“When people come together—let’s say they come to a little party or something—you always hear them discuss character. They will say this one has a bad character, this one has a good character, this one Is a fool, this one is a miser. Gossip makes the conversation. They all analyze character. It seems that the analysis of character is the highest human entertainment. And literature does it, unlike gossip, without mentioning real names.
The writers who don’t discuss character but problems—social problems or any problems—take away from literature its very essence. They stop being entertaining. We, for some reason, always love to discuss and discover character. This is because each character is different, and human character is the greatest of puzzles.”
Isaac Bashevis Singer
“I love her and she loves me and together we hate each other with a wild hatred born of love.”
Edvard Munch, via Sunbeams (Page 103)
“God created man, and finding him not sufficiently alone, gave him a female companion so that he might feel his solitude more acutely.”
Paul Valéry, via Sunbeams (Page 99)
“The pain of love is the pain of being alive. It’s a perpetual wound.”
Maureen Duffy, via Sunbeams (Page 97)
“Love is when I am concerned with your relationship with your own life, rather than with your relationship to mine… There must be a commitment to each other’s well-being. Most people who say they have a commitment don’t; they have an attachment. Commitment means, ‘I am going to stick with you and support your experience of well-being.’ Attachment means, ‘I am stuck without you.'”
Stewart Emery, via Sunbeams (Page 86)
“Chains do not hold a marriage together. It is threads, hundreds of tiny threads which sew people together through the years. That is what makes a marriage last—more than passion or even sex.”
Simone Signoret, via Sunbeams (Page 73)
“To marry a woman with any success a man must have a total experience of her, he must come to see her and accept her in time as well as in space. Besides coming to love what she is now, he must also come to realize and love equally the baby and the child she once was, and the middle-aged woman and the old crone she will eventually become.”
James Keyes, Only Two Can Play This Game, via Sunbeams (Page 73)
“While I generally find that great myths are great precisely because they represent and embody great universal truths, the myth of romantic love is a dreadful lie. Perhaps it is a necessary lie in that it ensures the survival of the falling-in-love experience that traps us into marriage. But as a psychiatrist I weep in my heart almost daily for the ghastly confusion and suffering that this myth fosters. Millions of people waste vast amounts of energy desperately and futilely attempting to make the reality of their lives conform to the unreality of the myth.”
M. Scott Peck, via Sunbeams (Page 72)
“Sometimes it seems to me that in this absurdly random life there is some inherent justice in the outcome of personal relationships. In the long run, we get no more than we have been willing to risk giving.”
Sheldon Kopp, via Sunbeams (Page 61)