c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
But the coconut is also a symbol of resilience, Samar. Even in the conditions where there's very little nourishment and even less nurturance, it flourishes, growing taller than most of the plants around it.
— Neesha Meminger, Shine, Coconut Moon
I just wouldn’t want to hook up with a guy unless I really, really like him, and in myexperience all boys can be classified as either assholes or bores, unless they’re both.Maybe it’s a blessing, because the last thing I need is relationship drama to sidetrack me from my grades.
— Daria Snadowsky, Anatomy of a Boyfriend
To get the most out of the relationship you are in, it won't be helpful to listen to the ego's stories about it. They will only bring separation and conflict. Essence would tell a different story about your loved one. It would probably be something like: "This person is in my life for me to love to the best of my ability. Let's see what happens if I do that." As Essence, we are here to serve others and serve life. The ego, on the other hand, is all about serving itself.
— Gina Lake, What about Now?: Reminders for Being in the Moment
I have always wanted to give you the world, so I started giving you pieces of the oceans that kept us apart.
— Karen Quan, Write like no one is reading
The person who wants out of the relationship always gets her way.
— Emily Giffin, Something Blue
There is a correlation between the number of days since a man last had sex, and, the number of things that he is willing to do for a woman.
— Mokokoma Mokhonoana
If someone tries to use you as a tool, you shouldn't mind it, because it is their choice and folly, not yours.
— Jude Morgan, Indiscretion
Commitment is another name for relationship not the compromise.
— Santosh Kalwar
But sometimes this hatred broke like a wave, unexplainably collapsing under its own weight, and before it would begin to well up again, she suddenly felt nothing but pure compassion for him, a kindness and forgiveness that almost broke her heart.
— Sana  Krasikov, One More Year
how anxiously I yearned for those I had forsaken.
— Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Dream of a Ridiculous Man
Some people have the coldest smiles, but have the tenderest hearts. And many have the most tender smiles, but carry the coldest hearts. You cannot judge a man by his smile, but you can judge a man by his heart. The smallest actions reveal the most about a hearts true color, so pay attention to them. Actions are the true words of the heart.
— Suzy Kassem, Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem
Sports bars are also a great place for guys to meet other guys--either for sex or for wrestling, whichever feels more right. 
— Eugene Mirman, The Will to Whatevs: A Guide to Modern Life
well I believe in commitment it's just I, you know, I don't stick to it.
— Jim Lewis
It was some time since I had gone to sleep in the same room with a girl. Of course, the room was large and reasonably well-lighted, and the girl had other things than me on her mind.
— Ross Macdonald, The Blue Hammer
She didn't want me she wanted all of me. I didn't mind saying it. My girlfriend scared the crap out of me. 
— T.J. Forrester, Miracles, Inc.: A Novel
Falling in love is a wonderfully terrifying sensation.
— Steve Maraboli
people will forget what you said, people will forget what you do, but people will never forget how you made them feel.
— Jason Barger
Love is fickle and fleeting," Tsukiko continues. "It is rarely a solid foundation for decisions to be made upon, in any game.
— Erin Morgenstern, The Night Circus
The girls said she was too cynical about love, but how could you not be? On the surface, relations between men and women were all soft kisses and white gowns and hand-holding. But underneath they were a scary, complicated, ugly mess, just waiting to rise to the surface.
— J. Courtney Sullivan, Commencement
I have to figure out why I worked at a job I hated for years. I have to find out why I can’t see what everyone else sees in me. I don’t feel beautiful. When I look in the mirror, I never saw beautiful. For this to happen to someone like me, it’s devastating, Jonas. I don’t want you to think it’s vanity, it isn’t. I can’t see me and I need to be able to do that. I need to find out what I’m like and what I want. I have to be comfortable in my own skin before I can be in a relationship the way you want.
— Christine Feehan, Safe Harbor
Real relationships - the kind that were supposed to last but never did - were more trouble than they were worth.
— Lauren Conrad, L.A. Candy
Fletcher was always going to be your ex-boyfriend, from the moment you met him. He's just finally caught up with where he's supposed to be.
— Derek Landy, Death Bringer
You had to live in your own bubble. You couldn't force your way into someone else's, because then it wouldn't be a bubble any more.
— Nick Hornby, About a Boy
It is assured that men of all ages imagine a woman naked when they first meet.
— Tiffany Madison, Black and White
For the first time in history, middle-class women do not need men in the traditional ways - for safety, for money, for a life. So they’re demanding instead what they always wanted but couldn’t ask for: emotional connection, presence, intimacy. Sex with enough foreplay, enough seduction, enough closeness to please them. Men are baffled not only because the needs they are being asked to fill differ so from what their fathers and grandfathers understood to be their jobs but also because full-fledged intimacy requires strengths and skills they’ve never learned. Moreover… they’re strengths and skills that were once left solely to women: Men didn’t have to develop them. This maturational mismatch may be contributing to distrust among lovers of all ages.
— Dalma Heyn, Drama Kings: The Men Who Drive Strong Women Crazy
He opened his mouth to say that she looked extremely beautiful and deserved armfuls of roses, but the words were lost in committee somewhere, shuffled aside by the parts of his head that worked full-time at avoiding ridicule.
