It seems to me that the best relationships, the ones that last, are frequently the ones rooted in friendship. You know, one day you look at the person and you see something more than 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. The X-Files (the character Dana Katherine Scully)
It is not time or opportunity that is to determine intimacy;-- it is disposition alone. Seven years would be insufficient to make some people acquainted with each other, and seven days are more than enough for others. Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility
In Genesis, it says that it is not good for a man to be alone; but sometimes it is a great relief. John Barrymore
The most important ingredient we put into any relationship is not what we say or what we do, but what we are. And if our words and our actions come from superficial human relations techniques (the Personality Ethic) rather than from our own inner core (the Character Ethic), others will sense that duplicity. We simply won't be able to create and sustain the foundation necessary for effective interdependence. Stephen Covey
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, Siddhartha
The only real security in a relationship lies neither in looking back in nostalgia, nor forward in dread or anticipation, but living in the present relationship and accepting it as it is now. Anne Morrow Lindbergh
First, all relationships are with yourself-and sometimes they involve other people. Second, the most important relationship in your life - the one you have, like it or not, until the day you die - is with yourself. Peter McWilliams
The beginning of love is to let those we love be perfectly themselves, and not to twist them to fit our own image. Otherwise we love only the reflection of ourselves we find in them. Thomas Merton
The entire sum of existence is the magic of being needed by just one other person. Vi Putnam
Camerado, I give you my hand!
I give you my love more precious than money,
I give you myself before preaching or law;
Will you give me yourself, will you come travel with me?
Shall we stick by each other as long as we live? Walt Whitman, "Song of the Open Road" from Leaves of Grass, 1891
The reason we all like to think so well of others is that we are all afraid for ourselves. The basis of optimism is sheer terror. We think that we are generous because we credit our neighbour with the possession of those virtues that are likely to be a benefit to us. We praise the banker that we may overdraw our account, and find good qualities in the highwayman in the hope that he may spare our pockets. I mean everything that I have said. I have the greatest contempt for optimism. As for a spoiled life, no life is spoiled but one whose growth is arrested. If you want to mar a nature, you have merely to reform it. As for marriage, of course that would be silly, but there are other and more interesting bonds between men and women. I will certainly encourage them. They have the charm of being fashionable. Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, 1890
