Love & Relationships

“When you defend those who are absent, you retain the trust of those present.”

“Derrida remarked that friendship’s driver isn’t the pursuit of someone who is just like you. A friend, he wrote, would ‘choose knowing rather than being known.’ I had always thought it was the other way around.”

“Sometimes hidden from me
in daily custom and in trust,
so that I live by you unaware
as by the beating of my heart,
Suddenly you flare in my sight,
a wild rose looming at the edge
of thicket, grace and light
where yesterday was only shade,
and once again I am blessed, choosing
again what I chose before.”

“To say ‘I love you’ one must know first how to say the ‘I.’”

“Many of us seek community solely to escape the fear of being alone. Knowing how to be solitary is central to the art of loving. When we can be alone, we can be with others without using them as a means of escape.”

“Love doesn’t just sit there, like a stone, it has to be made, like bread; remade all the time, made new.”

“To bring oneself to others makes the whole planet less lonely. The nobility of everybody trying boggles the mind.”

“Everyone you will ever meet knows something you don’t.”

“This was one of the first ways I perceived power in another person…showing what you know, giving it to another person, realizing that as you spread it, you get to keep it but watch it grow, and by watching others have it, you learn new things about the original thing.”

“Treat a man as he is and he will remain as he is. Treat a man as he can and should be treated and he will become as he can and should be.”