The more unsettled and unbalanced we feel, the more quickly and recklessly we are likely to fall in love.

You can measure the happiness of a marriage by the number of scars that each partner carries on their tongues, earned from years of biting back angry words.

To be fully seen by somebody, then, and be loved anyhow - this is a human offering that can border on miraculous.

Maybe the difference between first marriage and second marriage is that the second time at least you know you are gambling.

Sometimes life is too hard to be alone, and sometimes life is too good to be alone.

Marriage becomes hard work once you have poured the entirety of your life’s expectations for happiness into the hands of one mere person. Keeping that going is hard work.

The problem, simply put, is that we cannot choose everything simultaneously. So we live in danger of becoming paralyzed by indecision, terrified that every choice might be the wrong choice.

Every intimacy carries secreted somewhere below its initial lovely surfaces, the ever-coiled makings of complete catastrophe.

I was a veritable Johnny Appleseed of grand expectations, and all I reaped for my trouble was a harvest of bitter fruit.

the great lack of parity between husbands and wives has always been spawned by the disproportionate degree of self-sacrifice that women are willing to make on behalf of those they love.

By unnerving definition, anything that the heart has chosen for its own mysterious reasons it can always unchoose later—again, for its own mysterious reasons.

His eyebrows pulled in. “You won’t leave me, right? Even when I’m a pain in the ass?”“I vowed in front of God – and Elvis – that I wouldn’t, didn’t I?

A gift consists not in what is done or given, but in the intention of the giver or doer.

Much of what we call emotion is nothing more or less than a certain kind - a biased, prejudiced, or strongly evaluative kind - of thought.

Mental degeneracy may be caused by lead poisoning. Or by a poor dip in the gene pool.

Yeah, I like that idea. Maybe he'll shoot at us again. I was hoping someone would shoot at me today. That was the first thing I said when I got up: Boy, I hope I get shot at today.

I didn't want to look at them, so I looked away, and to look away was to look at Augustus.

The discipline of desire is the background of character.

This thou must always bear in mind, what is the nature of the whole.

Every band I've come across has read more than I have.

You are only as good as your reach, you must hold hands with others