Quotes about relationships

Let us live in as small a circle as we will, we are either debtors or creditors before we have had time to look round.

It would not have occurred to her that an action which is ineffectual thereby becomes meaningless. If you loved someone, you loved him and when you had nothing else to give, you still gave him love. When the last of the chocolate was gone, his mother had clasped the child in her arms. It was no use, it changed nothing, it did not produce more chocolate, it did not avert the child's death or her own; but it seemed natural for her to do it. The refugee woman in the boat had also covered the little boy with her arm, which was no more use against the bullets than a sheet of paper. The terrible thing that the Party had done was to persuade you that mere impulses, mere feelings, were of no account, while at the same time robbing you of all power over the material world. When once you were in the grip of the Party, what you felt or did not feel, what you did or refrained from doing, made literally no difference. Whatever happened you vanished, and neither you nor your actions were ever heard of again. You were lifted clean out of the stream of history. And yet to the people of only two generations ago, this would not have seemed all-important, because they were not attempting to alter history. They were governed by private loyalties which they did not question. What mattered were individual relationships, and a completely helpless gesture, an embrace, a tear, a word spoken to a dying man, could have value in itself.''' The proles, it suddenly occurred to him, had remained in this condition. They were not loyal to a party or a country or an idea, they were loyal to one another. For the first time in his life he did not despise the proles or think of them merely as an inert force which would one day spring to life and regenerate the world. The proles had stayed human.

Money, once again; all is money. All human relationships must be purchased with money. If you have no money, men won't care for you, women won't love you; won't, that is, care for you or love you the last little bit that matters. And how right they are, after all! For, moneyless, you are unlovable. Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels. But then, if I haven't money, I DON'T speak with the tongues of men and of angels.

Without money, you can't be straightforward in your dealings with women. For without money, you can't pick and choose, you've got to take what women you can get; and then, necessarily, you've got to break free of them. Constancy, like all other virtues, has got to be paid for in money.

The only thing that could spoil a day was people.... People were always the limiters of happiness except for the very few that were as good as spring itself.

They [the best of the Masai] had that attitude that makes brothers, that unexpressed but instant and complete acceptance that you must be Masai wherever it is you come from. That attitude you only get from the best of the English, the best of the Hungarians and the very best Spaniards; the thing that used to be the most clear distinction of nobility when there was nobility. It is an ignorant attitude and the people who have it do not survive, but very few pleasanter things ever happen to you than the encountering of it.

We’ll wait and see. Come on back in the shade, he said. You mustn’t feel that way.

I don’t feel any way, the girl said. I just know things.

I don’t want you to do anything that you don’t want to do——

Nor that isn’t good for me, she said. I know. Could we have another beer?

All right. But you’ve got to realize——

I realize, the girl said. Can’t we maybe stop talking?

They sat down at the table and the girl looked across at the hills on the dry side of the valley and the man looked at her and at the table.

You’ve got to realize, he said, that I don’t want you to do it if you don’t want to.

I’m perfectly willing to go through with it if it means anything to you.

Doesn’t it mean anything to you? We could get along.

Of course it does. But I don’t want anybody but you. I don’t want any one else. And I know it’s perfectly simple.

Yes, you know it’s perfectly simple.

It’s all right for you to say that, but I do know it.

Would you do something for me now?

I’d do anything for you.

Would you please please please please please please please stop talking?

All invitations must proceed from heaven perhaps; perhaps it is futile for men to initiate their own unity, they do but widen the gulfs between them by the attempt.

It is those who cannot connect who hasten to cast the first stone.

In these English farms, if anywhere, one might see life steadily and see it whole, group in one vision its transitoriness and its eternal youth, connect — connect without bitterness until all men are brothers.

Personal relations are the important thing for ever and ever and not this outer life of telegrams and anger.

Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon. Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer. Only connect, and the beast and the monk, robbed of the isolation that is life to either, will die.