What does open us is sharing our vulnerabilities. Sometimes we see a couple who has done this difficult work over a lifetime. In the process, they have grown old together. We can sense the enormous comfort, the shared quality of ease between these people. It is beautiful, and very rare. Without this quality of openness and vulnerability, partners don't really know each other; they are one image living with another image. -Charlotte Joko Beck

The most wonderful of all things in life is the discovery of another human being with whom one's relationship has a growing depth, beauty and joy as the years increase. This inner progressiveness of love between two human beings is a most marvellous thing; it cannot be found by looking for it or by passionately wishing for it. It is a sort of divine accident, and the most wonderful of all things in life. -Sir Hugh Walpole

Intimacy is being seen and known as the person you truly are. -Amy Bloom

You can't love a crowd the same way you can love a person. And a crowd can't love you the way a single person can love you. Intimacy doesn't scale. Not really. Intimacy is a one-on-one phenomenon. -Hugh Macleod

Love and work... work and love, that's all there is. -Sigmund Freud

Don't sacrifice your life to work and ideals. The most important things in life are human relations. I found that out too late. -Katharinde Susannah Prichard

She had been forced into prudence in her youth, she learned romance as she grew older - the natural sequence of an unnatural beginning. -Jane Austen, By a Lady

Romances paint at full length people's wooings, But only give a bust of marriages: For no one cares for matrimonial cooings. There's nothing wrong in a connubial kiss. Think you, if Laura had been Petrarch's wife, He would have written sonnets all his life? -Lord Byron

Parent of golden dreams, Romance! Auspicious queen of childish joys, Who lead'st along, in airy dance, Thy votive train of girls and boys. -Lord Byron

True, we love life, not because we are used to living, but because we are used to loving. There is always some madness in love, but there is also always some reason in madness. -Nietzsche