β
When someone loves you, the way they talk about you is different. You feel safe and comfortable.
β
β
Jess C. Scott (The Intern)
β
Death ends a life, not a relationship.
β
β
Mitch Albom (Tuesdays with Morrie)
β
Indifference and neglect often do much more damage than outright dislike.
β
β
J.K. Rowling (Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (Harry Potter, #5))
β
The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances: if there is any reaction, both are transformed.
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β
C.G. Jung
β
A guy and a girl can be just friends, but at one point or another, they will fall for each other...Maybe temporarily, maybe at the wrong time, maybe too late, or maybe forever
β
β
Dave Matthews Band
β
For the two of us, home isn't a place. It is a person. And we are finally home.
β
β
Stephanie Perkins (Anna and the French Kiss (Anna and the French Kiss, #1))
β
Man may have discovered fire, but women discovered how to play with it.
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β
Candace Bushnell (Sex and the City)
β
I no longer believed in the idea of soul mates, or love at first sight. But I was beginning to believe that a very few times in your life, if you were lucky, you might meet someone who was exactly right for you. Not because he was perfect, or because you were, but because your combined flaws were arranged in a way that allowed two separate beings to hinge together.
β
β
Lisa Kleypas (Blue-Eyed Devil (Travises, #2))
β
The most painful thing is losing yourself in the process of loving someone too much, and forgetting that you are special too.
β
β
Ernest Hemingway (Men Without Women)
β
I think you still love me, but we canβt escape the fact that Iβm not enough for you. I knew this was going to happen. So Iβm not blaming you for falling in love with another woman. Iβm not angry, either. I should be, but Iβm not. I just feel pain. A lot of pain. I thought I could imagine how much this would hurt, but I was wrong.
β
β
Haruki Murakami (South of the Border, West of the Sun)
β
You can talk with someone for years, everyday, and still, it won't mean as much as what you can have when you sit in front of someone, not saying a word, yet you feel that person with your heart, you feel like you have known the person for forever.... connections are made with the heart, not the tongue.
β
β
C. JoyBell C.
β
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.
β
β
Ray Bradbury (Fahrenheit 451)
β
I mean, if the relationship can't survive the long term, why on earth would it be worth my time and energy for the short term?
β
β
Nicholas Sparks (The Last Song)
β
When you stop expecting people to be perfect, you can like them for who they are.
β
β
Donald Miller (A Million Miles in a Thousand Years: What I Learned While Editing My Life)
β
Even if you cannot change all the people around you, you can change the people you choose to be around. Life is too short to waste your time on people who donβt respect, appreciate, and value you. Spend your life with people who make you smile, laugh, and feel loved.
β
β
Roy T. Bennett (The Light in the Heart)
β
Every man I meet wants to protect me. I can't figure out what from.
β
β
Mae West
β
No relationship is perfect, ever. There are always some ways you have to bend, to compromise, to give something up in order to gain something greater...The love we have for each other is bigger than these small differences. And that's the key. It's like a big pie chart, and the love in a relationship has to be the biggest piece. Love can make up for a lot.
β
β
Sarah Dessen (This Lullaby)
β
There is greatness in doing something you hate for the sake of someone you love.
β
β
Shmuley Boteach
β
If conversation was the lyrics, laughter was the music, making time spent together a melody that could be replayed over and over without getting stale.
β
β
Nicholas Sparks
β
I know I am but summer to your heart, and not the full four seasons of the year.
β
β
Edna St. Vincent Millay
β
Come sleep with me: We won't make Love, Love will make us.
β
β
Julio CortΓ‘zar
β
True love is usually the most inconvenient kind.
β
β
Kiera Cass (The Selection (The Selection, #1))
β
I spent my life folded between the pages of books.
In the absence of human relationships I formed bonds with paper characters. I lived love and loss through stories threaded in history; I experienced adolescence by association. My world is one interwoven web of words, stringing limb to limb, bone to sinew, thoughts and images all together. I am a being comprised of letters, a character created by sentences, a figment of imagination formed through fiction.
β
β
Tahereh Mafi (Shatter Me (Shatter Me, #1))
β
It's no good pretending that any relationship has a future if your record collections disagree violently or if your favorite films wouldn't even speak to each other if they met at a party.
