That’s what people do who love you. They put their arms around you and love you when you’re not so lovable.
You’ve got to have someone who loves your body. Who doesn’t define you, but sees you. Who loves what he sees. Who you don’t have to struggle to be good enough for.
It’s good to let God pick a man for you. We don’t do so well when we pick them ourselves. They end up lipsticks in a drawer, all those wrong colors you thought looked so good in the package.
When what you want is a relationship, and not a person, get a dog.
I shouldn’t have to be a liar to make someone love me. I shouldn’t be so afraid of losing someone that I’ll do anything to make them stay.
It took me years to figure out that upset was upset, and tumultuousness was not the same thing as passion. Love isn’t drama.
Maybe it was wrong, or maybe impossible, but I wanted the truth to be one thing. One solid thing.
I could forget that part, but it had to have been true.
Sometimes you can cattle rope your heart and sometimes you can’t, is all.
They say religion is about love, but you wonder how much of it really is about fear.
Too often in my life, love has been defined as “humiliation with occasional roses”.
So I put up with bad behavior in the name of loving the way I thought you were supposed to love.
If time heals all wounds, and a book can hold a person’s entire life, then you can speed up the process with a pulp time warp.
We are thickly layered, page lying upon page, behind simple covers. And love – it is not the book itself, but the binding.
Sometimes good choices are really bad ones, wrapped up in so much fear you can’t even see straight.
The loneliness you feel with another person, the wrong person, is the loneliest of all.
And pity–people who inspire it in you are actually very powerful people. To get someone else to take care of you, to feel sorry for you–that takes a lot of strength, smarts, manipulation. Very powerful people.
Maybe a person’s world can grow bigger in all the right ways, not too wide that it becomes shallow, just large enough to preserve its depth.
I’ve wished for things and never really had the chance…It’s time to stop dreaming and do something about it. You’ve got to know what you want, then…go.
But what I wanted back had never really been there. He was a temporary illusion, a mirage of water after walking in the desert. I had made him up. And he could have killed me. You’ve got to stop the ride sometimes. Stop it and get off.
Rejection, though–it could make the loss of someone you weren’t even that crazy about feel gut wrenching and world ending.
The most basic and somehow forgettable thing is this: Love is not pain. Love is goodness. And real love–it’s less shiny than solid and simple.
Marriage is like a well-built porch. If one of the two posts leans too much, the porch collapses. So each must be strong enough to stand on its own.
Supposedly there’s an actual, researched link between extreme creativity and mental illness, and I believe it because I’ve seen it with my own eyes.
Those questions you have? Whether he’s the one, whether you feel about him the way you should, or whether the relationship is going okay? When you’re not sure whether you’re in love with someone or not, the answer is not.
I guess forgiveness, like happiness, isn’t a final destination. You don’t one day get there and get to stay.
I am beginning to think there are two kinds of people,” she said. I waited. “Those who forgive themselves too easily but will not forgive others.” “And?” I asked. “Those that forgive others too easily but will not forgive themselves.
It was one of those times you feel a sense of loss, even though you didn’t have something in the first place. I guess that’s what disappointment is- a sense of loss for something you never had.
often enough, we owe our good fortune to someone else’s loss.
If you don’t participate, you’re just taking up oxygen. (Bunny)Life is a banquet. Approach it with hunger. (Chuck)
If you look up “charming” in the dictionary, you’ll see that it not only has references to strong attraction, but to spells and magic. Then again, what are liars if not great magicians?
Maybe it was better to be who he thought I was than who I thought I was.
I don’t get why prom is like a mini-wedding these days…No one should spend that kind of money for a high school dance.
Our memories and events in our lives are untidy things. We wish that we can file them away and shut the door, or wish the opposite – that they would stay forever.
Love doesn’t seem to follow a plan; it’s not a series of steps. It can hit with the force of nature – an earthquake, a tidal wave, a storm of wild, relentless energy that is beyond your simple attempts at control.
You could try and understand people, you could read books and understand words and concepts and ideas, but you could never understand enough or have enough knowledge to keep away the surprises that both fate and human beings had in store.
Good can sit in the distance, just beyond your view, waiting, until you go toward it.
In a world of insanity, nothing is sacred. It’s an insane world, nothing is sacred.
I kept trying to talk myself out of my second thoughts when they were trying to help me. My advice? When it comes to relationships, second thoughts should be promoted.
Flawed Human Parents + Shit Life Throws At You = Childhood That ‘Builds Character.
Most of our parents wanted the best for us, I knew, but we also wanted the best for them.
You’ve got to say what you mean and mean what you say…Doubt in your voice is an open door people will shove right through.
The word just hangs, until Severin starts the blender and there’s only the sound of crunching and grinding vitamins, the silvery core of nourishment, containing every essential thing but the nourishment itself.” (pg. 82)
If letting go, if letting people and things work themselves out in the way that they needed to without your help was the most important thing, then it was also the hardest.
Sometimes you’re sure dogs have some secret, superior intelligence, and other times you know they’re only their simple, goofy selves.
You can want one thing and have a secret wish for its opposite.
It can be exhausting eating a meal cooked by a man. With a woman, it’s, Ho hum, pass the beans. A guy, you have to act like he just built the Taj Mahal.
We should not give away a moment to anyone who does not deserve it.
It was about the way a moment, a single moment, could change things and make you decide to try to be someone different.
I was like a chocolate in a box, looking well behaved and perfect in place, all the while harboring a secret center.
You can hold a secret, hold it so far in that it drives nearly every thought and every move you make- your very heartbeat, almost.
…forever is hard enough without it beginning now.
If happiness shouldn’t make you so miserable, misery shouldn’t make you so happy.
Life and our love for others is a balancing act, I understand then; a dance between our instinct to be safe and hold fast, and our drive to flee, to run – from danger, toward new places to feed ourselves.
I thought about him everyday until then. I started having these conversations with him in my head that you have when you meet someone you sense is going to be important in your life.
My most memorable teacher was Rich Campe, my third-grade teacher at Fairlands Elementary in Pleasanton, California.
Bliss is the ocean, a towel on the sand, the sun out, the chance to swim in waves or walk dragging a stick behind you, a good book, a cold drink.