Megan McCafferty

"Loving you has never been the problem. What's troubling me is how loving you may never be enough."

Megan McCafferty (Fourth Comings)

Libba Bray

"You can never really know someone completely. That’s why it’s the most terrifying thing in the world, really—taking someone on faith, hoping they’ll take you on faith too. It’s such a precarious balance, it’s a wonder we do it at all ...."

Libba Bray

Susan Fletcher

"We carry on. We have ourselves and we carry on- in spite of our losses and mistakes and women, I think, have more than most. We are good secret-keepers. We can tie weights to out guilt and passions, and hatred and deceitfulness, and let them sink down, so that you'd never know they existed at all. But we know. I can count all mine."

Susan Fletcher

Susan Fletcher

"We carry on. We have ourselves and we carry on- in spite of our losses and mistakes and women, I think, have more than most. We are good secret-keepers. We can tie weights to out guilt and passions, and hatred and deceitfulness, and let them sink down, so that you'd never know they existed at all. But we know. I can count all mine."

Susan Fletcher

Ian McEwan

"And she did not miss his presence so much as his voice on the phone. Even being lied to constantly, though hardly like love, was sustained attention; he must care about her to fabricate so elaborately and over such a long stretch of time ... surely his deceit was a form of tribute to the importance of their relationship?"

Ian McEwan (Atonement)

Chuck Palahniuk

"I thought we were a real love relationship. I did. I was very invested in love, but it was just this long long sex thing that could end at any moment because after all, it's just about getting off. Almost all the time, you tell yourself you're loving somebody when you're just using them. This only looks like love."

Chuck Palahniuk (Invisible Monsters)

Gordon B. Hinckley

"The remedy for most marital stress is not in divorce. It is in repentance and forgiveness, in sincere expressions of charity and service. It is not in separation. It is in simple integrity that leads a man and a woman to square up their shoulders and meet their obligations. It is found in the Golden Rule, a time-honored principle that should first and foremost find expression in marriage."

Gordon B. Hinckley

Kahlil Gibrán

"Let there be spaces in your togetherness, and let the winds of the heavens dance between you. Love one another but make not a bond of love. Let it rather be a moving sea between the shores of your souls. Fill each other's cup but drink not from one cup. Give one another of your bread but eat not from the same loaf. Sing and dance together and be joyous, but let each one of you be alone, even as the strings of a lute are alone though they quiver with the same music. Give your hearts, but not into each other's keeping. For only the hand of Life can contain your hearts. And stand together, yet not too near together: for the pillars of the temple stand apart, and the oak tree and the cypress grow not in each other's shadow."

Kahlil Gibrán

Friedrich Nietzsche

"It is not a lack of love, but a lack of friendship that makes unhappy marriages."

Friedrich Nietzsche

Nicole Krauss

"He was gone, and all that was left was the space you'd grown around him, like a tree that grows around a fence. For a long time, it would remain hollow. Years, maybe. And when at last it was filled again, you knew that the new love you felt for a man would have been impossible without him. If it weren't for him, there would never have been an empty space, or the need to fill it."

Nicole Krauss

Jane Austen

"I can listen no longer in silence. I must speak to you by such means as are within my reach. You pierce my soul. I am half agony, half hope. Tell me not that I am too late, that such precious feelings are gone for ever. I offer myself to you again with a heart even more your own than when you almost broke it, eight years and a half ago. Dare not say that man forgets sooner than woman, that his love has an earlier death. I have loved none but you. Unjust I may have been, weak and resentful I have been, but never inconstant. You alone have brought me to Bath. For you alone, I think and plan. Have you not seen this? Can you fail to have understood my wishes? I had not waited even these ten days, could I have read your feelings, as I think you must have penetrated mine. I can hardly write. I am every instant hearing something which overpowers me. You sink your voice, but I can distinguish the tones of that voice when they would be lost on others. Too good, too excellent creature! You do us justice, indeed. You do believe that there is true attachment and constancy among men. Believe it to be most fervent, most undeviating, in F. W.

I must go, uncertain of my fate; but I shall return hither, or follow your party, as soon as possible. A word, a look, will be enough to decide whether I enter your father's house this evening or never.

Captain Wentworth to Anne Elliot"

Jane Austen

On love

"We set down feasts for each other and treated our love with tongues of fire. Our bodies were fields of wonder to us."

Pat Conroy (Beach Music)

"There is only one happiness in life, to love and be loved."

George Sand

"I was nauseous and tingly all over. I was either in love or I had smallpox."

Woody Allen

"We love because it's the only true adventure."