— Helen Simonson, Major Pettigrew's Last Stand
One minute she acts like she wants to be with me and I'm the one rejecting her. The next, she's got this barbed wire fence and barking dogs around her, like I can't even ask her the simplest questions.""And here I was assuming you didn't care about her."Stabbing his fingers through his hair, he groaned, "I don't!""And you make it perfectly clear." Men. Idiots.
— Jenny Trout, Ashes to Ashes
He reached out and intertwined our hands. Gently urging me forward he whispered, “Have I lost you love?
— Erin Jamison, Better Than 8: Fantasy
None of us, irrespective of our sexual preference and/or practice, imagine that we can have an intimate relationship with a partner and always have seamless harmony. Indeed, most of us assume that once the “honeymoon” period is over differences will emerge and conflicts will happen. Positively, we also assume that we will be “safe“ in those moments; that even if voices are raised and emotions expressed are intense, there will not be and should not be any abuse or any reason to be unsafe, and that the will to connect and communicate will prevail.
— bell hooks, Teaching Critical Thinking: Practical Wisdom
Technically, on the spectrum of very bad things, they did nothing truly wicked. But of course, that spectrum has no measure for the greatest of all carnal sins, the kind that occurs before skin touches skin, before wondering turns to yearning, yearning to having, having to holding for dear life, when two people cling to each other so desperately that even when they lie, inches apart, neither is fully satisfied until the light between them turns to darkness.
— Galt Niederhoffer, The Romantics
Relationship doesn’t remain, We resonate on different flames, I could cut you down again, If you were like all other men, If you were like all other men, I know that I could shut you down again
— Amy Winehouse
North is a powerful man, and you're still connected to him." Flo frowned. "Probably sexual memory, those Capricorns are insatiable. Well, you know. Sea Goat. And of course, you're a Fish. You'll end up back in bed with him."Andie slammed the car door. "You know what I'd like for Christmas, Flo? Boundaries. You can gift me early if you'd like.
— Jennifer Crusie, Maybe This Time
I'm always looking for meaningful one-night stands
— Dudley Moore
I could probably write a book on the complexities of our relationship, on my constantly shifting emotions, my ever-changing mind, but let's just say that nothing is ever as black and white as it seems, that love is not only blind but pathetic too. It can make us into victims and fools, reduce us to the kind of people who infuriate us on soap operas, the kind you want to scream at for allowing the creep or bitch to walk all over them.
— J.M. Morris, Fiddleback
So many men treat their wives badly, or indifferently, or with barely contained impatience. Josh doesn't mind-- no that's not right--he insists on openly showing his love and respect for me.
— Lynn Morris, Shadow of the Mountains
Married women are far more depressed than married men -- in unhappy marriages, three times more; and -- interestingly -- in happy marriages, five times more. In truth, it is men who are thriving in marriage, now as always, and who show symptoms of psychological and physical distress outside it. Not only their emotional well-being but their very lives, some studies say, depend on being married!
— Dalma Heyn
We're broken in complementary ways, thus rendering our damage comprehensible to each other.
— Ann Aguirre, Killbox
The Betty Lady explains love and splitting up: "It´s like playing the shell game with Jesus. You can´t figure anything out; it´s best not to try. You´ll just humiliate yourself.
— Suzanne Finnamore, Split: A Memoir of Divorce
(Georgie) Why is it that you always want to run after the one that goes off in a huff, and push away the one who is clinging to you?
— Nancy Woodruff, My Wife's Affair
This is the whole stupid thing about all these unblood relationships. They depend on people staying the same, standing in the same spot they were in over a decade ago, when they first met. Surely the reality is that connections between people aren't permanent, but fleeting and random, like a solar eclipse or clouds meeting in the sky. They exist in a constantly moving universe full of constantly moving objects.
— Matt Haig, The Radleys
NOT UNTIL I MET YOUNot until I felt your sunshine,Did I realize that I had been in the shade.Not until I saw all your colors,Did I realize that mine had faded.Not until I heard your dreams,Did I realize that I was still sleeping.And not until I experienced my life with you,Did I realize that I was barelyBreathing.
— Suzy Kassem, Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem
Bathsheba loved Troy in the way that only self-reliant women love when they abandon their self-reliance. When a strong woman recklessly throws away her strength she is worse than a weak woman who has never any strength to throw away. One source of her inadequacy is the novelty of the occasion. She has never had practice in making the best of such a condition. Weakness is doubly weak by being new.
— Thomas Hardy, Far from the Madding Crowd
Listen she said, everything ends, every single relationship you will ever have in your lifetime is going to end.... I'll die, you'll die, you'll get tired of each other. You don't always know how it's going to happen, but it is always going to happen. So stop trying to make everything permanent, it doesn't work. I want you to go out there and find some nice man you have no intention of spending the rest of your life with. You can be very, very happy with people you aren't going to marry.
— Ann Patchett, This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage
He carries stars in his pocketsbecause he knowsshe fears the dark.Whenever sadness pays her a visithe paints galaxieson the back of her hands.
— Alaska Gold, Growing Light
There comes a time in some relationships when no matter how sincere the attempt to reconcile the differences or how strong the wish to recreate a part of the past once shared, the struggle becomes so painful that nothing else is felt and the world and all its beauty only add to the discomfort by providing cruel contrast.
