quotations about intimacy
This is what intimacy does to us over time. That's what a long marriage can do: it causes us to inherit and trade each other's stories.
ELIZABETH GILBERT
Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage
You know what intimacy is? It's into-me-you-see ... it's allowing someone to know who you are when you have all these defenses to keep them from knowing.
MARTIN DE MAAT
interview, The Monthly Aspectarian, August 1998
I wonder if this is how people always get close: They heal each other's wounds; they repair the broken skin.
LAUREN OLIVER
Pandemonium
Intimacy has been the source of the deadliest enmity, no less than of the firmest friendship; like some mighty rivers which rise on the same mountain but pursue a quite contrary course.
CHARLES CALEB COLTON
Lacon: Or Many Things in Few Words
From the covenants of intimacy, we enjoy the treasures of real friendship, for there can be no intimacy where there is no faith.
ELIZA RYVES
attributed, Day's Collacon
Intimate relationships cannot substitute for a life plan. But to have any meaning or viability at all, a life plan must include intimate relationships.
HARRIET LERNER
attributed, Words of Women: Quotations for Success
Dancing, at its best, is independence and intimacy in balance.
DONNA GODDARD
The Love of Devotion
It is not time or opportunity that is to determine intimacy--it is disposition alone. Seven years would be insufficient to make some people acquainted with each other, and seven days are more than enough for others.
JANE AUSTEN
Sense and Sensibility
Seek acquaintance with the wise, intimacy with the good.
XIPHILINUS
attributed, Day's Collacon
Real intimacy is a place where there are no mistakes, at least not in the sense you feel. You don't just blow everything with one wrong move.
ELIF BATUMAN
The Possessed
In the modern world intimacy is disappearing. Even lovers are not intimate. Friendship is only a word now; it has disappeared. And the reason? The reason is that there is nothing to share. Who wants to show one's inner poverty?
OSHO
Intimacy: Trusting Oneself and the Other
Intimacy reveals infirmities; the shoe best knows if the stocking has holes.
HAYTIEN
attributed, Day's Collacon
Intimacy is not something that just happens between two people; it is a way of being alive. At every moment, we are choosing either to reveal ourselves or to protect ourselves, to value ourselves or to diminish ourselves, to tell the truth or to hide. To dive into life or to avoid it. Intimacy is making the choice to be connected to, rather than isolated from, our deepest truth at that moment.
GENEEN ROTH
When Food Is Love
Every intimacy carries secreted somewhere below its initial lovely surfaces, the ever-coiled makings of complete catastrophe.
ELIZABETH GILBERT
Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage
The promise of intimacy is also its risk: the more intimacy two people share, the more power they give to each other to cause hurt.
KAREN J. PRAGER
The Dilemmas of Intimacy: Conceptualization, Assessment, and Treatment