β
β
Nick Hornby
β
To be fully seen by somebody, then, and be loved anyhow - this is a human offering that can border on miraculous.
β
β
Elizabeth Gilbert (Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage)
β
Never marry at all, Dorian. Men marry because they are tired, women, because they are curious: both are disappointed.
β
β
Oscar Wilde (The Picture of Dorian Gray)
β
Holding Eleanor's hand was like holding a butterfly. Or a heartbeat. Like holding something complete, and completely alive.
β
β
Rainbow Rowell (Eleanor & Park)
β
Maybe our girlfriends are our soulmates and guys are just people to have fun with.
β
β
Candace Bushnell (Sex and the City)
β
Iβve been fighting to be who I am all my life. Whatβs the point of being who I am, if I canβt have the person who was worth all the fighting for?
β
β
Stephanie Lennox (I Don't Remember You)
β
I want to be in a relationship where you telling me you love me is just a ceremonious validation of what you already show me.
β
β
Steve Maraboli (Life, the Truth, and Being Free)
β
I suffer from girlnextdooritis where the guy is friends with you and that's it.
β
β
Taylor Swift
β
Well, it seems to me that the best relationships - the ones that last - are frequently the ones that are rooted in friendship. You know, one day you look at the person and you see something more than you did the night before. Like a switch has been flicked somewhere. And the person who was just a friend is... suddenly the only person you can ever imagine yourself with.
β
β
Gillian Anderson
β
Man, when you lose your laugh you lose your footing.
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Ken Kesey (One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest)
β
if you love two people at the same time, choose the second. Because if you really loved the first one, you wouldn't have fallen for the second.
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β
Johnny Depp
β
I know enough to know that no woman should ever marry a man who hated his mother.
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β
Martha Gellhorn (Selected Letters)
β
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.
β
β
Elizabeth Gilbert (Eat, Pray, Love)
β
Ok. You fuck me, then snub me. You love me, you hate me. You show me a sensitive side, then you turn into a total asshole. Is this a pretty accurate description of our relationship.
β
β
Chuck Palahniuk (Fight Club)
β
For there to be betrayal, there would have to have been trust first.
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β
Suzanne Collins (The Hunger Games (The Hunger Games, #1))
β
Every couple needs to argue now and then. Just to prove that the relationship is strong enough to survive. Long-term relationships, the ones that matter, are all about weathering the peaks and the valleys.
β
β
Nicholas Sparks (Safe Haven)
β
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. It confuses you, because you think that your feelings were wrong and it makes you feel so small because it's so hard to keep it inside when you let it out and it doesn't coma back. You're left so alone that you can't explain. Damn, there's nothing like that, is there? I've been there and you have too. You're nodding your head.
β
β
Henry Rollins (The Portable Henry Rollins)
β
Our wounds are often the openings into the best and most beautiful part of us.
β
β
David Richo
β
If you spend your time hoping someone will suffer the consequences for what they did to your heart, then you're allowing them to hurt you a second time in your mind.
β
β
Shannon L. Alder
β
I used to advertise my loyalty and I don't believe there is a single person I loved that I didn't eventually betray.
β
β
Albert Camus (The Fall)
β
When you don't talk, there's a lot of stuff that ends up not getting said.
β
β
Catherine Gilbert Murdock (Dairy Queen (Dairy Queen, #1))
β
Cheating and lying aren't struggles, they're reasons to break up.
β
β
Patti Callahan Henry (Between The Tides)
β
When in a relationship, a real man doesn't make his woman jealous of others, he makes others jealous of his woman.
β
β
Steve Maraboli (Unapologetically You: Reflections on Life and the Human Experience)
β
Those sweet lips. My, oh my, I could kiss those lips all night long.
Good things come to those who wait.
β
β
Jess C. Scott (The Intern)
β
It is an absolute human certainty that no one can know his own beauty or perceive a sense of his own worth until it has been reflected back to him in the mirror of another loving, caring human being.
