quotations about relationships
Some of the biggest challenges in relationships come from the fact that most people enter a relationship in order to get something: they're trying to find someone who's going to make them feel good. In reality, the only way a relationship will last is if you see your relationship as a place that you go to give, and not a place that you go to take.
ANTHONY ROBBINS
Awaken the Giant Within
We live in a time when the deepest and most painful need of the human person is for intrinsic worth, unconditional acceptance that does not depend on being good, right, controlled, conformist, or on being pretty, young, successful, rich, employed. Or on being straight, white and male. But if people do not hear the word that says, 'yes, you are accepted' through the meaningful framework of faith; if they do not hear it through their belonging within an accepting community; if they do not hear it through their closeness to the land; then people increasingly and only seek and hope to hear it in their personal, and especially sexual, relationships.
KATHY GALLOWAY
introduction, Dreaming of Eden
We had ideas about relationships. We both agreed that each pair of people must have a mutually compatible system all their own within which they can communicate, or communication falls like the Tower of Babel. A man should be able to expect his wife to play the role of Wife--be she bitchy or dutiful--when she relates to him. For her lover she may have a completely different role, but at home, on the Husband-Wife set, she must stay within the confines of that part. Or we would all wander around never knowing our friends from our strangers.
KEN KESEY
Sometimes a Great Notion
It doesn't matter what kind of world we live in as long as we have each other.
WALTER WYKES
The Profession
If you want a recipe for relationship failure, just wait for the other person to change first.
HARRIET LERNER
Twitter post, May 4, 2014
I do think on some basic level we are animals and by instinct we kind of breed accordingly. But, as much as I believe that, I work really hard when I'm in a relationship to make it work in a monogamous way.
SCARLETT JOHANSSON
London Telegraph, December 10, 2006
One must preserve some mystery in one's relationship.... A book that one has not read yet is always more exciting than a book one has memorized.
CASSANDRA CLARE
City of Lost Souls
The best you can hope for in a relationship is to find someone whose flaws are the sort you don't mind. It is futile to look for someone who has no flaws, or someone who is capable of significant change; that sort of person exists only in our imaginations.
SCOTT ADAMS
God's Debris: A Thought Experiment
Unlike 'real relationships', 'virtual relationships' are easy to enter and to exit. They look smart and clean, feel easy to use, when compared with the heavy, slow-moving, messy real stuff.
ZYGMUNT BAUMAN
The Contemporary Bauman
People meet; that is well. They part; that is well, too. Life is life.
OCTAVE MIRBEAU
The Diary of a Chambermaid
A relationship, I think, is like a shark. You know? It has to constantly move forward or it dies. And I think what we got on our hands is a dead shark.
WOODY ALLEN
Annie Hall