she doesn't want reverence. Thomas