Nikki Giovanni

"Throw your dreams into space like a kite, and you do not know what it will bring back, a new life, a new friend, a new love, a new country."

Anaïs Nin


"To fear love is to fear life, and those who fear life are already 3-parts dead."

Bertrand Russell

"Those who do not have imaginary conversations do not love. "

Josephine Hart

"In vain have I struggled but it will not do, my feelings will not be repressed. You must allow me to tell you, how much I love and admire you."

Jane Austen

Danica Cooper

"Infatuation is blind, love is seeing all of someone and loving them anyway."

Danica Cooper

On friendship

"Piglet sidled up to Pooh from behind. 'Pooh?' he whispered.
'Yes, Piglet?'
'Nothing,' said Piglet, taking Pooh's hand. 'I just wanted to be sure of you.'"

A. A. Milne

"Can miles truly separate you from friends.... If you want to be with someone you love, aren't you already there?"

Richard Bach

"A friend is someone who understands your past, believes in your future, and accepts you just the way you are."

Unknown

"A friend is someone who knows the song in your heart and can sing it back to you when you have forgotten the words"

Unknown

"A friend is a hand that is always holding yours, no matter how close or far apart you may be. A friend is someone who is always there and will always, always care. A friend is a feeling of forever in the heart."

Collin McCarty

"True friends are those who lift you up when your heart's wings forget how to fly"

Unknown

"Truly great friends are hard to find, difficult to leave, and impossible to forget"

Randolf G

"A true friend is one who knows all about you and likes you anyway."

Christi Mary Warner

"However rare true love maybe , it is less so than true friendship"

Albert Einstein

"People who cannot understand when you are silent, can never understand when you speak."
Mayank Saraf

"Never let your friendship die because of a lie, tell the truth."

Unknown

"Friendship is a prism through which the many variations of beauty are revealed in our lives."
Anonymous

"Of all the means to insure happiness throughout the whole life, by far the most important is the acquisition of friends."

Epicurus (A Guide to Happiness)

"Life is an ugly, awful place not to have a best friend"

Sarah Dessen (Someone Like You)

"When you have no light to guide you and no one to walk beside you, I will come to you. When the night is dark and stormy, you won't have to reach out for me, I will come for you."

Unknown

"It takes a minute to say hello and forever to say goodbye."

Dr. Nidhi Gupta

"Don't let your dreams be just dreams."

Mayank Saraf

"A friend can tell you things you don't want to tell yourself"

Frances Ward Weller

"A friend accepts us as we are yet helps us to be what we should"

Unknown

"I value the friend who for me finds time on his calendar, but I cherish the friend who for me does not consult his calendar."

Robert Brault

"I don't need a friend who changes when I change and who nods when I nod; my shadow does that much better."

Plutarch

"If you are to have friend's, you should have friends that are truthful and can tell a good story."

Alexandria Esobar

"Love is friendship set on fire."

Unknown

"A friend isn't judged by how often you get together, but by a total lack of awkwardness when you do. "

Kang Ho Dong

"Perhaps he does not want to be friends with you until he knows what you are like. With owls, it is never easy-come-easy-go."

T.H. White (The Sword in the Stone)

"A friend loves you, makes you feel alright, troubles are not troubles when you talk, listen and accept you as you are, because you will feel the same and love the same."

Anonymous

"Which of all my important nothings shall I tell you first?"

Jane Austen

"A friend is someone who loves you, when you forget to love yourself "

Unknown

We spent all those years talking about stuff we had in common, and the last few months noticing all the ways we were different and it broke both of our hearts."

Nick Hornby

"The worst thing about being lied to is knowing you weren't worth the truth "

Unknown

"We come back to the same people to learn something about how we have changed. We want to be assured that we have changed. We so want our pictures to paint differently than they do."

Heather Duffy

"When it hurts to look back and your scared to look ahead you can look beside you and your best friend will be there."

Unknown

"Flowers leave some of their fragrance in the hand that bestows them."

Chinese Proverb

"Friends don’t spy; true friendship is about privacy, too."

Stephen King

"Men have forgotten this truth,' said the fox. 'But you must not forget it. You become responsible, forever, for what you have tamed.'"

Antoine de Saint-Exupérye (The Little Prince)

Elizabeth Gilbert

"I have a history of making decisions very quickly about men. I have always fallen in love fast and without measuring risks. I have a tendency not only to see the best in everyone, but to assume that everyone is emotionally capable of reaching his highest potential. I have fallen in love more times than I care to count with the highest potential of a man, rather than with the man himself, and I have hung on to the relationship for a long time (sometimes far too long) waiting for the man to ascend to his own greatness. Many times in romance I have been a victim of my own optimism."

