Quotes About Relationships

I never showed up in her dreams, I am certain, as people we keep in our memories rarely have a place for us in theirs.

But whose problem is it when you make people talk about you?" "Theirs.

They were lonely and sad people, all three of them, and they would not make one another less sad, but they could, with great care, make a world that would accommodate their loneliness.

The happiness of love is a shooting meteor; the pain of love is the darkness following.

small talk is for neighbors and families and maybe, in your case, coworkers. You don't waste your life having small talk with strangers.

Mrs. Pang was once a nanny for me, and she spoils me the way I imagined kindhearted women would spoil an orphan, loving me for whom I am, exactly the opposite of my mother, whose love I have to earn with great effort and with little success.

To say we know a person is to write that person off. This is at times life's necessity. We run out of time or patience or curiosity; or we depart, willingly or not, from the situation that makes investigation possible and necessary. A person written off may become a character - depending on the charity of memory.

Childhood companionship is forced upon the children (...) Childhood friendship, though it has to meet the same geographical and temporal prerequisites, is something rarer: a child does not seek to bond with another child. The bond, defying knowledge and understanding, either is there, or is not; once a bond comes into existence, no child knows how to break from it until the setting is changed.

You cannot cut an apple with an apple. I have interrupted that living to write: the story of a faux-prodigy, which is the real story of Fabienne and Agnes, as real as on that day when we were in th graveyard, wanting, and unable, to kill each other; wanting, and unable, to save each other.

There's a reason for every relationship, that's what the saying means. Husband and wife, parents and children, friends and enemies, strangers you bump into in the street. It takes three thousand years of prayers to place your head side by side with your loved one's on the pillow. For father and daughter? A thousand years, maybe. People don't end up randomly as father and daughter, that's for sure.

The moment you admit someone into your heart you make yourself a fool,

Only later, when I met more girls, when I got to know my nieces and nephews, did I understand that Fabienne and I shared something not often available to children (or adults, for that matter). Neither of us felt intense love toward our parents, or intense resentment. And the world was made of people who were not that different from our parents, so it was only natural that neither of us felt intense love or intense resentment toward anyone. We had each other, and for a long time that was enough.

who can shorten the distance between two people so they can say with confidence that they have reached each other?

It was not about keeping a man; it was a lesson on how not to become an ugly woman.

The younger sweepers in the department joked behind Shaokang's back that he loved the brooms as his own children, but Mrs. Hua saw nothing wrong in that and knew that the joke would come only from young people who understood little of parenthood.

Who can say to love doesn't also mean to disappoint and to deceive? I said.

I never showed up in her dreams, I am certain, as people we kep in our memories rarely have a place for us in theirs.

Most men are undertakers of their women's dreams. And, of course, most women are undertakers of their men's dreams, too.

If a person is not living for others, it does not mean he knows how to live for himself. One prefers anyone - a mother, a lover, a friend - who knows how to live for herself. Such knowledge is not selfishness.

How do I measure Fabienne's presence in my life—by the years we were together, or by the years we have been apart, her shadow elongating as time goes by, always touching me?

and left. When the three children died in the same year she remained indifferent to Nikolai's loss. Worse than enduring a tyrannical parent is to be the favored child.

Childhood companionship is forced upon the children (...) Childhood friendship, though is has ti meet the same geographical and temporal prerequisites, is something rarer: a child does not seek to bond with another child. The bond, defying knowledge and understanding, either is there, or is not; once a bond comes into existence, no child knows how to break from it until the setting is changed.

Money isn't always the best motivator. If you leave a $50 check after dinner with friends, you don't increase the probability of being invited back.

Always go to other people's funerals, otherwise they won't come to yours.