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β
John Joseph Powell (The Secret of Staying in Love)
β
Relationships dont always make sense. Especially from the outside
β
β
Sarah Dessen (Along for the Ride)
β
I may not always be with you
But when we're far apart
Remember you will be with me
Right inside my heart
β
β
Marc Wambolt (Poems from the Heart)
β
To say that one waits a lifetime for his soulmate to come around is a paradox. People eventually get sick of waiting, take a chance on someone, and by the art of commitment become soulmates, which takes a lifetime to perfect.
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β
Criss Jami (Venus in Arms)
β
Every couple has ups and downs, every couple argues, and thatβs the thingβyouβre a couple, and couples canβt function without trust.
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β
Nicholas Sparks (At First Sight (Jeremy Marsh & Lexie Darnell, #2))
β
I know my heart will never be the same
But I'm telling myself I'll be okay
β
β
Sara Evans
β
A dame that knows the ropes isn't likely to get tied up.
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β
Mae West
β
He loved her for almost everything she was & she decided that was enough to let him stay for a very long time.
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β
Brian Andreas
β
It's okay,β he said. βWe're together.β He didn't say you're okay, or we're alive. After all they'd been through over the last year, he knew that the most important thing was that they were together. She loved him for saying that.
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β
Rick Riordan (The Mark of Athena (The Heroes of Olympus, #3))
β
I think the key indicator for wealth is not good grades, work ethic, or IQ. I believe it's relationships. Ask yourself two questions: How many people do I know, and how much ransom money could I get for each one?
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β
Jarod Kintz
β
I will not try to convince you to love me, to respect me, to commit to me. I deserve better than that; I AM BETTER THAN THAT...Goodbye.
β
β
Steve Maraboli (Unapologetically You: Reflections on Life and the Human Experience)
β
Women cannot complain about men anymore until they start getting better taste in them.
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β
Bill Maher
β
What we wait around a lifetime for with one person, we can find in a moment with someone else.
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β
Stephanie Klein (Straight Up and Dirty)
β
Remember that the best relationship is one in which your love for each other exceeds your need for each other.
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β
Dalai Lama XIV
β
I think you are wrong to want a heart. It makes most people unhappy. If you only knew it, you are in luck not to have a heart.
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β
L. Frank Baum (The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (Oz, #1))
β
Why wasnβt friendship as good as a relationship? Why wasnβt it even better? It was two people who remained together, day after day, bound not by sex or physical attraction or money or children or property, but only by the shared agreement to keep going, the mutual dedication to a union that could never be codified.
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β
Hanya Yanagihara (A Little Life)
β
nothing in this world was more difficult than love.
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β
Gabriel GarcΓa MΓ‘rquez
β
Why is it that the right people never wind up together? Why are people so afraid to leave a relationship, even if they know it's a bad one?
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β
Stephanie Perkins (Anna and the French Kiss (Anna and the French Kiss, #1))
β
Books are a poor substitute for female companionship, but they are easier to find.
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β
Patrick Rothfuss (The Wise Manβs Fear (The Kingkiller Chronicle, #2))
β
Weβre all seeking that special person who is right for us. But if youβve been through enough relationships, you begin to suspect thereβs no right person, just different flavors of wrong. Why is this? Because you yourself are wrong in some way, and you seek out partners who are wrong in some complementary way. But it takes a lot of living to grow fully into your own wrongness. And it isnβt until you finally run up against your deepest demons, your unsolvable problemsβthe ones that make you truly who you areβthat weβre ready to find a lifelong mate. Only then do you finally know what youβre looking for. Youβre looking for the wrong person. But not just any wrong person: it's got to be the right wrong personβsomeone you lovingly gaze upon and think, βThis is the problem I want to have.β
I will find that special person who is wrong for me in just the right way.
β
β
Andrew Boyd (Daily Afflictions: The Agony of Being Connected to Everything in the Universe)
β
Every woman that finally figured out her worth, has picked up her suitcases of pride and boarded a flight to freedom, which landed in the valley of change.
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β
Shannon L. Alder
β
There comes a time in your life when you have to choose to turn the page, write another book or simply close it.
β
β
Shannon L. Alder
β
Youβve changed me forever. And Iβll never forget you.
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β
Kiera Cass (The Elite (The Selection, #2))
β
It is always the false that makes you suffer, the false desires and fears, the false values and ideas, the false relationships between people. Abandon the false and you are free of pain; truth makes happy, truth liberates.