— Leo Buscaglia, Loving Each Other
I hold a strict policy of automatic grudges against people everyone likes.
— Kate Hattemer, The Vigilante Poets of Selwyn Academy
It is a matter of perspective, the difference between opponent and partner," Tsukiko says. "You step to the side and the same person can be either or both or something else entirely. It is difficult to know which face is true.
— Erin Morgenstern, The Night Circus
He offered her power, money, status...a giant prison, all in exchange for only...her soul.
— Coco J. Ginger
I didn't want to leave things the way we had, unresolved, ... and tried to tell myself he cared about me enough not to look elsewhere for what I wasn't giving him.
— Sarah Dessen, Someone Like You
To the degree you experience God's love towards you - seeing you as beautiful and radiant - to that degree sex won't ruin your life.
— Timothy J. Keller
Women get into a relationship hoping a man will change, and he never does; men get into a relationship hoping the woman don't change, but she always does. Men want their partners to be consistent. That they won't make impromptu impossible demands nor baffle him with classically female sudden-onset hysterical behavior.
— Valerie Frankel, The Girlfriend Curse
You know it’s a bad sign when the theme song from Titanic describes your relationship.
— Julia Spencer-Fleming, All Mortal Flesh
So she stood naked in front of the young man and at this moment stopped playing the game.
— Milan Kundera, Laughable Loves
Ideally, of course, a relationship is best, but then how many people are capable of deep feeling? Practically none.
— Gore Vidal, The City and the Pillar
He found it both sad and fascinating that only through an artificial universe of video images could she establish contact with the real world.
— Arthur C. Clarke, 2061: Odyssey Three
A man to whom a woman cannot look up, she cannot love. Yet, it is marvelous how a woman contrives to find something to look up to in a man.
— Arnold Haultain, Hints for Lovers
The conventional parabola--sentiment, the touch of the hand, the kiss, the passionate kiss, the feel of the body, the climax in the bed, then more bed, then less bed, then the boredom, the tears and the final bitterness--was to him shameful and hypocritical.
— Ian Fleming, Casino Royale
The thing about her is, she’s good-natured. He knew it the second he saw her standing by the parking meters. He could just tell from the soft way her belly looked. With women, you keep bumping against them, because they want different things, they’re a different race. Either they give, like a plant, or scrape, like a stone. In all the green world nothing feels as good as a woman’s good nature.
— John Updike, Rabbit, Run
Pull a thread in my story and feel the tremor half a world and two millenia away.
— Daniel Taylor, Tell Me a Story: The Life-Shaping Power of Our Stories
As I’ve said, it wasn’t until a long time afterwards—long after I’d left the Cottages—that I realized just how significant out little encounter in the churchyard had been. I was upset at the time, yes. But I didn’t believe it to be anything so different from other tiffs we’d had. It never occurred to me that our lives, until then so closely interwoven could unravel and separate over a thing like that.But the fact was, I suppose, there were powerful tides tugging us apart by then, and it only needed something like that to finish the task. If we’d understood that back then—who knows?—maybe we’d have kept a tighter hold of one another.
— Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go
When a man I like touches my arm or my hair, I want to know if he'll touch the center of me, and whatever I learned in school--I went to school for a long time--I seem to believe that my center can be reached best with the tip of a penis....
— Alice Mattison, Men Giving Money, Women Yelling: Intersecting Stories
By God, I may be old-fashioned in my ideas, but women run around too much these days to suit me. They meet all kinds of crazy fish.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
Between Countess Nordston and Levin there had been established those relations, not infrequent in society, in which two persons, while ostensibly remaining on friendly terms, are contemptuous of each other to such a degree that they cannot even treat each other seriously and cannot even insult each one another.
— Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina
I wanted intimacy in caps lock but I got it in parentheses. We curled into each other, upside down, my empty spaces filled by another. "Give me the three minute version of your life story," he said. I nailed it it one then refused to throw the question back as etiquette governs. He wanted to know where I'd been. I wanted to know who he was.
— Eleni Zoe, Hope Dies Last: Lessons in Love
I review what I know once again, confronting the monolith now alien and almost unconnected to me: my marriage.
— Suzanne Finnamore, Split: A Memoir of Divorce
for to have a deep attachment for a person (or a place or thing) is to have taken them as the terminating object of our instinctual responses."Separation anxiety. International Journal of Psycho-Analysts, XLI, 1-25 (1959(
— John Bowlby
That's the problem with relationships," George was saying. "It's a contract. You agree to be some unchanging caricature of yourself. To act the same way all the time. Never to change. It's counter-evolutionary. How can anything new and good come into your life, if you're holding on to something that doesn't exist anymore?
— Alex Shakar, Luminarium
A man must at times be hard as nails: willing to face up to the truth about himself, and about the woman he loves, refusing compromise when compromise is wrong. But he must also be tender. No weapon will breach the armor of a woman's resentment like tenderness.
— Elisabeth Elliot, The Mark of a Man
Men, you'll never be a good groom to your wife unless you're first a good bride to Jesus.
