Love is like quicksilver in the hand. Leave the fingers open and it stays. Clutch it, and it darts away.
We were classically in love, holding the classic beliefs: Everything is possible between us, we can authentically care for each other through not just the coming days but . . . the numerous busy decades to come. . . . It’s in no way denigrating to admit what we all know: This time comes and then it goes.
“I will love You forever,” swears the poet. I find this easy to swear too. I will love You at 4:15 PM next Tuesday: is that still as easy?
How many women, she wondered, had poisoned their husbands, not for gain or for another man, but out of sheer inability to leave them. The extreme solution is always the simplest. The weed killer is in the soup; the man is in his coffin. . . . Murder is more civilized than divorce; the Victorians, as usual, were wiser.
Some people ask the secret of our long marriage. We take time to go to a restaurant two times a week. A little candlelight, dinner, soft music, and dancing. She goes Tuesdays, I go Fridays.
Love and love always read together from the same book, but not always from the same page.
Love is the same as like except you feel sexier. And more romantic. And also more annoyed when he talks with his mouth full. And you also resent it more when he interrupts you. And you also respect him less when he shows any weakness. Furthermore, when you ask him to pick you up at the airport, and he tells you he can’t do it because he’s busy, it’s only when you love him that you hate him.
The trouble with many married people is that they are trying to get more out of marriage than there is in it.
My wife said she’d like to have sex in the backseat of the car . . . and she wanted me to drive.
Flesh goes on pleasuring us, and humiliating us, right to the end.
The sign of a good marriage is that everything is debatable and challenged; nothing is turned into law or policy. The rules, if any, are known only to the two players, who seek no public trophies.
Perhaps that is what love is: the momentary or prolonged refusal to think of another person in terms of power.
He felt now that he was not simply close to her, but that he did not know where he ended and she began.
My experience of a relationship is two people more or less compulsively playing musical chairs with each other’s selected inner archetypes. My tough street kid is romancing your honky-tonk angel. I am your homeless waif and you are my loving mother. I am your lost father and you are my doting daughter. I am your worshiper and you are my goddess. I am your god and you are my priestess. I am your client and you are my analyst. I am your intensity and you are my ground. These are some of the more garish of the patterns. Animus, anima, bopping on a seesaw.
Love opens the doors into everything . . . including, and perhaps most of all, the door into one’s own secret, and often terrible and frightening, real self.
I can see from your utter misery, from your eagerness to misunderstand each other, and from your thoroughly bad temper that this is the real thing.
There is no democracy in any love relation: only mercy.
Marriage is a perilous and fearful effort, it seems to me. . . . It creates pain that it is the only cure for. It is the only comfort for its hardships. . . . Though we had our troubles, we had them in a true perspective. The universe, as we could see any night, is unimaginably large, and mostly empty, and mostly dark. We knew we needed to be together more than we needed to be apart.