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β
Nisargadatta Maharaj
β
Seldom, very seldom, does complete truth belong to any human disclosure; seldom can it happen that something is not a little disguised or a little mistaken.
β
β
Jane Austen (Emma)
β
I had a boyfriend who told me Iβd never succeed, never be nominated for a Grammy, never have a hit song, and that he hoped Iβd fail. I said to him, βSomeday, when weβre not together, you wonβt be able to order a cup of coffee at the fucking deli without hearing or seeing me.
β
β
Lady Gaga
β
Human knowledge is never contained in one person. It grows from the relationships we create between each other and the world, and still it is never complete.
β
β
Paul Kalanithi (When Breath Becomes Air)
β
The venn diagram of boys who donβt like smart girls and boys you donβt wanna date is a circle.
β
β
John Green
β
Don't leave a piece of jewelry at his house so you can go back and get it later; he may be with his real girlfriend.
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β
Amy Sedaris (I Like You: Hospitality Under the Influence)
β
I'm about to make a wild, extreme and severe relationship rule: the word busy is a load of crap and is most often used by assholes. The word "busy" is the relationship Weapon of Mass Destruction. It seems like a good excuse, but in fact in every silo you uncover, all you're going to find is a man who didn't care enough to call. Remember men are never to busy to get what they want.
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β
Greg Behrendt
β
Forgive the past. It is over. Learn from it and let go. People are constantly changing and growing. Do not cling to a limited, disconnected, negative image of a person in the past. See that person now. Your relationship is always alive and changing.
β
β
Brian L. Weiss (Messages from the Masters: Tapping Into the Power of Love)
β
Even though you may want to move forward in your life, you may have one foot on the brakes. In order to be free, we must learn how to let go. Release the hurt. Release the fear. Refuse to entertain your old pain. The energy it takes to hang onto the past is holding you back from a new life. What is it you would let go of today?
β
β
Mary Manin Morrissey
β
Did you just kiss me?" Will inquired.
Magnus made a slip-second decision. "No."
"I thought-"
"On occasion the aftereffects of the painkilling spells can result in hallucinations of the most bizarre sort."
"Oh," Will said. "How peculiar.
β
β
Cassandra Clare (Clockwork Prince (The Infernal Devices, #2))
β
I will love you always. When this red hair is white, I will still love you. When the smooth softness of youth is replaced by the delicate softness of age, I will still want to touch your skin. When your face is full of the lines of every smile you have ever smiled, of every surprise I have seen flash through your eyes, when every tear you have ever cried has left its mark upon your face,I will treasure you all the more, because I was there to see it all. I will share your life with you, Meredith, and I will love you until the last breath leaves your body or mine.
β
β
Laurell K. Hamilton (A Lick of Frost (Merry Gentry, #6))
β
People like to say love is unconditional, but it's not, and even if it was unconditional, it's still never free. There's always an expectation attached. They always want something in return. Like they want you to be happy or whatever and that makes you automatically responsible for their happiness because they won't be happy unless you are ... I just don't want that responsibility.
β
β
Katja Millay (The Sea of Tranquility)
β
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.
β
β
Tom Robbins
β
Lots of things can be fixed. Things can be fixed. But many times, relationships between people cannot be fixed, because they should not be fixed. You're aboard a ship setting sail, and the other person has joined the inland circus, or is boarding a different ship, and you just can't be with each other anymore. Because you shouldn't be.
β
β
C. JoyBell C.
β
We die to each other daily. What we know of other people is only our memory of the moments during which we knew them. And they have changed since then. To pretend that they and we are the same is a useful and convenient social convention which must sometimes be broken. We must also remember that at every meeting we are meeting a stranger.
β
β
T.S. Eliot (The Cocktail Party)
β
If a girl starts out all casual with a guy and she doesn't tell him that she wants a relationship, it will never become a relationship. If you give the guy the impression that casual is okay with you, that's all he'll ever want. Be straight with him from the start. If he gets scared and runs away, he wasn't right for you.
β
β
Susane Colasanti (Waiting for You)
β
I care," he said in a trembling voice. "I care so much that I do not know how to tell you without it seeming inconsequential compared to how I feel. Even if I am distant at times and seem as if I do not want to be with you, it is only because this scares me, too.