— Timothy J. Keller
Anxiety and desire are two, often conflicting, orientations to the unknown. Both are tilted toward the future. Desire implies a willingness, or a need, to engage this unknown, while anxiety suggests a fear of it. Desire takes one out of oneself, into the possibility or relationship, but it also takes one deeper into oneself. Anxiety turns one back on oneself, but only onto the self that is already known.
— Mark Epstein, Open to Desire: Embracing a Lust for Life - Insights from Buddhism and Psychotherapy
Do you love me Hero?" His pale green eyes were full of torment. "Do you love me like I love you?
— Elizabeth Hoyt, Notorious Pleasures
He educated Maurice, or rather his spirit educated Maurice's spirit, for they themselves became equal. Neither thought "Am I led; am I leading?" Love had caught him out of triviality and Maurice out of bewilderment in order that two imperfect souls might touch perfection.
— E.M. Forster, Maurice
Small animals are a great problem. I wish God had never created small animals, or else that He had made them so they could talk, or else that He'd given them better faces. Space. Take moths. They fly at the lamp and burn themsleves, and then they fly right back again. It can't be instinct, because it isn't the way it works. They just don't understand, so they go right on doing it. Then they lie on their backs and all their legs quiver, and then they're dead. Did you get all that? Does it sound good?""Very good," Grandmother said.Sophia stood up and shouted, "Say this: say I hate everything that dies slow! Say I hate everything that won't let you help! Did you write that?
— Tove Jansson, The Summer Book
With him everything is a test, affection is measured, that given weighed against that which has been received, and the balance, more often than not, disappointing him.
— S.J. Watson, Before I Go to Sleep
However self-sufficient we may fancy ourselves, we exist only in relation -- to our friend, family, and life partners; to those we teach and mentor; to our co-workers, neighbors, strangers; and even to forces we cannot fully conceive of, let alone define. In many ways, we are our relationships.
— Derrick A. Bell, Ethical Ambition: Living a Life of Meaning and Worth
My boyfriends have all been as stoical as queen's guards. They'd been patient, committed, and dispassionate, and I'd had to really debase myself to extract any emotion, either grin or grimace, from them.
— Koren Zailckas, Fury: A Memoir
I have to wonder if you're not being slightly naive here. I mean, are you saying that you want nothing for people? You have no motives? Everybody has motives. Name the person, the circumstances, I'll name the motive. Even saints have motives -- to feel like saints, probably. ... But still, the point of any relationship is obtaining something from another person.
— Tom Rachman, The Imperfectionists
Then, whenever I feel the sun on my face, I will think of you, " I told him. "You will always be with me, Bill. Because of all I have felt for you, and all I have learned from you.
— Cornelia Maude Spelman, Missing: A Memoir
The clerk is looking at me. His expression hasn't changed. What I want to do is punch a hole in the front of the desk, reach through, grab his balls, and make him sing The Mickey Mouse Club song. But these days, I'm working on the theory that killing everyone I don't like might be counterproductive. I'm learning to use my indoor voice like a big boy, so I smile back at the clerk.
— Richard Kadrey, Kill the Dead
Being faithful and monogamous is not natural for human beings. It takes work. Deep down we all know that. We have all been tempted to stray at some point or another. Even when it was only a fleeting thought and we didn't act on it. Every time we acknowledge that someone of the opposite sex is "attractive" or "sexy" we are doing nothing other than pointing out that they would be a suitable mate. Not acting on that natural impulse to want to mate with a viable mating partner requires a conscious decision. It's a constant struggle between what your body wants, and what the civilized part of your brain says you should do, in order to avoid the negative consequences of cheating on your spouse and ruining your long-term relationship. That's why affairs, and extra-marital sex, are often referred to as "a moment of weakness.
— Oliver Markus, Why Men And Women Can't Be Friends
Women have been brought up with the false sense that they have all the options in the world. We don’t understand that the culture really isn’t offering us all of these options – there still are very strong pressures to conform. We have to step outside the culture to be able to make choices that will really give us what we want. But we lack the psychic mechanisms to do this, to really choose.
— Dalma Heyn
Is disinterest not the essence of every human relationship?
— Sándor Márai, Embers
She understands suddenly that the stuff that fills her up is not the love or attention she might get from other people; it is the love she herself has for other people. We are, Portia decides, the people we love
— Jessica Anya Blau, Drinking Closer to Home
I can only do what's easy. I can only entice and be enticed. I can't, and won't, attempt difficult relations. If I marry it will either be a man who's strong enough to boss me or whom I'm strong enough to boss. So I shan't ever marry, for there aren't such men. And Heaven help any one whom I do marry, for I shall certainly run away from him before you can say 'Jack Robinson.
— E.M. Forster, Howards End
Kate lost a mother," I said, "but I lost a nothing."Kate doesn't feel that way," Jack assured me.But what about everybody else besides Kate? How can I ever explain to anyone what she was when she and I had no name? People need names for everything. I wasn't a relative or a friend, I was just an object of her kind
— Hilary Thayer Hamann, Anthropology of an American Girl
As I walked inside, she turned around and headed for the end of the bed. Then she paused and turned to face me. She was wearing her Orchard Hill basketball T-shirt and sweatpants and she looked tired, but beautiful.
