Quotes About Relationships

The relatives didn't feel slighted—they had a limited interest in people like Roy who had just married into the family, and not even contributed any children to it, and who were not like themselves. They were large, expansive, talkative. He was short, compact, quiet.

These relatives of hers, the Boles and the Jetters and the Pooles, used to be around the house a lot, or else Lea wanted to be at one of their houses. It was a clan that didn't always enjoy one another's company but who made sure they got plenty of it.

For some reason he thinks of Diane in her unbecoming red ski jacket and decides that her life is her life, there is not much use worrying about it. And he thinks of his wife, pretending to laugh at the television. Her quietness.

She thought back to what he had said. /I could make you very happy./ It was something men said then, when they were trying to persuade you, and that was what they meant. It seemed rash and sweeping to her, dazzling but *presumptuous*. She had to try to see herself, then, as somebody who could be /made happy/. The whole worrying, striving, complicated bundle of her -- was that something that could just be picked up and /made happy/?

They were a pair of people with no middle ground, nothing between polite formalities and an engulfing intimacy

Y Doree se preguntó por qué tenía que importarle lo que Maggie pensara. Maggie era una extraña, ni siquiera se sentía a gusto con ella. Fue Lloyd quien lo dijo, y tenía razón.

That was the kind of lie I hope to never have to tell again, the contempt I hoped never to have to show, about the things that really mattered to me. And in order to do that, I would pretty well have to steer clear of people I used to know.

any store or restaurant or office that he went into. Nor was she married to any of the men he knew in the Elks or the Oddfellows or the Lions Club or the Legion. A

Men had fallen in love with Averill before. Twice she had promised to marry them, then had had to get out of it. She had slept with the ones she was engaged to, and with two or three others. Actually, four others. She had had one abortion. She was not frigid - she did not think so - but there was something about her participation in sex that was polite and appalled, and it was always a relief when they let go of her.

Sex meant nothing to him, or at any rate it did not mean what it meant (had meant) to her...

Lovers. Not a soft word, as people thought, but cruel and tearing.

There's the intelligent sort of love that makes an intelligent choice. That's the kind you're supposed to get married on. Then there's the kind that's anything but intelligent, that's like a possession. And that's the one everybody really values." (Hard-Luck Stories)

Greta was hoping that he wasn't one of those adults who make friends with children mostly to test their own charms, then grow bored and grumpy when they realize how tireless a child's affections can be.

Men. What they do. It's so sick and stupid. You can't believe it.

Isn't it true that all the people I know in the world so far are hardly more than puppets for me, serving the glossy contrivings of my imagination?

I have only had one better name than Santa Claus. And it was not Ziggy. It was not Joe Ziggy, it was not Stanley or Livingstone, Brother, Son, Nephew, Friend, or Mr. Johnson. I have loved all those names. My best name is Daddy.

love is the strut and hate is the stumble.

After Basie married his Katie, she became one of the sidditiest of siddity sisters.

There was one thing my murderer didn't understand; he didn't understand how much a father could love his child.

After telling the hard facts to anyone from lover to friend, I have changed in their eyes. Often it is awe or admiration, sometimes it is repulsion, once or twice it has been fury hurled directly at me for reasons I remain unsure of.

Before, they had never found themselves broken together. Usually, it was one needing the other but not both needing each other, and so there had been a way, by touching, to borrow from the stronger one's strength.

I knew my mother's limitations because they formed the marrow of my bones.

our heartache poured into one another like water from cup to cup.

How can I be expected to be trapped for the rest of my life by a man frozen in time?