Relationships and Family

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

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.

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

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.

Love lights more fires than hate extinguishes.

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

If we judge of love by its usual effects, it resembles hatred more than friendship.

Love that is ignorant and hatred have almost the same ends.

Hatred is blind, as well as love.

Love is like an hourglass, with the heart filling up as the brain empties.

Happiness is the china shop; love is the bull.

All love that has not friendship for its base, Is like a mansion built upon the sand.

Love must be as much a light as a flame.

I never knew how much like heaven this world could be, when two people love and live for one another!

Love . . . dies because we don’t know how to replenish its source, it dies of blindness and errors and betrayals. It dies of illnesses and wounds, it dies of weariness, of witherings, of tarnishings, but never a natural death. Every lover should be brought to trial as the murderer of his own love.

Love . . . dies because we don’t know how to replenish its source, it dies of blindness and errors and betrayals. It dies of illnesses and wounds, it dies of weariness, of witherings, of tarnishings, but never a natural death. Every lover should be brought to trial as the murderer of his own love.