— Kieran Scott, He's So Not Worth It
Connecting with someone is not necessarily a bond with a significant other, or even a friend, but can be the indefinable - perhaps the rarest and most precious thing in life to find at all.
— Donna Lynn Hope
You want him praising the Lord in the morning, you put a smile on his face tonight.
— Mark Gungor, Laugh Your Way to a Better Marriage: Unlocking the Secrets to Life, Love and Marriage
A girl should set her sights on a man who has money; or if not, who can expect to come into money; or if not, who has moneyed connections.
— Jude Morgan, Indiscretion
(Peter) If you don't share the lows, it seems you might stop sharing the highs as well.
— Nancy Woodruff, My Wife's Affair
At least there's nothing scary about him and hopefully he doesn't see anything scary in me. We go way back, to summer camp. We KNOW each other. People I don't know just make me want to say YIKES! I'll take history over mystery any day of the week.
— Douglas Coupland, Shampoo Planet
You can always evaluate a man's character by the way he speaks about his ex girlfriends and other women. When entering a new relationship or getting close with a new guy, make sure you take notice of the language he uses when referring to other girls
— Miya Yamanouchi, Embrace Your Sexual Self: A Practical Guide for Women
Men are not dogs. We merely think we are and, on occasion, act as if we are. But, by believing in our nobler nature, women have the amazing power to inspire us to live up to it.
— Neil Strauss, The Game: Penetrating the Secret Society of Pickup Artists
My God, these folks don't know how to love -- that's why they love so easily.
— D.H. Lawrence
Women rescue men just as much as, if not more than, men rescue women.
— Criss Jami, Killosophy
If you expect honesty, be honest. If you expect forgiveness, forgive. If you expect a whole person, you have to be a whole person.
— Kristen Crockett, The Gift of Past Relationships
It hurts to let go. Sometimes it seems the harder you try to hold on to something or someone the more it wants to get away. You feel like some kind of criminal for having felt, for having wanted. For having wanted to be wanted.
— Henry Rollins
people have character strength but they lack communication skills, and that undoubtedly affects the quality of relationships as well.
— Stephen R. Covey, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Powerful Lessons in Personal Change
Our moments are music, and sometimes – just sometimes – we can catch them and put them into some lasting form. If we didn’t have music, I don’t think we could ever be truly happy, and if we didn’t have special moments, we would never find music.
— David Levithan, How They Met, and Other Stories
Perhaps the depth of love can be calibrated by the number of different selves that are actively involved in a given relationship.
— Carl Sagan, Contact
These guys may not talk too much about relationships, but they sure do blush at telling moments, don’t they? Maybe that’s the key to understanding the opposite sex; I could invent a science, call it blushology.
— Jody Gehrman, Babe in Boyland
First she would try to kill him, but failing this give him food and her body, breast-feed him back to a state of childishness and even, perhaps, feel affection for him. Then, the moment he was asleep, cut his throat. The synopsis of the ideal marriage.
— J.G. Ballard, High-Rise
It all comes down to that one person you always think about before you fall asleep at night. And text "Good Morning" as soon as you wake up.
— Jonathan Anthony Burkett
He is not the same person as when wemet, but . . . neither am I. Time has refined us, but instead of pushing us apart, we’re closer than ever.
— Ann Aguirre, Aftermath
Regardless of whether a relationship brings us joy or sorrow, each relationship gives us the opportunity to grow stronger, nobler, and more compassionate with ourselves and others.
— Tamela Rich
The women we really love are the women who complete us, who have the qualities we can borrow and so become something nearer to whole men. Just as we complete them, of course; it’s not a one-way thing. Leola and I, when romance was stripped away, were too much alike; our strengths and weaknesses were too nearly the same. Together we would have doubled our gains and our losses, but that isn’t what love is.
— Robertson Davies
Never give a lousy person the opportunity to create lousy babies.
— Roberto Hogue, Real Secrets of Sex: A Women's Guide on How to Be Good in Bed
What? Did we end up hating each other? Did we end up the way we thought we always knew would? Did I end up wearing khakis because of that fucking ad?
— Bret Easton Ellis, Glamorama
Love is more about being the right person than finding the right person.
— Barbara Bartlein, Why Did I Marry You Anyway?: Overcoming the Myths That Hinder a Happy Marriage
I wept for relationships not possible due to denial and dreams locked in the back of people’s minds, all of the bits of life that lay dormant until the babblings of televisions and nursing homes sweep them away. It makes me wonder how many of the dreams we had originally have already been forgotten.
— Christopher Hawke, Unnatural Truth
Her grey, sun-strained eyes stared straight ahead, but she had deliberately shifted our relations, and for a moment I thought I loved her. But I am slow-thinking and full of interior rules that act as brakes on my desires, and I knew that first I had to get myself definitely out of that tangle back home.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
Your relationships will take you beyond the boundaries of your normal strength. Encouragement gives struggling people eyes to see the unseen Christ.
