Quotes About Relationships

SAYING AND CONCEALING For I would prefer to have these attacks and please you, rather than displease you and not have them. —Marcel Proust in a letter to his mother

They are able to listen, to identify with others; they are outgoing, concerned, and usually less prone to illusions than the figures we see them encountering. As they have experienced honesty and unconditional affection in their early years, they are better able to cope with their lives than those who are fed on illusions and later have to fight to find out the truth about themselves, like Claudia, Anika, Helga, or Lilka.

People who were loved in childhood will love their parents in return. There is no need of a commandment to tell them to do so. Obeying a commandment can never be the basis for love.

With the infallibility of a sleepwalker, she will seek out those who, like her parents (though for different reasons), certainly cannot understand her. Because of her blindness caused by repression, she will try to make herself understandable to precisely these people—trying to make possible what cannot be.

Feelings of helplessness were mingled with long-dammed-up rage against the mother who had not been available to him when he needed her the most. As a result of becoming aware of these feelings, Peter could rid himself of a symptom that had tormented him for a long time; its point was now easy to understand. His relationships to women changed as his compulsion first to conquer and then to desert them disappeared.

These people have all developed the art of not experiencing feelings, for a child can experience her feelings only when there is somebody there who accepts her fully, understands her, and supports her.

I felt in him what women feel in men, something so tender, swollen, tyrannical, absurd; I would never take the consequences of interfering with it.

And at the end of his letter one terrible sentence. 'If I loved you I would have written differently.

Love dies all the time, or at any rate it becomes distracted, overlaid--it might as well be dead.

Her attitude towards sex is very comforting to those of her friends who get into terrible states of passion and jealousy, and feel cut loose from their moorings. She seems to regard sex as a wholesome, slightly silly indulgence, like dancing and nice dinners--something that shouldn't interfere with people's being kind and cheerful to each other.

For what was living with a man if it wasn't living inside his insanity?

When I told him on the phone that after all you and I would not be getting married, he said Oh-oh. Do you think you'll ever manage to get another one? If I'd objected to his saying that he would naturally have said it was a joke. And it was a joke. I have not managed to get another one but perhaps have not been in the best condition to try.

Sick people grew to resent well people, and sometimes that was true of husbands and wives, or even of mothers and their children. Both

Half my concern in love became how to disguise love, to make it harmless and merry.

He takes up too much room, on the divan and in one's mind. It is simply impossible for me, in his presence, think of anything but him.

You would think that Rosemary would understand that. She should have understood what such a choice said - that Karin was not to be made happy, amends were not possible, forgiveness was out of the question.

Odd choices were simply easier for men, most of whom would find women glad to marry them. Not so the other way around.

Love is not for the undepilated.

People doing something that seems to them natural and necessary. At least, one of them is doing what seems natural and necessary, and the other believes that the important thing is for that person to be free, to go ahead. They understand that other people might not think so. They do not care.

In all my years in the town, I encountered no one who was divorced, and so it may be taken for granted that there were other couples living separate lives in one house, other men and women who had accepted the fact that there were differences never to be mended, a word or an act never to be forgiven, a barrier never to be washed away.

I did not understand why Alfrida looked at him with such a fiercely encouraging smile. All of my experience of a woman with men, of a woman listening to her man, hoping and hoping that he will establish himself as somebody she can reasonably be proud of, was in the future.

I had once heard somebody say, at a party, that one of the nice things about marriage was that you could have real affairs – an affair before marriage could always turn out to be nothing but courtship.

Forgiveness in families is a mystery to me, how it comes or how it lasts.

People doing something that seems to them natural and necessary. At least, one of them is doing what seems natural and necessary, and the other believes that the important thing is for that person to be free, to go ahead. They understand that other people