Relationships and Family

Success took me to her bosom like a maternal boa constrictor.

Love is music, and sex is only the instrument.

The very essence of romance is uncertainty.

Love is a reality which is born in the fairy region of romance.

Man is a knot, a web, a mesh into which relationships are tied.

My attachment has neither the blindness of the beginning— nor the microscopic accuracy of the close of such liaisons.

Study has been for me the sovereign remedy against all the disappointments of life. I have never known any trouble that an hour’s reading would not dissipate.

Many possessions, if they do not make a man better, are at least expected to make his children happier; and this pathetic hope is behind many exertions.

Parents are the bones on which children sharpen their teeth.

Parents are the bones on which children sharpen their teeth.

Parentage is a very important profession; but no test of fitness for it is ever imposed in the interest of the children.

Parentage is a very important profession; but no test of fitness for it is ever imposed in the interest of the children.

as the silent voice of our parents from the country of the dead.

There is no magic on earth strong enough to wipe out the legacies of one’s parents.

It’s frightening to think that you mark your children merely by being yourself.

It’s frightening to think that you mark your children merely by being yourself.

Probably there is nothing in human nature more resonant with charges than the flow of energy between two biologically alike bodies, one of which has lain in amniotic bliss inside the other, one of which has labored to give birth to the other. The materials are here for the deepest mutuality and the most painful estrangement.

A correct answer is like an affectionate kiss.

A man falls in love through his eyes, a woman through her imagination, and then they both speak of it as an affair of “the heart.”

it is always the false ones that look the most real, the most brilliant.

Compassion for our parents is the true sign of maturity.

When men and women pick one another up for just a bit of fun, they find they’ve picked up more than they bargained for, because men and women have a top story as well as a ground floor, and you can’t have the one without the other.

The allurement that women hold out to men is precisely the allurement that Cape Hatteras holds out to sailors: they are enormously dangerous and hence enormously fascinating.

I hated her now with a hatred more fatal than indifference because it was the other side of love.