Relationships and Family

I like for you to be still, and you seem far away.

You are like nobody else since I love you.

On ne Badine pas avec l’Amour .

On ne Badine pas avec l’Amour .

124 was spiteful. Full of a baby’s venom.

I would indeed that love were longer-lived,

Love is the most fun you can have without laughing.

The curt truth is that, in a deep secret way, the state of being beloved is intolerable to many. The beloved fears and hates the lover, and with the best of reasons. For the lover is forever trying to strip bare his beloved. The lover craves any possible relation with the beloved, even if this experience can cause him only pain.

Love is a joint experience between two persons—but the fact that it is a joint experience does not mean that it is a similar experience to the two people involved. There are the lover and the beloved, but these two come from different countries. Often the beloved is only a stimulus for all the stored-up love which has lain quiet within the lover for a long time hitherto.

He knew only that the child was his warrant.

The tragedy of love is indifference.

[ Responding to a woman contestant who, explaining why she had twenty-two children, said “because I love children, and I think that’s our purpose here on earth, and I love my husband” :] I love my cigar too, but I take it out of my mouth once in a while.

Sweet Helen, make me immortal with a kiss.

What I want is to draw inspiration only from the truth. . . . My qualifications for this important role include a large head, an enormous nose, disappointment in love, and expectations of ill health.

What I want is to draw inspiration only from the truth. . . . My qualifications for this important role include a large head, an enormous nose, disappointment in love, and expectations of ill health.

Marcela loved me during fifteen months and three thousand dollars; nothing more.

By and large, mothers and housewives are the only workers who do not have regular time off. They are the great vacationless class.

Mother is putting my new secondhand clothes in order. She prays now, she says, that I may learn in my own life and away from home and friends what the heart is and what it feels. Amen. So be it.

He looked down the slope and, at the base, in the shadow of the wall of the Park, he saw some human figures lying. Those venal and furtive loves filled him with despair. He gnawed the rectitude of his life; he felt that he had been outcast from life’s feast.

[ Helmer :] First and foremost, you are a wife and mother.

Our house has never been anything but a play-room. I have been your doll wife, just as at home I was Daddy’s doll child. And the children in turn have been my dolls. I thought it was fun when you came and played with me, just as they thought it was fun when I went and played with them. That’s been our marriage, Torvald.

The first symptom of true love in a young man is timidity; in a young woman, it is boldness.

What did I know of love’s austere and lonely offices?

[ Suicide note by a child who killed himself and two siblings :] Done because we are too menny.