Quotes About Relationships

I have decided to leave Clea's last letter un-answered. I no longer wish to coerce anyone, to make promises, to think of life in terms of compacts, resolutions, covenants. It will be up to Clea to interpret my silence according to her own needs and desires, to come to me if she has need or not, as the case may be. Does not everything depend on our interpretation of the silence around us?

There are only three things to be done with a woman' said Clea once. 'You can love her, suffer for her, or turn her into literature.

There is nothing stranger than to love somebody who is mad, or who is intermittently so. The weight, the strain, the anxiety is a heavy load to bear – if only because among these confusional states and hysterias loom dreadful probabilities like suicide or murder. It shakes one's hold also on one's own grasp of reality; one realises how precariously we manage

Shyness has laws: you can only give yourself, tragically, to those who least understand.

The richest love is that which submits to the arbitration of time. Lawrence Durrell in Clea, book three of the epic Alexandria Quartet - which I am reading for the third time since my early 20s...relishing its superb prose and enigmatic insights into the nature of love.

One always falls in love with the love-choice of the person one loves.

One learns nothing from those who return our love.

How difficult it is to analyse these relationships which lie under the mere skin of our actions; for loving is only a sort of skin-language, sex a terminology merely.

First the young, like vines, climb up the dull supports of their elders who feel their fingers on them, soft and tender; then the old climb down the lovely supporting bodies of the young into their proper deaths.

Loving is so much truer when sympathy, not desire, makes the match; for it leaves no wounds.

A city becomes a world when one loves its inhabitants.

If I let myself love you, I won't throw myself in front of her. I'll throw myself in front of you.

I know what it's like to have someone coming home who looks at you not in the way they used to in the old days, and I've seen my own face contorted with sadness and rage in the mirror.

A sad thing in life is that sometimes you meet someone who means a lot to you, only to find out in the end it was never bound to be, and you just have to let go.

Yet but three come one more. Two of both kinds make up four. Ere she comes curst and sad. Cupid is a knavish lad. Thus to make poor females mad.

There is no such thing as a lovers' oath.

I wonder if I could take back every 'I love you' ever said to you, would I do it?

Sad thing is, you can still love someone and be wrong for them.

Oh, I wouldn't say Love always makes you happy. Sometimes it makes you incredibly sad.

Sad people dislike the happy, and the happy the sad; the quick thinking the sedate, and the careless the busy and industrious.

You don't have to be sad to miss someone and wish they were still in your life.

I survive at the edge of friends circles.

Christmas it seems to me is a necessary festival; we require a season when we can regret all the flaws in our human relationships: it is the feast of failure, sad but consoling.

The most difficult aspect of moving on is accepting that the other person already did.