— Timothy S. Lane, Relationships: A Mess Worth Making
I thought I would prefer apathy over this," I confided to her. "Why?" she asked. "Are you saying you would rather be cold than comforted? He's looking at you and offering his hand in friendship and you're rudely looking away pretending not to notice. At least with him you wouldn't be so alone." I felt my eyes turn into colorless pools as I glared at her for stating the obvious. "Being numb to someone is better than feeling something," I explained. "Safer you mean," she interrupted. I sighed and continued, "When someone who was once significant in your life comes back after an extended absence, emotions you had finally freed yourself from are reawakened, and if that's not enough to contend with, dormant memories are summoned whether you want them to be or not." "And what is it that you want?" she posed triumphantly. I swallowed my anger and thought with defeat, "Nothing anyone can give me.
— Donna Lynn Hope
You can never recover from losing a person you love, but you can find a way to let it be part of your life rather than letting it take over every part of you
— Darien Gee, Friendship Bread
To share out your soul freely, that is what metanoia (a change of mind, or repentance)really refers to: a mental product of love. A change of mind, or love for the undemonstrable. And you throw off every conceptual cloak of self-defense, you give up the fleshly resistance of your ego. Repentance has nothing to do with self-regarding sorrow for legal transgressions. It is an ecstatic erotic self-emptying. A change of mind about the mode of thinking and being.
— Christos Yannaras, Variations on the Song of Songs
I had a dream about you. You were crying, and I couldn’t tell if it was because you were sad or because you’d been laughing too hard. So I decided to find out by telling you that I’d just heard from the cops, and your mother had been murdered. Before I got to the punch line you started sobbing in a different manner, so I realized you’d been laughing earlier. By that time the mood had changed, and I decided it best not to deliver the punch line after all. So I sat down next to you and put my arm around you and tried to console you for your perceived loss.  
— Dora J. Arod, I Had a Dream About You
I help others because I can, not because I expect something in return.
— Amy Manemann, Deadly Reunion
When clouds of pain loom in the skyWhen a shadow of sadness flickers byWhen a tear finds its way to the eyeWhen fear keeps the loneliness aliveI try and console my heartWhy is it that you cry? I askThis is only what life impartsThese deep silences withinHave been handed out to all by timeEveryone’s story has a little sorrowEveryone’s share has a little sunshineNo need for water in your eyesEvery moment can be a new lifeWhy do you let them pass you by?Oh heart, why is it that you cry?
— Javed Akhtar
The thing that binds us together is that we have both lowered our expectations of life
— Orhan Pamuk, Snow
Relationships are never static. They have to evolve over time as the individuals in them change.
— Sherryl Woods, Driftwood Cottage
About halfway through I broke down crying, which I hadn't expected. I was a little ashamed, but only a little;it was her, you see, and she never taxed me with the times that I slipped from the way I thought a man should be...the way I thought I should be, at any rate. A man with a good wife is the luckiest of God's creatures, and one without must be among the most miserable, I think, the only true blessing of their lives that they don't know how poorly off they are.
— Stephen King, The Green Mile
The Heart of Gold fled on silently through the night of space, now on conventional photon drive. Its crew of four were ill as ease knowing that they had been brought together not of their own volition or by simple coincidence, but by some curious perversion of physics- as if relationships between people were susceptible to the same laws that governed the relationships between atoms and molecules
— Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
Because that’s what unfaithfulness is, isn’t it? A cancer that’s always there in the back of your mind, eating away at the foundations of the relationship. It’s happened once, it could happen again, so you’re always looking for telltale signs or symptoms to show that it’s reappeared...
— Matt Dunn, The Ex-Boyfriend's Handbook
When women are secret they are secret indeed and more often then not they only begin to be secret with the advent of a second lover. 
— Thomas Hardy, A Pair of Blue Eyes
We spend so much time on the whole world instead of on those who really need us, in a world where rumours are a trend and truth is an afterthought.
— Pandora Poikilos, Excuse Me, My Brains Have Stepped Out
I know my vision is impaired and cannot be trusted with even the simplest tasks, much less dating. Not that I´ve come within talon distance of a man.
— Suzanne Finnamore, Split: A Memoir of Divorce
Emancipation of women has made them lose their mystery.
— Grace Kelly
No relationship is without its difficulties and this is certainly true when one or both of the persons involved has an autistic spectrum disorder. Even so, I believe what is truly essential to the success of any relationship is not so much compatibility, but love. When you love someone, virtually anything is possible.
— Daniel Tammet, Born on a Blue Day: Inside the Extraordinary Mind of an Autistic Savant
Walk together. Feel the heart beats. Experience the presence. This is how to be thankful.
— Amit Ray
How much do you love me?"She drew in a breath and let it out. "Too much.""Too much is just enough for this man.""And do you love me?" she whispered."I have always loved you. Always. You know that.
— Delilah Marvelle, Once Upon a Scandal
An apple tree is just like a person. In order to thrive, it needs companionship that's similar to it in some ways, but quite different than others.
— Jeffrey Stepakoff, The Orchard
I´ve blown it, the whole grisly charade.
— Suzanne Finnamore, Split: A Memoir of Divorce
It's early days. A few skeletons are bound to keep jumping out of the closet.
— Alan Moore, Watchmen
He did not want an affair with his boss. He did not even want a one-night stand. Because what always happened was that people found out, gossip at the water cooler, meaningful looks in the hallway. And sooner or later the spouses found out. It always happened. Slammed doors, divorce lawyers, child custody.
