Relationships Quotes

Time grants a unique perspective which allows us to see events through a filter of accumulated wisdom.

~ Christopher Earle

Men, being accustomed to act on reflection themselves, are a great deal too apt to believe that women act on reflection, too. Women do nothing of the sort. They act on impulse; and, in nine cases out of ten, they are heartily sorry for it afterward.

~ Wilkie Collins

For the life of me I cannot remember, what made us think that we were wise and we'd never compromise. For the life of me I cannot believe we'd ever die for these sins, we were merely freshmen.

~ The Verve Pipe

I knew her so well that I loved her, or maybe I loved her so well that I knew her. I didn't want to fight her anymore. I wanted to quit. I wanted to go home. So I blew up her planet.

~ Orson Scott Card

I never told her the other story, in which she stars, in which she is always the heroine – a romanticized story full of cliché images in which I am telling her all the things there has not been enough time for, in which we are doing all the things there has not been time for…

~ Penelope Lively

They shared a laugh, and then the silence that so often intruded on their discussion asserted itself once again, a gap born of equal parts weariness, familiarity and--conversely--the many differences that fate had created between those who had once gone about lives that were but variations on a single melody.

~ Christopher Paolini

I had a dream about you. At first you were a mannequin, and I was a fashion designer. Then, inexplicably, we switched roles and I became the mannequin. But instead of putting clothes on me, you laughed at my nakedness, and you sold me to the owner of a sex shop. 


~ Dark Jar Tin Zoo

because in the past words have only driven them apart.

~ Jodi Picoult

The Auden/Kallman relationship had this to be said for it: It affirmed that it's better to be blatant than latent.

~ Christopher Hitchens

I had a dream about you. You were you, but you were many—a multitude of mannequins, each named Manny. And I was me, but I was Dark Jar Tin Zoo, and as such I made love to you—all of you. Then I woke up alone, naked, cuddling a mannequin I named after you who smells like you, because I spray it with the same fragrance you used to wear. Is that crazy? No, I didn’t think so either. 


~ Dora J. Arod

i want to say to her: i just want to be myself. and i want to be with someone who's just himself. that's all. i want to see through all the performance and all the pretending and get right to the truth.

~ David Levithan

I think this is why Ellis took so many moving pictures of us. Because he knew that people come in and out of your life, and a picture fixes them in the moment they reach out to you.

~ Zu Vincent

There was once a spirited feral mustang broken in by her stern rider. It was a harmonious relationship for the most part but, like any relationship, she tested the boundaries he placed on her and threw him...Would the rider, having suffered his own wound, retaliate, discipline or forgive?

~ Donna Lynn Hope

I had a dream about you. We were in a canoe, and we were paddling across the desert. You said you were thirsty, and I pointed to the sand that surrounded us and said, “No, I will not urinate in your mouth.” At that point I woke up, because I realized I really had to pee—and get a drink of water.


~ Dora J. Arod

I had a dream about you. You had no skin or muscle on your face, and to try to conceal your bare skull you liberally applied lipstick and makeup. Your birthday was coming up, and I knew you were probably sensitive about parties that emphasize the aging process, so I decided to box up your gift in a coffin and wrap it with black wrapping paper. I got you the best gift ever too—a hooker, who happened to be dead, because that enabled me to procure a sizeable discount.


~ Dora J. Arod

You can have a pet zebra and put that zebra into a small cage every day and tell the zebra that you love it, but no matter how you and the zebra love each other, the fact remains, that the zebra should be let out of that cage and should belong to someone who can treat it better, the way it should be treated, someone who can make it happy.

~ C. Joybell C.

When jealousy rears up, it indicates that something inside of you is afraid. It's an alarm, nothing less and nothing more. Treat it as such.

~ Anthony D. Ravenscroft

So, a little advice. Relax. You're not filling a job position. You're looking for a pleasant acquaintance.. who might become a good friend... who turns out to be attractive to your senses... and a rewarding lover... then a committed partner whose heart will not stray. If you don't see those signposts and in that order, then you're probably on the wrong road and getting more lost with every step.

~ Anthony D. Ravenscroft

The only humility that is really ours is not that which we try to show before God in prayer, but that which we carry with us, and carry out, in our ordinary conduct; the insignficances of daily life are the importances and the tests of eternity, because they prove what really is the spirit that possesses us.

~ Andrew Murray

It's a false premise to say that most monogamous people have chosen monogamy. Most people belong to the religion they were raised in...because that's what's familiar. That's the milieu they grew up in, and, for better or worse, they're just continuing the pattern. Until this traditionalist mindset is shaken loose, you would likely try from reflex to impose notions onto nonmonogamy that are not only untenable in the new context but spel sudden and messy doom even in situations that otherwise could be worked out.

~ Anthony D. Ravenscroft

Let them see that you trust them & let them solve their own problems, make their own decisions.Do that & they will commit their lives to you. Bully the, control them out of fear or malice or just for your own convenience, & after a while you'll have to spend all your time thinking for them, controlling them, & stifling their resentment.

