Quotes About Relationships

We need a person whom we can make our little god on this earth, as the old Kgatla saying had it. Whether it was a spouse, or a child, or a parent, or anybody else for that matter, there must be somebody who gives our lives purpose.

has it ever occurred to people that love at first sight might be the rule rather than the exception? How many people fall in love gradually rather than on the first occasion they meet the other person?

For each of us, she thought, there is out completeness in another. Whether we find it, or it finds us, or it eludes all finding is a matter of moral luck.

It was easy, terribly easy, to become with time a middle-aged spinster with a sharp tongue. She would have to guard against this.

The new lover, of a few weeks standing, may seem more precious than friends of decades.

Do you know that dogs are descendants of wolves—all dogs, even those ridiculous little dogs you see in the parks. Wolves. Imagine how embarrassed a real wolf would be if he knew that he was cousin to a shih-tzu? Of course, we shouldn't think animals have feelings like us—I don't think they can be embarrassed, do you? My daughter's cat is incapable of feeling anything very much, I can tell you—and certainly not embarrassment...

I suppose that's the way affairs come to an end. Somebody grabs a fork and stabs the other in the hand. And that's it

Emma was happy. She realized that happiness is something that springs from the generous treatment of others, and that until one makes that connection, happiness may prove elusive.

You can go through life and make new friends every year—every month practically—but there was never any substitute for those friendships of childhood that survive into adult years. Those are the ones in which we are bound to one another with hoops of steel.

In bed that night, in the darkness, with the illuminated dial of her alarm clock glowing from the bedside table, she asked herself whether one could force oneself to like somebody, or whether one could merely create the conditions for affection to come into existence and hope that it did, spontaneously.

Late people do not altogether leave us, she thought; they are still with us in memories such as that, wherever we are, no matter what time of day it was or how we were feeling, they were there, still shining the light of their love upon us.

People did not spend enough time sitting and talking, she thought, and it was important that sitting and talking time be preserved.

Love] may bring surprise, joy, despair and, occasionally, perfect happiness.

But we cannot always choose whose lives will become entangled with our own; these things happen to us, come to us uninvited, and Mma Ramotswe understood that well.

She had never been able to tolerate dishonesty, which she thought threatened the very heart of relationships between people. If you could not count on other people to mean what they said, or to do what they said they would do, then life could become utterly unpredictable. The fact that we could trust one another made it possible to undertake the simple tasks of life.

And she, Isabel, had gone along with this and all the time what was happening was she was becoming increasingly possessive of Jamie without ever having to acknowledge it. Now there was another woman, a girl really, and there was an obvious intimacy between them, which would exclude her as it would have to do, and that would be the end of everything.

That was the way the world was; it was composed of a few almost perfect people (ourselves); then there were a good many people who generally did their best but were not all that perfect (our friends and colleagues); and finally, there were a few rather nasty ones (our enemies and opponents).

She meant it, and as she spoke, she thought how strange it was that we so very rarely said complimentary things to our friends, and how easy it was to do so, and how it made the world seem a less harsh place.

It's easy to be foolish... It's dead simple, really. All you have to be is human and to allow yourself to do the human things, like fall in love with somebody when you know that there's no point and when you know, too, that it's just going to make you unhappy.

Neighbours are given to us on the same basis as we are given our families. There is no element of choice involved - none at all.

we must love those with whom we live and work, and love them for all their failings, manifest and manifold though they be.

It was reasonable enough, of course, for people to wish to speak to a man, if that is what they wanted, but that did not mean that a man would be better.

The unmerited dislike of another made one think less of oneself. We are enlarged by the love of others; we are diminished by their dislike.

every wife [..] had a mental list of things that her husband should do but realistically never would do.