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Quotes About Relationship

What he'd never understood about men in his position, in all the books he'd read and movies he'd seen about them, was clearer to him now: you couldn't keep expecting wholehearted love without, at some point, requiting it. There was no credit to be earned for simply being good.
~ Jonathan Franzen
Don't talk to me about hatred if you haven't been married. Only love, only long empathy and identification and compassion, can root another person in your heart so deeply that there's no escaping your hatred of her, not ever; especially not when the thing you hate most about her is her capacity to be hurt by you. The love persists and the hatred with it.
~ Jonathan Franzen
Parents are programmed to want the best for their kids, regardless of what they get in return. That's what love is supposed to be like, right? But in fact, if you think about it, that's kind of a strange belief. Given what we know about the way people really are. Selfish and shortsighted and egotistical and needy. Why should being a parent, in and of itself, somehow confer superior-personhood on everybody who tries it? Obviously it doesn't.
~ Jonathan Franzen
Katz couldn't have said exactly why Walter mattered to him. No doubt part of it was simply an accident of grandfathering: of forming an attachment at an impressionable ago, before the contours of his personality were fully set.
~ Jonathan Franzen
It was clear to everyone that day, and in the months that followed, that Patty's greatest warming influence was on Walter himself. Now, instead of speeding by his neighbors in his angry Prius, he stopped to lower his window and say hello. On weekends, he brought Patty over to the patch of clear ice that the neighborhood kids maintained for hockey and instructed her in skating, which, in a remarkably short time, she became rather good at.
~ Jonathan Franzen
According to Scripture, earthly life was but a moment, but the moment seemed spacious when he was with her.
~ Jonathan Franzen
His life was much fuller than hers, and the breathing space this gave her was welcome. If she wanted his complete attention again, all she had to do was put his hands on her body; he was not undoglike himself in this regard.
~ Jonathan Franzen
I'm the fat little humiliation he's married to.
~ Jonathan Franzen
It was awkward to be called dear by a person you felt like calling insufferable bitch.
~ Jonathan Franzen
No one stays haunted by a person they're not still in love with.
~ Jonathan Franzen
All we ever argued about was nothing. As if by multiplying zero content by infinite talk we could make it stop being zero. In order to have sex again we´d had to separate, and in order to have frenzied and complusive sex we´d had to get divorced.
~ Jonathan Franzen
because, no matter how he'd come to hate her, he was also, even now, trying to impress her and win her praise, bringing her his Bertrand Russell papers as mother-flattering evidence of his outsize intellect, constructing his rhyme schemes.
~ Jonathan Franzen
who you are, but I'm not in love with you.
~ Jonathan Franzen
I had a private, intense relationship with Snoopy, the cartoon beagle. He was a solitary not-animal animal who lived among larger creatures of a different species, which was more or less my feeling in my own house.
~ Jonathan Franzen
Hell-o-oh," she called with the silly lilt with which she and Tom announced arrivals. "Hello," Tom called from the living room, without the lilt.
~ Jonathan Franzen
Njen život sa Tomom bio je neobi?an i nedefinisan, zauvek privremen, ali upravo zato, bila je to prava ljubav, jer je svaki dan, svaki sat bio stvar slobodnog izbora. To ju je podse?alo na razliku koju je nau?ila još kao dete na veronauci. Njihovi su brakovi bili starozavetni, ona je poštovala svoju obavezu prema ?arlsu, Tom se plašio Anabelinog gneva i osude. Po Novom zavetu, jedino što je bilo važno bili su ljubav i slobodna volja.
~ Jonathan Franzen
She'd never really known her father. Probably nobody had. With his shyness and his formality and his tyrannical rages he protected his interior so ferociously that if you loved him, as she did, you learned that you could do him no greater kindness than to respect his privacy.
~ Jonathan Franzen
People who like to be in control of things can have a hard time with intimacy. Intimacy is anarchic and mutual and definitionally incompatible with control. You seek to control things because you are afraid.
~ Jonathan Franzen
His resentment of his wife, Caroline, was moderate and well contained.
~ Jonathan Franzen
It was love that worked miracles; no force on earth was more powerful.
~ Jonathan Franzen
Her life with Tom was strange and ill-defined and permanently temporary but therefore all the more a life of true life, because it was freely chosen every day, every hour. It reminded her of a distinction she'd learned as a child in Sunday school. Their marriages had been Old Testament, hers a matter of honouring her covenant with Charles, Tom's a matter of fearing Anabel's wrath and judgement. In the New Testament, the only things that mattered were love and free will.
~ Jonathan Franzen
Whatever chemistry she and Jason had had was still there, if only in the form of regret about never really having acted on it.
~ Jonathan Franzen
She was certainly hungry to sleep with someone; it was practically forever since she'd done it. But she liked Jason a little too much to think it was a good idea to sleep with him. What if she started liking him even more? Relationship pain and relationship horror seemed probable.
~ Jonathan Franzen
It was exceedingly improbable that he would ever see the men again, but, as my father said, you never knew. Always worth approaching every man you met as if he might become your best friend in the world.
~ Jonathan Franzen