Partners Quotes

“I love you. I hate you. I like you. I hate you. I love you. I think you’re stupid. I think you’re a loser. I think you’re wonderful. I want to be with you. I don’t want to be with you. I would never date you. I hate you. I love you…..I think the madness started the moment we met and you shook my hand. Did you have a disease or something?”
― Shannon L. Alder

“I used to think that finding the right one was about the man having a list of certain qualities. If he has them, we'd be compatible and happy. Sort of a checkmark system that was a complete failure. But I found out that a healthy relationship isn't so much about sense of humor or intelligence or attractive. It's about avoiding partners with harmful traits and personality types. And then it's about being with a good person. A good person on his own, and a good person with you. Where the space between you feels uncomplicated and happy. A good relationship is where things just work. They work because, whatever the list of qualities, whatever the reason, you happen to be really, really good together.”
― Deb Caletti, The Secret Life of Prince Charming

“Hide yourself in God, so when a man wants to find you he will have to go there first.”
― Shannon L. Alder

“They'll say you are bad
or perhaps you are mad
or at least you
should stay undercover.
Your mind must be bare
if you would dare
to think you can love
more than one lover.”
― David Rovics

“The number of chances you give someone doesn't tell the world how loving you are without telling them how desperate you are to believe they care as much as you. True love resides in the first chance, stupidity in the second, opportunists in the third and scoundrels in the fourth.”
― Shannon L. Alder

“In a relationship, people may be inhabited by discordant personalities. For that reason, it might be convenient for partners if one of both could sometimes be a little hard of hearing, or the other a bit shortsighted. ("Mutual understanding")”
― Erik Pevernagie

“If you want to make peace with your enemy, you have to work with your enemy. Then he becomes your partner. -Nelson Mandela, activist, South African president, Nobel Peace Prize (b. 1918)”
― Nelson Mandela

“Guido raised his hand to his head and moved his index finger around in a circle near his temple indicating Smalley Pauley had some mental issues.”
― A.G. Russo, Bangtails, Grifters, and a Liar's Kiss

“Though soulmates aren't looking for you, they will find you.”
― Kevin Ansbro

“A relationship is likely to last way longer, if each partner convinces or has convinced themselves that they do not deserve their partner, even if that is not true.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“Those who cheat on their partners who are loyal to them; don't deserve them. It is a trashy attitude to disrespect a person who is loyal in a relationship, by cheating on him or her.”
― Ellen J. Barrier

“Once she was certain, she didn't waiver. I had to make her stop for water or a bite to eat. She obeyed, but she was restless. As clear as if she spoke to me, she was saying, "Very well, I know you want to keep my strength up, but scent fades, you know!"
And I'd say, "I know, girl, but you're what I have and I'm going to take care of you.”
― Tamora Pierce, Bloodhound

“Sometimes, a person isn’t looking to increase their lifestyle, status or ego when they fall in love. Sometimes, they just want that special someone that is just like them. The one person that truly understands how they suffer because they have gone through it too. They want to wake up beside someone that knows their trials intimately. They want a teammate that doesn’t say they get it, but someone who knows it, lived it and survived it. They have been looking for that person their entire life because they feel alone and misunderstood. They are tired of people telling them not to care about other people, when that is not who God designed them to be. The depth of their soul can’t be reached by their partner standing at the top looking down. They want to come home to their “own kind”--the person that has run the same dark corridors they have traveled in their mind. They want to build a life with someone that would never break their heart, push them away or give up on them. They don’t want the person that has to win. They want the rescuer that has been to the fearful boundaries of their heart, but knows the way back to life. When they meet this person they will never forget them because they will come into their life with all the fire they possess and never leave their soul.”
― Shannon L. Alder

“People are more likely to remember the great social interaction they had with a colleague than the great meeting they both attended.”
― Ron Garan, The Orbital Perspective: Lessons in Seeing the Big Picture from a Journey of 71 Million Miles

“Choice: that was the thing. Other people claimed that you can't choose who you love--it just happens!--but Grace and Roman knew that was a bunch of happy horseshit. Of course you chose who you loved. If you didn't choose, you ended up with what was left--the drunks and abusers, the debtors and vacuums, the ones who ate their food too fast or had never read a novel. Damn, marriage was hard work, was manual labor, and unpaid manual labor at that. Yet, year after year, Grace and Roman had pressed their shoulders against the stone and rolled it up the hill together.”
― Sherman Alexie, The Toughest Indian in the World

“Whether our caretaker was our mom, dad, uncle, aunt, grandparent, foster parent, or sibling, our blueprint of what a relationship is supposed to look like is drafted by what we observed from our caretaker’s relationship. If our caretaker took their significant other back multiple times, made excuses for their actions, helped them battle demons, turned a blind eye to their infidelity, or moved from one relationship to the next, that is what we know. Their behavior becomes our very own model of what a relationship is supposed to look like and determines what we will expect from our own partners.”
― Kristen Crockett, The Gift of Past Relationships

“Heartland
Now that we’ve given our hearts away
With the bric-a-brac, we want them back.
Now we look for them secondhand,
Someone else’s, in the old songs,
The slowly unfolding novels
We never had time for. Hearts
That taught themselves to fly;
…overstuffed hearts, still leaking
Downy secrets like feathers.

