The easiest kind of relationship for me is with ten thousand people. The hardest is with one.
—Joan Baez
The heart of another is a dark forest, always, no matter how close it has been to one's own.
—Willa Cather
That’s love. A part of what makes it so awesome is the level of real, true intimacy, and the risk you take by opening yourself up that way to someone who has the power to gut you.
—Lauren Dane in Inside Out
It's easier to be faithful to a restaurant than it is to a woman.
—Federico Fellini
If men could only know each other, they would neither idolize nor hate.
—Elbert Hubbard
Our moment had passed somehow. I was different. He was, too. Without our “madness” to unite us, there wasn’t anything much there. Or maybe too much had happened in too short a time. It’s like when you take a trip with someone you don’t know very well. Sometimes you can get very close very quickly, but then after the trip is over, you realize all that was a false sort of closeness. An intimacy based on the trip more than the travelers, if that makes any sense.
—Gabrielle Zevin in Memoirs of a Teenage Amnesiac
If fear is the great enemy of intimacy, love is its true friend.
—Henri Nouwen
Love does not consist in gazing at each other, but in looking outward together in the same direction.
—Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
If we’d never met, I think I would have known my life wasn’t complete. And I would have wandered the world in search of you, even if I didn’t know who I was looking for.
—Nicholas Sparks in The Longest Ride
We are inclined to believe those whom we do not know because they have never deceived us.
—Samuel Johnson
Relationships take work. Hours and days and years of getting close to that person. That's real love, real intimacy.
—Karen Kingsbury in A Time to Embrace
In little towns, lives roll along so close to one another; loves and hates beat about, their wings almost touching.
—Willa Cather
Another plan I have is World Peace through Formal Introductions. The idea is that everyone in the world would be required to meet everyone else in the world, formally, at least once. You'd have to look the person in the eye, shake hands, repeat their name, and try to remember one outstanding physical characteristic. My theory is, if you knew everyone in the world personally, you'd be less inclined to fight them in a war: "Who? The Malaysians? Are you kidding? I know those people!
—George Carlin
Being with you never felt wrong. It's the one thing I did right. You're the one thing I did right.
—Becca Fitzpatrick in Crescendo
She couldn't remember the last time she hugged someone, really hugged someone.
—Cecelia Ahern in P.S. I Love You