Relationships Quotes

The ambivalent strategy involves clinging to the care-giver, often with excessive submissiveness, or adopting a role-reversal in which the care-giver is cared for rather than vice versa. Here feelings of anger at the rejection are most conspicuously subjected to defensive exclusion. Although these strategies have the function of maintaining attachment in the face of difficulties, a price has to be paid. The attachment patterns so established are clearly restricted and, if repeated in all relationships, will be maladaptive.

~ Jeremy Holmes

I'll live to be one year younger, because I can't stand the idea of a world without you in it, and die buried beneath an avalanche of my own books.

~ Lance Olsen

But you make the rest hard too. Make me work for you. Make me earn your love. It's worth whatever price. Whatever cost. Don't let me come to expect easy with you. Make me want to work hard for you.

~ Nicole Williams

A person's attachment status is a fundamental determinant of their relationships, and this is reflected in the way they feel about themselves and others. Neurotic patterns can be seen as originating here because, where core attachments are problematic, they will have a powerful influence on the way someone sees the world and their behaviour. Where there is a secure core state, a person feels good about themselves and their capacity to be effective and pursue their projects. Where the core state is insecure, defensive strategies come into play.

~ Jeremy Holmes

Relationships are used by the darkness to keep people revolving around the ego’s demands. For a moment, people see the light of the divine in each other. They run to it and then quickly forget the light they once saw as their fears reclaim their consciousness. Thus begins the ongoing battle to protect one’s own ‘rights’, in case they be forgotten or betrayed. The tally of what is owed is counted, the guilt of perceived wrong doings is cast upon the other, one’s freedom must be paid as the price for ‘love’, and it is only in short periods of peace when all of this is forgotten. Those moments are the precious windows of the Soul.

~ Donna Goddard

As I accept the flowers, I release my grip on the balloons, and they bounce gently against the ceiling the way they did before—hovering, annoyed, frustrated, contained by the ceiling and disappointed by the limits of life.

~ Shannon Mullen

I guess all the time I spend on social media has made me believe that love exists above the surface, that it’s supposed to be light all of the time.

~ Shannon Mullen

Every grievance you hold hides a little more of the light of the world from your eyes until the darkness becomes overwhelming. Everything you forgive restores that light. So ask yourself, who is it that you are really hurting?

~ Donna Goddard

We draw into our life those who will help us to grow. Naturally, we tend to have mixed feelings about those very people but they are marked for us. We have forgotten that we wrote them an invitation some time ago. We look at them as if they are intruders when all along they are our guests.

~ Donna Goddard

The intensity of my grief hits the mountains across Eclipse Sound, and then echoes throughout Arctic. There’s nobody around. I can barely see the town below the hill, nestled within the valley of barren tundra, across from the tiny airport, my only access to the south. I’m alone amidst this desolate landscape and there’s nowhere to hide. No trees or buildings or distractions. It’s just me in the depths of my suffering and all my faults and mistakes of the past are exposed underneath the spotlight of the midnight sun.

~ Shannon Mullen

You can turn every ugly and damaging drama into a genuine blessing by seeing it differently. No one is suffering on purpose. We learn to give up the pleasure we feel in self-righteously blaming others. Healing happens when we see things differently. The question is: do you want suffering or peace? It's that simple.

~ Donna Goddard

We have already said more goodbyes than are necessary. Those were goodbyes that brought about the end of partings. We taught each other that no parting is possible.

~ Donna Goddard

Relationships are valuable no matter who they are between.

~ Donna Goddard

Just as I’m about to continue walking along the shoreline, the left third of the iceberg breaks off suddenly and crashes violently, like a high-rise apartment building imploding in the heart of the city. Tears roll down my face uncontrollably as I watch the two distinct halves of the iceberg drift further and further apart from each other. It’s devastating to watch something that seems so strong and unbreakable crumble in an instant. Even more devastating is the feeling that there’s nothing I can do about it.

~ Shannon Mullen

I felt the wild need for any or all of these people that night. Lying there alone, I began to feel - perhaps even to know - that I did not exist apart from their love and need of me.Of this latter I felt less sure, but it seemed possible, if the equation worked both ways.Falling asleep I thought, 'Maybe this, for me, is the hand of God.

~ Maggie Nelson

I grew up with a front-row seat to what a happy, healthy marriage looks like. Never perfect, constantly evolving, always united.

~ Shonda Rhimes

I guess love distorts our perception of reality, and it’s even harder to recognize the truth when it’s buried underneath layers of what we imagine relationships should be like.

