Quotes About Relationships

I want you to know, if you ever read this, there was a time when I would rather have had you by my side than any one of these words; I would rather have had you by my side than all the blue in the world.

Standing / apart from them one wonders / what on earth is a straight woman. / 'The only love I have ever felt / was for children and other women. / Everything else was just lust, pity, self-hatred, / pity, and lust.

The time for blithely asserting that sleeping with whomever you want however you want is going to jam its machinery is long past.

we fuck well because he is a passive top and I am an active bottom. I never said this out loud, but I thought it often.

Two women in a room. One seated, one standing

She will not, she tells herself, be the first to speak. Let him decide what should be said, since he is so skilled with words, since he is so fêted and celebrated for his pretty speeches. She will keep her counsel. He is the one who has caused this problem, this breach in their marriage: He can be the one to address it.

She feels it; he feels it. They know it and they know each other's thoughts and they sense each other's actions and fears. She does not know why this is or where it might lead, but she knows it must remain hidden, and silent as the tongue in his head.

Why is it that twenty-four hours in the company of your family is capable of reducing you to a teenager? Is this retrogression cumulative? Will she continue to lose a decade a day?

In their apartment, he lets her take his hand, lets her lead him from the fire to a chair, lets his eyes lose focus, lets her rub her fingers through his hair, and she can feel him switch from one character to another; she can sense that other, big-house, self melt off him, like wax sliding from a lit candle, revealing the man within.

She moves her comb, her shift, her gown next door. She takes up the bed that was once her aunts'. Nothing is said. She leaves her mother and sister to their grief and moves in above the workshop.

there are the parents, then the sons, then the daughter, then the pigs in the pig-pen and the hens in the henhouse, then the apprentice and then, right at the bottom, the serving maids. Agnes believes her position, as new daughter-in-law, to be ambiguous, somewhere between apprentice and hen. Agnes

It is possible, I think as I sit there on the cold wood of the bandstand bench, to see ailing marriages as brains that have undergone a stroke. Certain connections short-circuit, abilities are lost, cognition suffers, a thousand neural pathways close down forever. Some strokes are massive, seminal, unignorable; others imperceptible. I'm told it's perfectly possible to suffer one and not realize it until much later.

I have a theory,' she says, looking far ahead, at where salt meets sky, 'that marriages end not because of something you did say but because of something you didn't. All you have to do now is work out what it is.

In an odd way, we no longer seemed like a family, just a collection of people living in different rooms.

Peter had been feeling lately that perhaps he and Jenny had come to the end of their story

Iris wonders sometimes how she would explain Alex, if she needed to. How would she begin? Would she say, we grew up together? Would she say, but we're not related by blood? Would she say that in her bag she carries a pebble he gave her more than twenty years ago? And that he doesn't know this?

Mother and Father had said one night, just before my wedding, that her name would not be mentioned again and that they would thank me if I would act accordingly. And I did, act accordingly, that is, although I thought about her a great deal more than they realised. So I pulled out the letters and—

It is in such small acts of kindness that people know they are loved. Which

He thought she was like all four seasons wrapped in one unpredictable day. She could go from sunshine to blizzard, from heat wave to ice storm, from gentle breeze to lightning bolt, all in the blink of an eye. And he had no idea what sort of weather was coming next.

This is a love story. I never knew there were so many kinds of love or that love could make people do so many different things. I never knew there were so many different ways to say goodbye.

It is possible to be in love with you just because of who you are.

She does not love you. Your metaphors thrill her you are her poet. But that's all there's to it. from "She Does Not Love You

Had I known you, I would have possessed you, and had you known me, you would have possessed me. But then you and I would not be.

The only paradise we know through our senses and intuition is that of the beloved, and the only hell, disappointment in love.