No man really knows about other human beings. The best he can do is to suppose that they are like himself.
—John Steinbeck in The Winter of Our Discontent
The heart of another is a dark forest, always, no matter how close it has been to one's own.
—Willa Cather
That’s what life is about: People come and go.
—Cecelia Ahern in Love, Rosie
Love without conversation is impossible.
—Mortimer Adler
Love is when the other person's happiness is more important than your own.
—H. Jackson Brown, Jr.
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
The truth is, sometimes too much can happen in a relationship, and then there’s nothing anyone can do or say. It’s broken.
—Gabrielle Zevin in In the Age of Love and Chocolate
How strange that the years and ocean between us have brought us closer together.
—Sarra Manning in You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me
Well, it’s simple to love someone. But it’s hard to know when you need to say it out loud.
—Rebecca Stead in When You Reach Me
I don’t like to feel so crazy about someone. I don’t like to feel like my happiness is so tied up in another person.
—Gabrielle Zevin in Memoirs of a Teenage Amnesiac
The meeting of a customer and a clerk across the service counter in a store is as significant as two leaders of nations meeting over a conference table in search of peace. If peace and understanding is possible, it must occur in the moment that is present. It can occur only when relationship is real and unconditional. Relationship begins with thoughtless awareness, an openness that sees and hears with humility, and a consideration that has already forgiven all things that the mind might present as a barrier to unity.
—Booker Jones
The most important thing in any relationship is not what you get but what you give.
—Eleanor Roosevelt
I am in you and you in me, mutual in divine love.
—William Blake
Just because a relationship ends, it doesn't mean it's not worth having.
—Sarah Mlynowski in Gimme a Call
I have no patience for cheaters. I don't care what people say—cheating never 'just happens.' If your eye's wandering, then there's something wrong with your relationship. Either work things out with your partner or have the balls to break things off before jumping into bed with someone else.
—Ember Casey in Her Wicked Heart