~ Octavia E. Butler

I would see him, Edward.'It was no request; he knew it to be an ultimatum. He shook his head violently, not trusting his voice. Time passed. She was staring at him, saying nothing, and on her face was a look of stunned disbelief, of anguished accusation he knew would haunt him for the rest of his life. But when she spoke, her voice held no hint of tears. It was not a voice to offer either understanding or absolution, spoke of no quarter given, of a lifetime of love denied.'God may forgive you for this,' she said, very slowly and distinctly, 'but I never shall.

~ Sharon Kay Penman

At first, you fall in love. You wake in the morning woozy and your twilight is lit with astral violet light. You spelunk down into each other until you come to possess some inner vision of each other that becomes one thing. Us. Together. And time passes. Like the forming of Earth itself, volcanoes rise and spew lava. Oceans appear. Rock plates shift. Sea turtles swim half the ocean to lay eggs on the mother island; songbirds migrate over continents for berries from a tree. You evolve--cosmically and geologically. You lose each other and find each other again. Every day. Until love gathers the turtles and the birds of your world and encompasses them, too.

~ Michael Paterniti

Relationships tend to be flawed because they are made up of inherently flawed components, mere human beings.

~ Anthony D. Ravenscroft

Use every opportunity of humbling yourself before your fellow-men as a help to abide humble before God.

~ Andrew Murray

I knew I was waiting for someone I didn't understand.

~ Megan Mayhew Bergman

In a sane world, a term like chronic crisis would be instantly seen by anone as an oxymoron. Nevertheless, that's the state that many of us Western Worlders live in, provoking crisis after crisis so that we can justify our dis-ease rather than addressing that directly.

~ Anthony D. Ravenscroft

Joe Spork opens the door. The man departs. Joe turns to Polly to say something about how they’re obviously not going to Portsmouth, and finds an oyster knife balanced on his cheek, just under his eye.“Can we be very clear,” Polly Cradle murmurs, “that I am not your booby sidekick or your Bond girl? That I am an independent supervillain in my own right?”Joe swallows. “Yes, we can,” he says carefully.“There will therefore be no more ‘Say hello, Polly’?”“There will not.

~ Nick Harkaway

I could tell you of occasionally, every eon, meeting a person, with whom I might stay for a billion years. But what of it? After a billion years there is nothing left to say, and you wander apart, uncaring in the end.

~ Steven L. Peck

Learning the difference between God's intervention, the devil's mischief, and PMS can lead to increased happiness.

~ J.p. Galuska

But we'd only had so many nights together, and the notebook had so many pages, and the world was never going to get bigger.

~ Jennifer R. Hubbard

I long ago developed a very practical smile, which I call my Noh smile because it resembles a Noh mask whose features are frozen. Its advantage is that men can interpret it however they want; you can imagine how often I've relied on it.

~ Arthur Golden

...we are taught to put fun and serious pursuits on a continuum as opposed extremes, when this dichotomy is entirely false, made even worse when we act as though we can instantly exchange one for the other...Exerting yourself at a task that is serious and rewarding can still be quite fun, but doing something fun because you have a neurotic need to pack your life full of un is pretty much a guarantee that any long-term benefits you derive will be entirely happenstance.

~ Anthony D. Ravenscroft

But I want to see Clara, Charlie's friend, who's right up my street. I want to see her because I don't know where my street is; I don't even know which part of town it's in, which city, which country, so maybe she'll enable me to get my bearings.

~ Nick Hornby

And then I met the most wonderful boy in the world. We would take long walks by the river. We spent hours gazing into each others eyes. We were so very much in love. And then one day, he went away. And I thought I'd die, but I didn't. And when I didn't, I said to myself... is that all there is to love?

~ The Nines

But nearly every woman I know has a roughly similar story - in fact, dozens of them: stories about being obsessed with a celebrity, work colleague or someone they vaguely knew for years; living in a parallel world in their head; conjuring up endless plots and scenarios for this thing that never actually happened.

~ Caitlin Moran

To the immature, other people are not real.

~ Harry Overstreet

She serves me a piece of it a few minutesout of the oven. A little steam risesfrom the slits on top. Sugar and spice -cinnamon - burned into the crust.But she's wearing these dark glassesin the kitchen at ten o'clockin the morning - everything nice -as she watches me break offa piece, bring it to my mouth,and blow on it. My daughter's kitchen,in winter. I fork the pie inand tell myself to stay out of it.She says she loves him. No waycould it be worse.

~ Raymond Carver

We are raised to believe (on the surface, at least) that us humans only have so much love to give, and that it comes in a standard round unit: one. After all, we associate love with the heart, and, well, you've either got a whole heart, or you're dead, period. You can't, common wisdom goes, just run around dividing that one heart up freely; to claim to do so means that you're either a fool, or you're dividing up something that is dead.

~ Anthony Ravenscroft

It suddenly struck me that Dawsey is a lonesome person. I think it may be that he has always been lonely, but he didn't mind before, and now he minds.

~ Annie Barrows