Elizabeth Gilbert

On relationships ....

"As grand and glorious as love is, it is not without its perils. Anyone who has felt the cruel pangs of rejection knows that love is best approached cautiously, as one would approach an angry, cornered brush-tailed possum. Yes, before throwing yourself into a relationship, it's wise to buy a sturdy pair of leather gloves, and to be extra careful of love's front claws and rows of needle-sharp teeth."

Michael J. Nelson

"Perhaps there is more understanding and beauty in life when the glaring sunlight is softened by the patterns of shadows. Perhaps there is more depth in a relationship that has weathered some storms. Experience that never disappoints or saddens or stirs up feeling is a bland experience with little challenge or variation of color. Perhaps it's when we experience confidence and faith and hope that we see materialize before our eyes this builds up within us a feeling of inner strength, courage, and security. We are all personalities that grow and develop as a result of our experiences, relationships, thoughts, and emotions. We are the sum total of all the parts that go into the making of a life."

Virginia M. Axline

"Today the network of relationships linking the human race to itself and to the rest of the biosphere is so complex that all aspects affect all others to an extraordinary degree. Someone should be studying the whole system, however crudely that has to be done, because no gluing together of partial studies of a complex nonlinear system can give a good idea of the behavior of the whole. "

Murray Gell-Mann

"I am one of the searchers. There are, I believe, millions of us. We are not unhappy, but neither are we really content. We continue to explore life, hoping to uncover its ultimate secret. We continue to explore ourselves, hoping to understand. We like to walk along the beach, we are drawn by the ocean, taken by its power, its unceasing motion, its mystery and unspeakable beauty. We like forests and mountains,, deserts and hidden rivers, and the lonely cities as well. Our sadness is as much a part of our lives as is our laughter. To share our sadness with one we love is perhaps as great a joy as we can know - unless it be to share our laughter.
We searchers are ambitious only for life itself, for everything beautiful it can provide. Most of all we love and want to be loved. We want to live in a relationship that will not impede our wandering, nor prevent our search, nor lock us in prison walls; that will take us for what little we have to give. We do not want to prove ourselves to another or compete for love.

For wanderers, dreamers, and lovers, for lonely men and women who dare to ask of life everything good and beautiful. It is for those who are too gentle to live among wolves."

James Kavanaugh


"It is not inertia alone that is responsible for human relationships repeating themselves from case to case, indescribably monotonous and unrenewed: it is shyness before any sort of new, unforeseeable experience with which one does not think oneself able to cope. But only someone who is ready for everything, who excludes nothing, not even the most enigmatical will live the relation to another as something alive."

Rilke

"An individual can be hurt in countless ways by other men's irrationality, dishonesty, injustice. Above all, he can be disappointed, perhaps grievously, by the vices of a person he had once trusted or loved. But as long as his property is not expropriated and he remains unmolested physically, the damage he sustains is essentially spiritual, not physical; in such a case, the victim alone has the power and the responsibility of healing his wounds. He remains free: free to think, to learn from his experiences, to look elsewhere for human relationships; he remains free to start afresh and to pursue his happiness."

Leonard Peikoff

"Happy will the house be in which the relationships are formed from character."

Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Living with integrity means: Not settling for less than what you know you deserve in your relationships. Asking for what you want and need from others. Speaking your truth, even though it might create conflict or tension. Behaving in ways that are in harmony with your personal values. Making choices based on what you believe, and not what others believe."

Barbara De Angelis

"Maybe we all live life at too high a pitch, those of us who absorb emotional things all day, and as mere consequence we can never feel merely content: we have to be unhappy, or ecstatically, head-over-heels happy, and those states are difficult to achieve within a stable, solid relationship."

Nick Hornby

"Relationships - of all kinds - are like sand held in your hand. Held loosely, with an open hand, the sand remains where it is.The minute you close your hand and squeeze tightly to hold on, the sand trickles through your fingers. You may hold onto it, but most will be spilled. A relationship is like that. Held loosely, with respect and freedom for the other person, it is likely to remain intact. But hold too tightly, too possessively, and the relationship slips away and is lost."

Kaleel Jamison

"He saw all these forms and faces in a thousand relationships become newly born. Each one was mortal, a passionate, painful example of all that is transitory. Yet none of them died,
they only changed, were always reborn, continually had a new face: only time stood between one face and another."

Hermann Hesse

Helen Keller

"The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched. They must be felt with the heart"

Helen Keller