Because we are inwardly empty, dull, mediocre, we use our relationships and our social reforms as a means of escaping from ourselves. I wonder if you have noticed how lonely most people are?
—Jiddu Krishnamurti in Think on These Things
D’you know what happens when you hurt people? When you hurt people, they begin to love you less. That’s what careless words do. They make people love you a little less.
—Arundhati Roy in The God of Small Things
Laughter is the closest distance between two people.
—Victor Borge
Be nice first, because you can always be mean later, but once you’ve been mean to someone, they won’t believe the nice anymore.
—Laurell K. Hamilton in A Stroke of Midnight
I began to see what marriage is for. It's to keep people away from each other. Sometimes I think that two people who love each other can be saved from madness only by the things that come between them—children, duties, visits, bores, relations: the things that protect married people from each other.
—Edith Wharton
Marriage is an extraordinary thing, and I doubt if any outsider—even a child of the marriage—has the right to judge.
—Agatha Christie
It’s hard to get along with people. As much as you try to like them and accept them as individuals, it becomes difficult because they keep getting out of line and wasting your time.
—Henry Rollins
The best thing to hold onto in life is each other.
—Audrey Hepburn
It is far more impressive when others discover your good qualities without your help.
—Judith Martin
Be nice to people on your way up because you'll meet them on your way down.
—Wilson Mizner
The easiest kind of relationship for me is with ten thousand people. The hardest is with one.
—Joan Baez
I should let people in. If they leave, they leave. If I break, I break. It happens to everyone.
—Sarah Addison Allen in Garden Spells
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
We teach people how to treat us. If you don’t settle for anything less than respect, that’s what you’ll get. But if you let the douchebags walk all over you and treat you like you’re disposable, then that’s what you’ll always get.
—Kristen Proby in Play With Me
People loved you in the way they knew how—and often it was not the way you knew. Or needed.
—Josh Lanyon in The Dark Tide