β
β
Aimee Carter (The Goddess Test (Goddess Test, #1))
β
Part of the problem with the word 'disabilities' is that it immediately suggests an inability to see or hear or walk or do other things that many of us take for granted. But what of people who can't feel? Or talk about their feelings? Or manage their feelings in constructive ways? What of people who aren't able to form close and strong relationships? And people who cannot find fulfillment in their lives, or those who have lost hope, who live in disappointment and bitterness and find in life no joy, no love? These, it seems to me, are the real disabilities.
β
β
Fred Rogers (The World According to Mister Rogers: Important Things to Remember)
β
Of course it hurt that we could never love each other in a physical way. We would have been far more happy if we had. But that was like the tides, the change of seasons--something immutable, an immovable destiny we could never alter. No matter how cleverly we might shelter it, our delicate friendship wasn't going to last forever. We were bound to reach a dead end. That was painfully clear.
β
β
Haruki Murakami (Sputnik Sweetheart)
β
Relationships are mysterious. We doubt the positive qualities in others, seldom the negative. You will say to your partner: do you really love me? Are you sure you love me? You will ask this a dozen times and drive the person nuts. But you never ask: are you really mad at me? Are you sure youβre angry? When someone is angry, you donβt doubt it for a moment. Yet the reverse should be true. We should doubt the negative in life, and have faith in the positive.
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β
Christopher Pike (Remember Me (Remember Me, #1-3))
β
Therefore, dear Sir, love your solitude and try to sing out with the pain it causes you. For those who are near you are far away... and this shows that the space around you is beginning to grow vast.... be happy about your growth, in which of course you can't take anyone with you, and be gentle with those who stay behind; be confident and calm in front of them and don't torment them with your doubts and don't frighten them with your faith or joy, which they wouldn't be able to comprehend. Seek out some simple and true feeling of what you have in common with them, which doesn't necessarily have to alter when you yourself change again and again; when you see them, love life in a form that is not your own and be indulgent toward those who are growing old, who are afraid of the aloneness that you trust.... and don't expect any understanding; but believe in a love that is being stored up for you like an inheritance, and have faith that in this love there is a strength and a blessing so large that you can travel as far as you wish without having to step outside it.
β
β
Rainer Maria Rilke (Letters to a Young Poet)
β
Lucky Charms are like the vampires of breakfast cereal. They're magical, they're delicious, they're a little bit dangerous and bad for you. They initially make you feel great, but then over time you realize that maybe your relationship with Lucky Charms is just a little bit unhealthy and you start to think, 'Maybe I don't want to be in a long-term relationship with a breakfast cereal that tastes delicious but damages my health.' But then the Lucky Charms gets all stalker on you and for some reason you kind of like that. It makes you feel special. So yeah, you spend your life with Lucky Charms. That's awesome. That's a great way to... get diabetes.
β
β
John Green
β
Maybe its like you said before, all of us being cracked open. Like each of us starts out as a watertight vessel. And then things happen - these people leave us, or donβt love us, or donβt get us, or we donβt get them, and we lose and fail and hurt one another. And the vessel starts to crack in places. And I mean, yeah once the vessel cracks open, the end becomes inevitable. Once it starts to rain inside the Osprey, it will never be remodeled. But there is all this time between when the cracks start to open up and when we finally fall apart. And its only that time that we see one another, because we see out of ourselves through our cracks and into others through theirs. When did we see each other face to face? Not until you saw into my cracks and I saw into yours. Before that we were just looking at ideas of each other, like looking at your window shade, but never seeing inside. But once the vessel cracks, the light can get in. The light can get out.
β
β
John Green (Paper Towns)
β
Usually adult males who are unable to make emotional connections with the women they choose to be intimate with are frozen in time, unable to allow themselves to love for fear that the loved one will abandon them. If the first woman they passionately loved, the mother, was not true to her bond of love, then how can they trust that their partner will be true to love. Often in their adult relationships these men act out again and again to test their partner's love. While the rejected adolescent boy imagines that he can no longer receive his mother's love because he is not worthy, as a grown man he may act out in ways that are unworthy and yet demand of the woman in his life that she offer him unconditional love. This testing does not heal the wound of the past, it merely reenacts it, for ultimately the woman will become weary of being tested and end the relationship, thus reenacting the abandonment. This drama confirms for many men that they cannot put their trust in love. They decide that it is better to put their faith in being powerful, in being dominant.
