Quotes about relationships

You said you’re going far away,” Tamaru said. “How far away are we talking about?”

“It’s a distance that can’t be measured.”

“Like the distance that separates one person’s heart from another’s.”

Such were the brittle threads of a relationship built not on trust but on a slurry of fear, mutual codependence, and self-interest.

there’s not an expiration date on needing help, or needing people. You don’t get to a certain age and it stops.

He now viewed a successful relationship as one in which both people had recognized the best of what the other person had to offer and had chosen to value it as well.

Relationships never provide you with everything. They provide you with some things. You take all the things you want from a person -- sexual chemistry, let's say, or good conversation, or financial support, or intellectual compatibility, or niceness, or loyalty -- and you get to pick three of those things. The rest you have to look for elsewhere…If you keep trying to find everything, you'll wind up with nothing.

In the whole dark universe, I've met you at this bit of fire, and we speak with each other, and listen to each other. All of life and the war led up to this present time of being here with you. (p209)

In this time of uncertainty, when all our old social forms are crumbling, when we cannot easily find our way, we can be lights to each other. p. 403

"Chance encounters are what keep us going."

You build up relationships like that one after another and before you know it you have meaning. The more connections, the deeper the meaning. Doesn't matter if it's eel, or rice bowls, or grilled fish, whatever. Get it?

He marvelled again at the effect of projection: how hostile Henry had seemed to him when Patrick was hostile towards everyone; how considerate he seemed now that Patrick had no argument with him. What would it be like to stop projecting? Was it possible at all?

Of course it was wrong to want to change people, but what else could you possibly want to do with them?

The understanding and the feelings are moulded by intercourse; the understanding and feelings are corrupted by intercourse. Thus good or bad society improves or corrupts them. It is, then, all-important to know how to choose in order to improve and not to corrupt them; and we cannot make this choice, if they be not already improved and not corrupted. Thus a circle is formed, and those are fortunate who escape it.