Quotes about Intimacy

Do you know, 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. We've been too close together—that has been our sin. We've seen the nakedness of each other's souls.

He took [the book] up, and found himself plunged in an atmosphere unlike any he had ever breathed in books; so warm, so rich, and yet so ineffably tender, that it gave a new and haunting beauty to the most elementary of human passions.

She clung to him desperately, and as he drew her to his knees on the couch she felt as if they were being sucked down together into some bottomless abyss.

It was a kiss with a future in it: like a ring slipped upon her soul. And now, in the dreadful pause that followed--while Strefford fidgeted with his cigarette-case and rattled the spoon in his cup--Susy remembered what she had seen through the circle of Nick's kiss: that blue illimitable distance which was at once the landscape at their feet and the future in their souls.

And if you can't come into the room without my feeling all over me a ripple of flame, & if, wherever you touch me, a heart beats under your touch, & if, when you hold me, & I don't speak, it's because all the words in me seem to have become throbbing pulses, & all my thoughts are a great golden blur (Joslin 20).

The face she lifted to her dancers was the same which, when she saw him, always looked like a window that has caught the sunset. He even noticed two or three gestures which, in his fatuity, he had thought she kept for him: a way of throwing her head back when she was amused, as if to taste her laugh before she let it out, and a trick of sinking her lids slowly when anything charmed or moved her.

Knowing and being known—by design we enjoy human connections, and those connections are forged over time through normal interactions and questions that gradually ask for more. Such connections are the foundations for mutual help, and they are helpful in themselves since they are expressions of love.

Whatever our monument might be, we want it to be public, even if the public is one friend.

For now, what things have you done that you prefer to keep private? What things in your life do you insist on keeping secret? That's where we will find the shame that is attached to what we do.

You can't have a deeper relationship if you won't allow yourself to be known.

Live-tweeting your bikini wax is not vulnerability. Nor is posting a blow-by-blow of your divorce . That's an attempt to hot-wire connection. But you can't cheat real connection. It's built up slowly. It's about trust and time.

Family life is too intimate to be preserved by the spirit of justice. It can be sustained by a spirit of love which goes beyond justice.