β
β
bell hooks
β
The paradox of our time in history is that we have taller buildings but shorter tempers, wider Freeways, but narrower viewpoints. We spend more, but have less, we buy more, but enjoy less. We have bigger houses and smaller families, more conveniences, but less time. We have more degrees but less sense, more knowledge, but less judgment, more experts, yet more problems, more medicine, but less wellness.
We drink too much, smoke too much, spend too recklessly, laugh too little, drive too fast, get too angry, stay up too late, get up too tired, read too little, watch TV too much, and pray too seldom. We have multiplied our possessions, but reduced our values. We talk too much, love too seldom, and hate too often.
We've learned how to make a living, but not a life. We've added years to life not life to years. We've been all the way to the moon and back, but have trouble crossing the street to meet a new neighbor. We conquered outer space but not inner space. We've done larger things, but not better things.
We've cleaned up the air, but polluted the soul. We've conquered the atom, but not our prejudice. We write more, but learn less. We plan more, but accomplish less. We've learned to rush, but not to wait. We build more computers to hold more information, to produce more copies than ever, but we communicate less and less.
These are the times of fast foods and slow digestion, big men and small character, steep profits and shallow relationships.
These are the days of two incomes but more divorce, fancier houses, but broken homes. These are days of quick trips, disposable diapers, throwaway morality, one night stands, overweight bodies, and pills that do everything from cheer, to quiet, to kill. It is a time when there is much in the showroom window and nothing in the stockroom. A time when technology can bring this letter to you, and a time when you can choose either to share this insight, or to just hit delete...
Remember, to spend some time with your loved ones, because they are not going to be around forever. Remember, say a kind word to someone who looks up to you in awe, because that little person soon will grow up and leave your side.
Remember, to give a warm hug to the one next to you, because that is the only treasure you can give with your heart and it doesn't cost a cent.
Remember, to say, "I love you" to your partner and your loved ones, but most of all mean it. A kiss and an embrace will mend hurt when it comes from deep inside of you.
Remember to hold hands and cherish the moment for someday that person might not be there again. Give time to love, give time to speak! And give time to share the precious thoughts in your mind.
β
β
Bob Moorehead (Words Aptly Spoken)
β
Forgiveness is not about forgetting. It is about letting go of another person's throat......Forgiveness does not create a relationship. Unless people speak the truth about what they have done and change their mind and behavior, a relationship of trust is not possible. When you forgive someone you certainly release them from judgment, but without true change, no real relationship can be established.........Forgiveness in no way requires that you trust the one you forgive. But should they finally confess and repent, you will discover a miracle in your own heart that allows you to reach out and begin to build between you a bridge of reconciliation.........Forgiveness does not excuse anything.........You may have to declare your forgiveness a hundred times the first day and the second day, but the third day will be less and each day after, until one day you will realize that you have forgiven completely. And then one day you will pray for his wholeness......
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β
William Paul Young (The Shack)
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Grief can destroy you --or focus you. You can decide a relationship was all for nothing if it had to end in death, and you alone. OR you can realize that every moment of it had more meaning than you dared to recognize at the time, so much meaning it scared you, so you just lived, just took for granted the love and laughter of each day, and didn't allow yourself to consider the sacredness of it. But when it's over and you're alone, you begin to see that it wasn't just a movie and a dinner together, not just watching sunsets together, not just scrubbing a floor or washing dishes together or worrying over a high electric bill. It was everything, it was the why of life, every event and precious moment of it. The answer to the mystery of existence is the love you shared sometimes so imperfectly, and when the loss wakes you to the deeper beauty of it, to the sanctity of it, you can't get off your knees for a long time, you're driven to your knees not by the weight of the loss but by gratitude for what preceded the loss. And the ache is always there, but one day not the emptiness, because to nurture the emptiness, to take solace in it, is to disrespect the gift of life.
