"The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances: if there is any reaction, both are transformed."
— Carl Gustav Jung

"Why is it," he said, one time, at the subway entrance, "I feel I've known you so many years?"
"Because I like you," she said, "and I don't want anything from you."
— Ray Bradbury (Fahrenheit 451)

"When we're incomplete, we're always searching for somebody to complete us. When, after a few years or a few months of a relationship, we find that we're still unfulfilled, we blame our partners and take up with somebody more promising. This can go on and on--series polygamy--until we admit that while a partner can add sweet dimensions to our lives, we, each of us, are responsible for our own fulfillment. Nobody else can provide it for us, and to believe otherwise is to delude ourselves dangerously and to program for eventual failure every relationship we enter."
— Tom Robbins

"Man may have discovered fire, but women discovered how to play with it.
— Carrie Bradshaw"
— Candace Bushnell (Sex and the City)

"Hugh and I have been together for so long that in order to arouse extraordinary passion, we need to engage in physical combat. Once, he hit me on the back of the head with a broken wineglass, and I fell to the floor pretending to be unconscious. That was romantic, or would have been had he rushed to my side rather than stepping over my body to fetch the dustpan."
— David Sedaris (Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim)

"Women cannot complain about men anymore until they start getting better taste in them."
— Bill Maher

"He knew one of the women well, and had shared his universe with her. They had seen the same mountains, and the same trees, although each of them had seem them differently. She knew his weaknesses, his moments of hatred, of despair. Yet she was there at his side. They shared the same universe."
— Paulo Coelho (The Valkyries)

"When you don't talk, there's a lot of stuff that ends up not getting said."
— Catherine Murdock (Dairy Queen)

"I don't want to be your other half. I believe that one and one make two."
— Alanis Morissette (Alanis Morissette - Jagged Little Pill)

"Assumptions are the termites of relationships. "
— Henry Winkler

"I would choose a man without money rather than money without a man."
— Themistocles

"You will have five hundred million little bells, and I shall have five hundred million springs of fresh water..."
— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (The Little Prince)

"The single greatest lesson the garden teaches is that our relationship to the planet need not be zero-sum, and that as long as the sun still shines and people still can plan and plant, think and do, we can, if we bother to try, find ways to provide for ourselves without diminishing the world. "
— Michael Pollan (The Omnivore's Dilemma)

"Her face looked ugly in the attempt to avoid tears; it was an ugliness which bound him to her more than any beauty could have done. It isn't being happy together, he thought as though it were a fresh discovery, that makes one love--it's being unhappy together."
— Graham Greene (The Ministry of Fear: An Entertainment)

"All of them, all except Phineas, constructed at infinite cost to themselves these Maginot Lines against this enemy they thought they saw across the frontier, this enemy who never attacked that way-if he ever attacked at all; if he was indeed the enemy."
— John Knowles (A Separate Peace)

"'You could say that Elphaba brought us together,' said Boq softly. 'I'm closer to her and so I'm closer to you.'

Galinda seemed to give up. She leaned her head back on the velvet cushions of the swing and said, 'Boq, you know despite myself I think you're a little sweet. You're a little sweet and you're a little charming and you're a little maddening and you're a little habit-forming.'

Boq held his breath.

'But you're little!' she concluded. 'You're a Munchkin, for god's sake!'

He kissed her, he kissed her, he kissed her, little by little by little."
— Gregory Maguire (Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West)

"After their encounter on the approach to Jupiter, there would aways be a secret bond between them---not of love, but of tenderness, which is often more enduring."
— Arthur C. Clarke (2010: Odyssey Two)

"Your tongue is a rudder
It steers the whole ship,
Sends your words past your lips,
Or keeps them safe behind your teeth.
But the wrong words will strand you
Come of course while you sleep,
Sweep your boat out to sea
Or dashed to bits on the reef
"
— Play Crack the Sky by Brand New

"Ultimately the bond of all companionship, whether in marriage or in friendship, is conversation, and conversation must have a common basis, and between two people of widely different culture the only common basis possible is the lowest level.
"
— Oscar Wilde

"Through my love for you, I want to express my love for the whole cosmos, the whole of humanity, and all beings. By living with you, I want to learn to love everyone and all species. If I succeed in loving you, I will be able to love everyone and all species on Earth... This is the real message of love."
— Thich Nhat Hanh (Teachings on Love)

"Human relationships always help us to carry on because they always presuppose further developments, a future - and also because we live as if our only task was precisely to have relationships with other people."
— Albert Camus

"I broke in Big and now the Idiot Stick Figure with No Soul gets to ride him around."
— Carrie Bradshaw

"'People are islands,' she said. 'They don't really touch. However close they are, they're really quite separate. Even if they've been married for fifty years.'"
— Ian Fleming (Casino Royale)

"Man, when you lose your laugh you lose your footing. A man go around lettin' a woman whup him down till he can't laugh any more, and he loses one of the biggest edges he's got on his side."
— Ken Kesey (One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest)

"But it is impossible to go through life without trust; that is to be imprisoned in the worst cell of all, oneself."
— Graham Greene (The Ministry of Fear: An Entertainment)

"He was one of those quite rare adults who communicate with small children fairly well and who love them all impartially--not in a sugary way but in a businesslike fashion that may sometimes entail a hug, in the same way that closing a big business deal may call for a handshake."
— Stephen King (The Gunslinger)

"A man can know his father, or his son, and there might still be nothing between them but loyalty and love and mutual incomprehension."
— Marilynne Robinson (Gilead)

"Living together/ is one move closer/ to living apart"
— Kristi Maxwell

"God is even in a single parent household."
— Karen Salmansohn (Even God Is Single, So Stop Giving Me A Hard Time)

"...you do not have too many boogeymen for me. You have just the right number."
— Rebecca Wells

"It was a bitter moment for us. We weren't two mature parents. We were just two kids playing grown-up. We still needed Mommy and Daddy's permission, blessings, and money to survive."
— Erma Bombeck

"There is no mystery-- that's the beauty of it. We are entirely explicable to each other, and yet we stay. What a miracle that is."
— Kamila Shamsie, "Omi" Broken Verses

"Shall there be truth between us, as two men? Not as friends, but as enemies and equals?"
— Stephen King (The Gunslinger)

"Tell me whom you haunt and I’ll tell you who you are."
— André Breton

"If thou dost seek to have what thou dost hide,
By self-example mayst thou be denied."
— William Shakespeare (Shakespeare's Sonnets)

"In the best, the friendliest and simplest relations flattery or praise is necessary, just as grease is necessary to keep wheels turning. "
— Leo Tolstoy (War and Peace)

"At least there's noting 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)

"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)

"...their respect for the mystery--the half-grasped but never spoken idea that maybe, when you got right down to the place where the cheese binds, there is no such thing as marriage, no such thing as union, that each soul stood alone and ultimately defied rationality. That was the mystery."
— Stephen King (Pet Sematary)

"Difficult but worth it-- that's how my mother had once describe life with Omi."
— Kamila Shamsie

"We cannot win in team situations or in relationships by ourselves. It is like trying to pick up a pencil with only one finger...Even if that one finger is extremely strong, it will prove almost impossible to pick up that pencil unless you use your other fingers or some other part of your hand. Teamwork is a bit like using all of your fingers. Each one is unique and contributes something different, but they unite in pursuit of a common goal."
— Terry Orlick

"(Her husband's departure ...)had picked Mildred up by the hair and dropped her down at the doorstep of insanity.
From "Butterfly on F street""
— Edward P. Jones

"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)