~ Shannon Mullen

I knew I was really there, because I was the thing his arms encircled, the thing his love defined.

~ Carolyn Ives Gilman

Sometimes you have to fight for the past and sometimes you have to let go.

~ Shannon Mullen

Lies don't end relationships the truth does.

~ Shannon L. Alder

Introverts don’t see life as one big cocktail party. We’re content with just a few meaningful relationships.

~ Jenn Granneman

I'll always choose you.Gabe Willoughby

~ Hope Collier

Marriage is the beginning of love for your spouse, not the result of it.

~ Shannon L. Alder

You see her for who she really is, past all the disillusions most people get tangled up in when they think they are falling in love. You accept her flaws, and you love her just as much because of them as you do in spite of them.

~ Blakney Francis

Can I Tinder swipe for cat cuddles?

~ Shannon Mullen

Wouldn't we all do better not trying to understand, accepting the fact that no human being will ever understand another, not a wife a husband, a lover a mistress, nor a parent a child? Perhaps that's why men have invented God -- a being capable of understanding. Perhaps if I wanted to be understood or to understand I would bam-boozle myself into belief, but I am a reporter; God exists only for leader-writers.

~ Graham Greene

Despite all of the social advances in women’s rights and the push for gender equality in the workplace, it seems like modern men still want a woman that they can take care of at home.

~ Shannon Mullen

The great obstacle to communication is the tendency to constantly evaluate or moralize with others, creating in them a fear to speak or act. The great key to this communication is to learn to listen attentively with understanding to the other person’s point of view creating an atmosphere of love and approval.

~ Stephen Covey

Therefore, while social phobics and patients with AvPD both avoid out of fear, the social phobic’s fears mainly arise in the clinical context of feeling, or actually being called upon to perform in ways ranging from giving a speech to urinating in a public washroom. In contrast the avoidant’s fears generally arise in the context of interpersonal relationships, the main marker I look for in making the diagnosis of AvPD.

~ Martin Kantor

We became six people at a table in Hampton Court. We rose and walked together down the avenue. In the thin, the unreal twilight, fitfully like the echo of voices laughing down some alley, geniality returned to me and flesh. Against the gateway, against some cedar tree I saw blaze bright, Neville, Jinny, Rhoda, Louis, Susan and myself, our life, our identity. Still King William seemed an unreal monarch and his crown mere tinsel. But we – against the brick, against the branches, we six, out of how many million millions, for one moment out of what measureless abundance of past time and time to come, burnt there triumphant. The moment was all; the moment was enough.

~ Virginia Woolf

All of us are interested in things outside of our stewardships, and we should be, but the most important way to do anything about them is to magnify our own stewardships. When you focus on your own responsibility, you become relatively unconcerned with other peoples stewardships...The highest form of influence is to be a model, not a critic; a light, not a judge.

~ Stephen R. Covey

It’s not about describing someone as that’s typically an attempt to make whatever they are comfortable for whoever we are. Instead, we may wish to skip the agenda of the description and embrace the wonder of the person.

~ Craig D. Lounsbrough

If you closely scrutinize relationships everywhere that struggle, in most cases, it is due to lack of self-awareness of one or both parties...

~ Assegid Habtewold

Or maybe it was already too late; you only get one first love. She was mine, but I had not been hers. She was only going to look for some echo of it, and if I had made the right noises, that echo might have been me for a while.

~ Olivia Sudjic

Very few people have ever experienced the feeling of being completely understood. When they experience it, it can become one of the richest feelings they have ever had.

~ Stephen Covey

How can any of us even know what to believe anymore? Our culture’s full of so much phoniness and deception. Companies advertise products to make us believe that we will be more beautiful, more healthy, or live longer by consuming their products. We are seduced by lovers who feed their porn addictions when we’re asleep. We’re taught to believe that if we work hard and take risks, that we can achieve our dreams, yet youth unemployment is the highest it’s been in decades. Fairytales tell us that true love exists, but half of all marriages end in divorce.

~ Shannon Mullen

She can’t worry. She can’t ‘fix.’ She can’t love.

~ Shannon Mullen

Perhaps love in the digital age is more like Netflix binge-watching: we enjoy bursts of fantasy, and then move on to something else when it’s done. Like browsing for a new series on Netflix, if the relationship doesn’t fit perfectly, you can trade it in for something new with the click of a button or a swipe on your phone.

~ Shannon Mullen

It is unpleasant and disturbing to be rejected. It is deeply satisfying to be accepted.

~ Stephen Covey

Family is the most important thing in this life.

~ Shannon Mullen