— Michael Crichton, Disclosure
I shall never cease to marvel at the way we beg for love and tyranny.
— Francine du Plessix Gray, Lovers and Tyrants
But my best friend from college was silent for a long time. She, of all of my friends, had seen the parade of sad wrecks through my life, date after bad date after bad boyfriend. She was the one who'd picked up the pieces after the musician, the investment banker, the humanitarian who was human to everyone but me.When at last she spoke, she said, Oh, hell.And, after that: Hallelujah.
— Lauren Groff, Delicate Edible Birds and Other Stories
All positive interactions with other human beings involve, to some degree, the experience of visibility-- that is, the experience of being seen and understood.
— Nathaniel Branden
When she had failed once or twice to respond to some conversational gambit or other, Bond also relapsed into silence and occupied himself with his own gloomy thoughts.
— Ian Fleming, Casino Royale
The moment you put someone on a pedestal they will look down upon you. The trick is respecting each other equally.
— Teresa Mummert
SELFLESS LOVE.If you have a special person in your life, but you find yourselves arguing, irritated and/or fighting out of the blue… you both need to try to step back and be selfless and think of the other person... with no ego of your own. No ego. We are ALL dealing with our own tough issues. We may keep them to ourselves, but we all have struggles. If you BOTH allow yourselves to step into each others shoes- to have the awareness and respect for each others issues and struggles... that will most likely allow the love that you have for each other to shine through at its brightest.There will be ups and downs- feelings of being under-appreciated for both. It will happen. But let that be the worst that happens. Unity through diversity. That's the greatest love. A selfless love. It’s paradoxical, but you each would get back more than you give out. That's the love that conquers all things that’s mentioned in the Bible. It will be challenging for both of you, but well worth it.
— José N. Harris
When we are passionately in love with our Prince, we put Him above all else--not just in theory, but also practically, in every moment of our day-to-day lives. We do not live for the applause of heaven. Our longings are not for people's approval but only for more and more of Him. We are marked by an effortless, unshakable strength that is found in the presence of our perfect Lover.
— Leslie Ludy, Authentic Beauty: The Shaping of a Set-Apart Young Woman
We imagined we knew everything the other thought, even when we did not necessarily want to know it, but in fact, I have come to see, we knew not the smallest fraction of what there was to know.
— Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking
I am getting nowhere with you and I can't let you go and I cant get through.
— Ani DiFranco
Security comes first from inside of you. Then, if you are very lucky, you will be in a position to find other people who also possess that same sort of security, and build some sort of family or community as a team.
— Anthony D. Ravenscroft, Polyamory: Roadmaps for the Clueless and Hopeful: An Introduction on Polyamory
Anyway, you can't leave her like that. You can't do that to the woman. She doesn't deserve it; nobody does. You don't belong to her and she doesn't belong to you, but you're both part of each other; if she got up and left now and walked away and you never saw each other again for the rest of your lives, and you lived an ordinary waking life for another fifty years, even so on your deathbed you would still know she was part of you.
— Iain Banks
If you listen closely, silence can be deafening.
— Truth Devour, Wantin
When a man cheats, it is said it is because he is a dog. When a woman cheats, it is said it is because her man is a dog.
— Mokokoma Mokhonoana, Divided & Conquered
Sex can lead to nasty things like herpes, gonorrhea, and something called relationships.
— Sacha Baron Cohen
I'm not saying that I think one man is better than the other. I'm not saying that either is kinder or wiser or more ambitious, more thoughtful, confident, or able. But the fact is that when I'm with the one, comfort settles into my bones. I feel calm around him, as if the sun is smiling down on me and the world has suddenly become a sweet, safe place to be. I feel good about life―about myself. And it's hard not to want to be near someone who, just by their very nature, makes you feel that way.
— Richelle E. Goodrich, Smile Anyway
If you really love someone. You wouldn't hide them. You would be proud to let the whole world know that you have feelings for that special someone. If I got asked who do I love. I would straight up say the name. Just imagine how special that person would feel to know that you aren't afraid or embarrassed to let everyone know that person means a lot to you. However, sometimes its understandable especially when you have your friends or family against it. Which to me shouldn't matter because it's your life and we only live once. Even if it doesn't work out, we grow from our own experiences, right?
— Jonathan Anthony Burkett
Where does love go? When something you have taped on the wall falls off, what has happened to the stickum? It has relaxed. It has accumulated an assortment of hairs and fuzzies. It has said "Fuck it" and given up. It doesn't go anywhere special, it's just gone. Energy is created, and then it is destroyed. So much for the laws of physics. So much for chemistry. So much for not so much.
— Lorrie Moore
I hate everything about her except for the fact that I love everything about her.
— Charles Yu, Sorry Please Thank You: Stories
Well, clearly someone you trust isn’t really someone you should be trusting,” she said without thinking, and regretted it when Terrible glanced at her. He did it fast, just a quick cut of his eyes in her direction and then away again, but she saw it. She felt it. It was starting already. She wished she could say she was surprised, wished she hadn’t been waiting for it, expecting it the way she expected rain from black clouds overhead. Nothing in the world was permanent, especially not happiness. She’d always known that. She just wished life would stop proving her right.
