Quotes on Relationships

Marriage fascinates me: how we negotiate its span, how we change within it, how it changes itself, and why some relationships survive and others do not. There isn't a single marriage that couldn't provide enough narrative arc for a novel.

When it comes to health care policy, we keep failing to take seriously the value of human relationships. The cost of this oversight is staggering.

The political world is defined by relationships rather than transactions, and by numerous actors at home and abroad with independent power. Navigating such a world is difficult and precarious.

My parents had a great marriage. Interestingly, it made it harder for me in relationships because I knew what a good relationship looked like.

While having friends of color is better than not having them, it doesn't change the overall system or prevent racism from surfacing in our relationships. The societal default is white superiority, and we are fed a steady diet of it 24/7. To not actively seek to interrupt racism is to internalize and accept it.

You can't manage by memo. You can't stand up there and just send out edicts. I think you just gotta really personalize your relationships.

Men rarely worry about using or being used because all relationships work that way. A man perceives himself as owning and being owned by a woman. 'Use' is a dirty word only when there's an imbalance in the relationship.

We only have so much energy for our work, for our relationships, for ourselves. A smart person understands this and guards it carefully. Meanwhile, idiots focus on marginal productivity hacks and gains while they leak out energy each passing day.

This industry is tough on relationships. I've always thought that my wife should have a credit up alongside mine because I couldn't do what I do without her support.

Pride adversely affects all our relationships - our relationship with God and His servants, between husband and wife, parent and child, employer and employee, teacher and student, and all mankind.

If I am constantly working, my relationships fail. So at least now I can have enough time to write a happy record. And be in love and be happy. And then I don't know what I'll do. Get married. Have some kids. Plant a nice vegetable patch.

I believe that inspiration is one of the most powerful forces in life. In career and in relationships, it's worth searching for the path that inspires you. Pursuing such a path often entails risk - it may involve making a big change in what you're doing - but the career risks we regret most are the ones we don't take.

When you're 20 or 30, looking ahead, you see these benchmarks for relationships, career, ambition, sexuality, and they went off into infinity. When you get to 50, you look at what's ahead of you, and there's an end. It goes into a nothingness, a void.

Truly great actors carry their characters in silence with them. They communicate without words the relationships that predate the movie.

A lot of ink is given over to mythologizing female friendships as curious, fragile relationships that are always intensely fraught. Stop reading writing that encourages this mythology.

Being known as a writer did change the relationships I had with directors. The rap on actors is that they always want to inflate their parts. But when directors know you write screenplays and have a different view of things, you really get invited into the huddle in a much fuller way. And those collaborations end in friendships.

We have children to pursue other elements of well-being. We want meaning in life. We want relationships.

I think we pursue positive relationships whether or not they bring us engagement or happiness.

Sports have an amazing way of banding people together from all walks of life, building relationships that would have never happened.

Takers believe in a zero-sum world, and they end up creating one where bosses, colleagues and clients don't trust them. Givers build deeper and broader relationships - people are rooting for them instead of gunning for them.