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Dean Koontz (Odd Hours (Odd Thomas, #4))
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Nothing on this planet can compare with a womanβs loveβit is kind and compassionate, patient and nurturing, generous and sweet and unconditional. Pure. If you are her man, she will walk on water and through a mountain for you, too, no matter how youβve acted out, no matter what crazy thing youβve done, no matter the time or demand. If you are her man, she will talk to you until there just arenβt any more words left to say, encourage you when youβre at rock bottom and think there just isnβt any way out, hold you in her arms when youβre sick, and laugh with you when youβre up. And if youβre her man and that woman loves youβI mean really loves you?βshe will shine you up when youβre dusty, encourage you when youβre down, defend you even when sheβs not so sure you were right, and hang on your every word, even when youβre not saying anything worth listening to. And no matter what you do, no matter how many times her friends say youβre no good, no matter how many times you slam the door on the relationship, she will give you her very best and then some, and keep right on trying to win over your heart, even when you act like everything sheβs done to convince you sheβs The One just isnβt good enough.
Thatβs a womanβs loveβit stands the test of time, logic, and all circumstance.
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Steve Harvey (Act Like a Lady, Think Like a Man: What Men Really Think About Love, Relationships, Intimacy, and Commitment)
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I was suffering the easily foreseeable consequences. Addiction is the hallmark of every infatuation-based love story. It all begins when the object of your adoration bestows upon you a heady, hallucinogenic dose of something you never dared to admit you wanted-an emotional speedball, perhaps, of thunderous love and roiling excitement. Soon you start craving that intense attention, with a hungry obsession of any junkie. When the drug is witheld, you promptly turn sick, crazy, and depleted (not to mention resentful of the dealer who encouraged this addiction in the first place but now refuses to pony up the good stuff anymore-- despite the fact that you know he has it hidden somewhere, goddamn it, because he used to give it to you for free). Next stage finds you skinny and shaking in a corner, certain only that you would sell your soul or rob your neighbors just to have 'that thing' even one more time. Meanwhile, the object of your adoration has now become repulsed by you. He looks at you like you're someone he's never met before, much less someone he once loved with high passion. The irony is,you can hardly blame him. I mean, check yourself out. You're a pathetic mess,unrecognizable even to your own eyes. So that's it. You have now reached infatuation's final destination-- the complete and merciless devaluation of self." - pg 20-21
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Elizabeth Gilbert
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I'd like to repeat the advice that I gave you before, in that I think you really should make a radical change in your lifestyle and begin to boldly do things which you may previously never have thought of doing, or been too hesitant to attempt. So many people live within unhappy circumstances and yet will not take the initiative to change their situation because they are conditioned to a life of security, conformity, and conservatism, all of which may appear to give one peace of mind, but in reality nothing is more damaging to the adventurous spirit within a man than a secure future. The very basic core of a man's living spirit is his passion for adventure. The joy of life comes from our encounters with new experiences, and hence there is no greater joy than to have an endlessly changing horizon, for each day to have a new and different sun.
If you want to get more out of life, Ron, you must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life that will at first appear to you to be crazy. But once you become accustomed to such a life you will see its full meaning and its incredible beauty. And so, Ron, in short, get out of Salton City and hit the Road. I guarantee you will be very glad you did. But I fear that you will ignore my advice. You think that I am stubborn, but you are even more stubborn than me. You had a wonderful chance on your drive back to see one of the greatest sights on earth, the Grand Canyon, something every American should see at least once in his life. But for some reason incomprehensible to me you wanted nothing but to bolt for home as quickly as possible, right back to the same situation which you see day after day after day. I fear you will follow this same inclination in the future and thus fail to discover all the wonderful things that God has placed around us to discover.
Don't settle down and sit in one place. Move around, be nomadic, make each day a new horizon. You are still going to live a long time, Ron, and it would be a shame if you did not take the opportunity to revolutionize your life and move into an entirely new realm of experience.
You are wrong if you think Joy emanates only or principally from human relationships. God has placed it all around us. It is in everything and anything we might experience. We just have to have the courage to turn against our habitual lifestyle and engage in unconventional living.
My point is that you do not need me or anyone else around to bring this new kind of light in your life. It is simply waiting out there for you to grasp it, and all you have to do is reach for it. The only person you are fighting is yourself and your stubbornness to engage in new circumstances.
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Jon Krakauer (Into the Wild)