— Stacia Kane, Sacrificial Magic
My guess is that he remembers some of me, some of us together, and the rest rolled off him like topsoil in a flash flood.
— Elizabeth Kostova, The Swan Thieves
Delusions are hardly an escape from reality. It’s a way of understanding insane people living in a backwards world.
— Shannon L. Alder
We are responsible for our own relationships, their successes, their failures, the good times, the bad times. Take responsibility for creating the relationships that you desire.
— Sam Owen
Pubic hair is proof of sexual maturity and if your partner finds that a turn-off, you should probably reconsider that partner.
— Hadley Freeman, Be Awesome: Modern Life for Modern Ladies
I don't know," she said. "We used to squabble a lot when we were going together and then engaged and everything, but I thought everything would be so different as soon as you were married. And now I feel so sort of strange and everything. I feel so sort of alone.
— Dorothy Parker, Here We Are
My mother had always taught me to write about my feelings instead of sharing really personal things with others, so I spent many evenings writing in my diary, eating everything in the kitchen and waiting for Mr. Wrong to call.
— Cathy Guisewite
I had a dream about you. In my dream I stole all your money, kidnapped your parents, and mailed you mannequin parts spray-painted red in a series of packages that also included ransom notes. Then, towards the end of the dream, the cops surrounded my cave and swarmed in to arrest me. Sweating, my eyes shot open, and I realized it was a dream. “Of course it’s a dream,” I thought. “The cops have no idea where my cave is, and your first package has yet to be delivered.” 
— Dark Jar Tin Zoo, I Had a Dream About You
I think we’re romantic people in some ways, but when it comes to relationships it’s not a question of ‘Can you trust another human being?’, so much as a question of trusting yourself. The animalistic nature of man seems to mean that you’re bound to find another people physically attractive. And there’s something dishonest about shutting those feelings off - it seems puritanical to deny yourself that. The idea of sin is still so widely pervading.
— Richey Edwards
I had a day when I was busy in the world, where the activity created a turmoil on the surface of my consciousness like waves on the surface of the ocean, which made it difficult to see through the waves to the inner silence. It reminded me that we need to develop both the capacity to use the mind when engaged in activity and social relations, and to be able to let go of the activity and to come in contact with the deep inner silence. The relationship between being active in the world and in social relations and the inner silence is like the relationship between the waves on the surface of the ocean and the deep inner silence on the bottom of the ocean.
— Swami Dhyan Giten, Presence - Working from Within. The Psychology of Being
Or maybe I, like, cuddle raped him or something.
— Lauren Barnholdt, Two-Way Street
How do people know they are sane? Can a person be gripped by lunacy, only to be released a short time later, never to relive the episode again?
— Dee Remy, There Once Was A Boy
The greatest testament of a life lived is to be missed when you are gone. It is not something you can plan for or buy ahead of time. It is a sentiment that comes freely from the lives you touch in positive ways.
— Brian MacLearn
we all make vows, Jimmy. And there is something very beautiful and touching and noble about wanting good impulses to be permanent and true forever," she said. "Most of us stand up and vow to love, honor and cherish someone. And we truly mean it, at the time. But two or twelve or twenty years down the road, the lawyers are negotiating the property settlement." "You and George didn't go back on your promises." She laughed. "Lemme tell ya something, sweetface. I have been married at least four times, to four different men." She watched him chew that over for a moment before continuing, "They've all been named George Edwards but, believe me, the man who is waiting for me down the hall is a whole lot different animal from the boy I married, back before there was dirt. Oh, there are continuities. He has always been fun and he has never been able to budget his time properly and - well, the rest is none of your business." "But people change," he said quietly. "Precisely. People change. Cultures change. Empires rise and fall. Shit. Geology changes! Every ten years or so, George and I have faced the fact that we have changed and we've had to decide if it makes sense to create a new marriage between these two new people." She flopped back against her chair. "Which is why vows are such a tricky business. Because nothing stays the same forever. Okay. Okay! I'm figuring something out now." She sat up straight, eyes focused somewhere outside the room, and Jimmy realized that even Anne didn't have all the answers and that was either the most comforting thing he'd learned in a long time or the most discouraging. "Maybe because so few of us would be able to give up something so fundamental for something so abstract, we protect ourselves from the nobility of a priest's vows by jeering at him when he can't live up to them, always and forever." She shivered and slumped suddenly, "But, Jimmy! What unnatural words. Always and forever! Those aren't human words, Jim. Not even stones are always and forever.
— Mary Doria Russell, The Sparrow
I feel incendiary, a wildfire. My spirit licks at the gates of a very elaborate, customized, and distracting emotional Hades.
— Suzanne Finnamore, Split: A Memoir of Divorce
When I speak of life and love as expanding with age, sex seems the least important thing. At any age we grow by the enlarging of consciousness, by learning a new language, or a new art or craft (gardening?) that implies a new way of looking at the universe. Love is one of the great enlargers of the person because it requires us to "take in" the stranger and to understand him, and to exercise restraint and tolerance as well as imagination to make the relationship work.
— May Sarton, Journal of a Solitude