We want someone to say,
‘I give you my heart’, meaning,
‘Summer and winter’, meaning
‘All my time in the this world’…”
― Lisel Mueller, Alive Together

“In my professional opinion, they aren’t fit to be partnered with anyone BUT each other,”
― Abigail Roux, Sticks & Stones

“Jake didn't wake up as 1 banged drawers and doors open and shut, pulling on sweaters, jeans, my practical heavy boots. For a perverse moment, I wanted to yank the blankets off, freeze his toes, force him to wake up, but he'd done surgery on me that turned him green, he'd spent the night, he'd made me feel less alone and more beautiful than I usually do.”
― Sara Paretsky, Body Work

“Jack Smith- Turner y Elsie Hannaway. Compañeros que se respetan. Vecinos de despacho. Enemigos académicos.”
― Ali Hazelwood, Love, Theoretically

“As a unit, they are largely uncooperative, unorganized, antagonistic toward each other, stubborn when problems arise, and they conceal their weaknesses from each other and sometimes from themselves. But somehow, it works for them. They trust each other. They’re fiercely loyal to each other, as well. When there’s an outside force working against them, they pull it together in one way or another and defend one another. Viciously, if need be. Zane Garrett stood up to my father, Dick. More than once.” He paused to allow that information to sink in and then continued. “In my professional opinion, they aren’t fit to be partnered with anyone but each other,” he said wryly. “They’d drive anyone else crazy.”
― Abigail Roux, Sticks & Stones

“The same little boy who had been conditioned to expect the worst from everyone and everything.
Except…
Apparently me.
Otherwise he wouldn’t be here clinging to me. Wouldn’t be showing me his exposed heart like he knew I’d protect it more fiercely than he ever had. Robin had not only just given me the keys to his heart, he’d opened the lock himself.”
― Fae Quin, If Only In Our Dreams

“Pam is cute and loves to work out. When her marriage ended, she found a new companion on an Internet site called Fitness Singles. At the moment, the two of them are bicycling through Italy.

When I divorced, I looked for women who lazed around after poetry readings.”
― Donald Hall, Essays After Eighty

“If I tell you, I will have to kill you." "Okay, but give me a head start.”
― Deana Marie Starkey, The Recon Files: Book One: God, Family, Secrets

“I want to be a sweetheart in every moment,
full of goats & xylophones, as charming
as a hill with a small village on it.
I want to be a village full of sweethearts,
as you are, every second of the day,
cooking me soups & drawing me pictures
& holding me, my inexplicable & elephant sadness,
with your infinite arms.”
― Chen Chen, When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities

“He couldn't talk to his wife about it. Not Jolene, who believed that happiness was a choice to be made and a smile was a frown turned upside down. Her turbulent, ugly childhood had left her impatient with people who couldn't choose to be happy. Lately, it got on his nerves, all her buoyant it-will-get-better platitudes. Because she'd lost her parents, she thought she understood grief, but she had no idea how it felt to be drowning. How could she? She was Teflon strong.”
― Kristin Hannah, Home Front

“Tell me
how you live in hell,
what is required in hell,
for I would send
my beloved there. Not
of course forever:
I may want him
back sometime, not
permanently harmed but
severely chastened,
as he has not been, here
on the surface.”
― Louise Glück, Meadowlands

“Sooner or later in a long
life together, every couple encounters
some emergency like this, some
drama which results
in harm. This
occurs for a reason: to test
love and to demand
fresh articulation of its complex terms.”
― Louise Glück, Meadowlands

“So it came to light that the male and female
flew under different banners: whereas
the male believed that love
was what one felt in one’s heart
the female believed
love was what one did.”
― Louise Glück, Meadowlands

“A white day breaks through the dusky cloud
That was last night, when you lifted me
Onto the pillows and whispered marvelous things
Into my thighs. I don't want to rise
From this bed or this life, your head heavy
Beside mine in the low space
Where everything that means something happens.”
― Tracy K. Smith, The Body's Question