Merle Shain
Loving can cost a lot but not loving always costs more, and those who fear to love often find that want of love is an emptiness that robs the joy from life.Collection: Fear
The act is unjustifiable that either begs for a blessing, or, having succeeded gives no thanksgiving.Collection: Thanksgiving
There are really only two ways to approach life - as victim or as gallant fighter - and you must decide if you want to act or react, deal your own cards or play with a stacked deck. And if you don't decide which way to play with life, it always plays with you.Collection: Inspirational
Loving can cost a lot but not loving always cost more.Collection: Inspirational
The job of a friend is not to decide what should be done, not to run interference or pick up the slack. The job of a friend is to understand, and to supply energy and hope, and in doing so to keep those they value on their feet a little longer, so that they can fight another round and grow strong in themselves.Collection: Friends
The answer doesn't lie in learning how to protect ourselves from life-it lies in learning how to become strong enough to let a bit more of it in.Collection: Life
Loving someone means helping them to be more themselves, which can be different from being what you’d like them to be, although often they turn out the sameCollection: Mean
One can never change the past, only the hold it has on you, and while nothing in your life is reversible, you can reverse it nevertheless.Collection: Past
If there are no endings, there are no beginnings and you see no new lands, so for everything that's lost, there is usually something gained.Collection: Land
I'm not sure there can be loving without commitment, although commitment takes all kinds of forms, and there can be commitment for the moment as well as commitment for all time. The kind that is essential for loving marriages - and love affairs, as well - is a commitment to preserving the essential quality of your partner's soul, adding to them as a person rather than taking away.Collection: Marriage
One often learns more from ten days of agony than from ten years of contentment.Collection: Cancer
The conflict between what one is and who one is expected to be touches all of us. And sometimes, rather than reach for what one could be, we choose the comfort of the failed role, preferring to be the victim of circumstance, the person who didn't have a chance.Collection: Comfort
Friends are like windows through which you see out into the world and back into yourself. If you don't have friends you see much less than you otherwise might.Collection: Friendship
Anger is a passion, so it makes people feel alive and makes them feel they matter and are in charge of their lives. So people often need to renew their anger a long time after the cause of it has died, because it is a protection against helplessness and emptiness just like howling in the night. And it makes them feel less vulnerable for a little while.Collection: Anger
The romantic myth is so strong that it survives the wear and tear of marriage by simply detaching from it and floating up on ahead, and women who are rather fond of the men they married, as well as ones who are not, go through life with a bag packed for the day when the shining knight on a white charger arrives, just in case he does.Collection: Strong
Life is like fording a river, stepping from one slippery stone to another, and you must rejoice every time you don't lose your balance, and learn to laugh at all the times you do.Collection: Rivers
Our strength is in our dreams, and those who do not dare to dream damn themselves.Collection: Dream
Sex deepens love and love deepens sex, so physical intimacy transforms everything and playing with it is playing with fire.Collection: Sex
The day you spend hoping, the day you spend waiting, the day you spend in despair, is a day in your life as much as the tomorrow you hope for, but which may never come, so betting today on tomorrow is always a bad bet.Collection: Waiting
Feelings take you into uncharted territory from time to time it's true, but you almost always benefit from the journey one way or the other. We tend to think of the rational as a higher order, but it is the emotional that marks our lives.Collection: Journey
The roots of love sink down and deep and strike out far, and they are arteries that feed our lives, so we must see that they get the water and sun they need so they can nourish us. And when you put something good into the world, something good comes back to you.Collection: Love
There are problems connected with infidelity and problems connected with being faithful at any cost, and I am for letting those concerned choose the problems they'd prefer. There need not be one rule for all. Infidelity is enlarging and fragmenting and very very dangerous, but it has been known to retrieve people as well as marriages, so it can't be only bad.Collection: People
It takes great generosity to accept generosity.Collection: Generosity
Friends are people who help you be more yourself, more the person you are intended to be.Collection: People
One can never change the past, only the hold it has on you.Collection: Healing
Until you divest yourself of the notion that you are a collection of needs, an empty vessel that someone else must fill up, there will be no safe place to harbor yourself, no safe shore to reach. As long as you think mostly of getting, you will have nothing real to give.Collection: Real
you have to be very careful when you give to others that you don't tell them how great you are rather than how much you value them.Collection: Giving
Men who take advantage of one woman take advantage of them all.Collection: Men
Love is short, forgetting is long, and understanding longer still.Collection: Love Is
There are many pages in the book, many kinds of lives we each can live, many ways to be rich, and even more to be poor.Collection: Book
The best kind of men have a certainty in themselves that isn't done in when countered by a certainty in their women, and they are much adored.Collection: Men
We marry to grow up, to escape our parents and to inherit our share of the world, not knowing who we are and who we will become, so it is left to marriage to make it clear which ones of us are growing in the same directions and which are ships meant to have passed in the night.Collection: Marriage
No marriage is one person's failure any more than it's one person's success, so it works best to see a marriage that has ended simply as something that didn't work out.Collection: Divorce
The older I get, the clearer it becomes to me that no one is cheated in this world, unless it's by himself.Collection: Life
Perhaps the old view of 'Me breadwinner, you hausfrau' worked for our grandparents, when people obligingly popped off before boring each other to death, but it won't work any longer because we are living too long and divorce is needed today to do what death acomplished more economically before.Collection: Divorce
You can tell a lot about what a man lacks by watching what he is cynical about, and many of us are cynical about love.Collection: Men
It can be much harder to be on the receiving end of a transaction than to be the one who gets to give. In fact, being given to can mean being taken from. There is a very strong connection between pride and giving, and those who do the giving get to feel that they are worthy, while those who are given to often feel that they are not.Collection: Strong
Cynicism is a form of cowardice, a failure of courage to hope.Collection: Cynicism
It's hard to tell our good luck sometimes. Hard to tell sometimes for many years to come. And most of us have wept copious tears over someone or something, when if we'd understood the situation better, we might have celebrated our good fortune insteadOne can never change the past, only the hold it has on you and while nothing in your life is reversible, you can reverse it nevertheless.Collection: Good Luck
There are some decisions in life that only you can make.Collection: Decision
Some men are more perfect than others.Collection: Men
when you put something good into the world, something good comes back to you.Collection: World
Girls gave sex to get love and boys gave love to get sex and conning girls was the favorite indoor sport.Collection: Girl
Most women would rather have someone whisper their name at optimum moments than rocket with contractions to the moon.Collection: Moon
Each of us is a seed, a silent promise, and it is always Spring.Collection: Spring
Marriage is supposed to do everything, like Duz, which is more than half its problem. It is said to save us, define us, give us purpose, keep us from loneliness, and incidentally balance our diet and wash our socks, and when it doesn't, we get divorced.Collection: Marriage
Compassion is the thing that leads you gently back to yourself.Collection: Compassion
There are no perfect men of course, but some are more perfect than others, and we can use all of those we can get.Collection: Men
It takes a lot of mulch, love does, to create a froth.Collection: Love