Love enjoys knowing everything about you; desire needs mystery.

If you start to feel that you have given up too many parts of yourself to be with your partner, then one day you will end up looking for another person in order to reconnect with those lost parts.

Trouble looms when monogamy is no longer a free expression of loyalty but a form of enforced compliance.

Mystery is not always about travelling to new places, it is about looking with new eyes.

It’s hard to feel attracted to someone who has abandoned her sense of autonomy.

Love is a vessel that contains both security and adventure, and commitment offers one of the great luxuries of life: time. Marriage is not the end of romance, it is the beginning.

There is no neediness in desire ... there is no caretaking in desire. Caretaking is mightily loving, [but] it's a powerful anti-aphrodisiac.

When we seek the gaze of another, it isn't always our partner we're turning away from, but the person we have ourselves become.

Love rests on two pillars: surrender and autonomy. Our need for togetherness exists alongside our need for separateness.

It's our imagination that's responsible for love, not the other person.

The mom doesn't become sexy; the woman does. You have to retrieve the woman from the mother. And she may need to separate to do that: a bath, a walk. She must cordon off an erotic space.

I only eat things that you don't have to kill.

A very magnanimous statement, Gideon,” said Magnus. “I’m Gabriel.” Magnus waved a hand. “All Lightwoods look the same to me.

So the idea that there is nothing essential, in the sense that there are no human universals, is dogma. Ask most anyone who is going to be shot at dawn.

Thought control is the ability to direct mind and attention anywhere. Your ability to win is dependent upon the power of your concentration. Winning is a state of mind.

Contemporary society has become dry, not for lack of wonders but for lack of wonder.

My account is paid in full. So, why are you calling me?

I think the obstacles are the same as the opportunities, is the way we like to look at them.

My skin is hard when it comes to my music. But with my movies, I'm still a virgin in a lot of ways. I'm not used to being shot down for no reason.

The main reason for people's lack of success is their willingness to give up what they want most of all, for what they want right now!