There is something that happens between men and women in the dark that seems to make everything else unimportant.
A man falls in love through his eyes, a woman through her ears.
Their bodies, like strangers meeting for the first time, introduced themselves to each other.
Monogamous heterosexual love is probably one of the most difficult, complex, and demanding of human relationships.
Art is not necessary at all. All that is necessary to make this world a better place is to love — to love as Christ loved, as Buddha loved.
To love one person with a private love is poor and miserable; to love all is glorious.
The idea that nations should love one another, or that business concerns or marketing boards should love one another, or that a man in Portugal should love a man in Peru of whom he has never heard — it is absurd, unreal, dangerous. . . . The fact is we can only love what we know personally. And we cannot know much.
I am Tarzan of the Apes. I want you. I am yours. You are mine. We will live here together always in my house. I will bring you the best fruits, the tenderest deer, the finest meats that roam the jungle. I will hunt for you. I am the greatest of the jungle hunters. I will fight for you. I am the greatest of the jungle fighters.
[Proposing marriage to Irene Mayer:] I snore loudly, drink exuberantly, work excessively, and my future is drawing to a close. But I am tall and Jewish and I do love you.
[On the breakdown of his marriage to Winnie Mandela:] She married a man who . . . became a myth; then the myth returned home and proved to be just a man after all.
People come into your life for a reason, a season, or a lifetime. When you figure out which it is, you know exactly what to do.
Visiting someone in a hospital recently, I watched an elderly couple. The man was in a wheelchair, the wife sitting next to him in the visitors’ room. For the half-hour that I watched they never exchanged a word, just held hands and looked at each other, and once or twice the man patted his wife’s face. The feeling of love was so thick in that room that I felt I was sharing in their communion and was shaken all day by their pain, their love, something sad and also joyful: the fullness of a human relationship.
He listened with the intense interest one feels in a stranger’s life, the interest the young mistake for love.
Strangers become friends, friends become lovers, lovers become husbands and wives, and ex-husbands and ex-wives become strangers.
A simple enough pleasure, surely, to have breakfast alone with one’s husband, but how seldom married people in the midst of life achieve it.
It was an unspoken pleasure that having . . . ruined so much and repaired little, we had endured.
You know what getting married is? It’s agreeing to taking this person who right now is at the top of his form, full of hopes and ideas, feeling good, looking good, wildly interested in you because you’re the same way, and sticking by him while he slowly disintegrates. And he does the same for you. You’re his responsibility now and he’s yours. If no one else will take care of him, you will. If everyone else rejects you, he won’t. What do you think love is? Going to bed all the time?
That night, when the party was over, Howard went to our bedroom and lay in wait for me, wearing only his suit of tarnished flesh. I walked toward the bed through the pewter light, dressed in all the awful beauty of my years. We looked at one another.
