I’m a human being and I fall in love and sometimes I don’t have control of every situation.

To be loved is very demoralizing.

When people say ‚marriage‘ to me… It’s always a means to an end. Everyone’s so in a rush to define the relationship.

Not to expose your true feelings to an adult seems to be instinctive from the age of seven or eight onwards.

You are Mrs. Reagan because Mr. Reagan loves you with all his heart.

William Maxwell’s my favorite North American writer, I think. And an Irish writer who used to write for ‚The New Yorker‘ called Maeve Brennan, and Mary Lavin, another Irish writer. There were a lot of writers that I found in ‚The New Yorker‘ in the Fifties who wrote about the same type of material I did – about emotions and places.

She’s been married so many times she has rice marks on her face.

I think women love very hard. We love men. We just love with everything we have. And sometimes, I don’t know that that love is met with the type of dignity that we wish it would be met with.

All violent feelings have the same effect. They produce in us a falseness in all our impressions of external things, which I would generally characterize as the pathetic fallacy.

The best thing about being a dad? Well, I think it’s just the thing that every man wants – to have a son and heir.

Marriage is the most wonderful thing ever.

It is foolish to tear one’s hair in grief, as though sorrow would be made less by baldness.

Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind, And therefore is winged Cupid painted blind.

It is in the thirties that we want friends. In the forties we know they won’t save us any more than love did.

You can close more business in two months by becoming interested in other people than you can in two years by trying to get people interested in you.

There are two kinds of people in this world. ‚I‘ people and ‚we‘ people. I’ve always tried to be a ‚we‘ person.

Better to be occasionally cheated than perpetually suspicious.

I can say I’d honestly rather be happy than have 30 to 40 songs that I’ve written about these thrilling, exciting, horrible, unhappy times.

A lot of times, people make other people responsible for their joy: ‚You’re not making me happy, you’re not doing this, you’re not doing that.‘

I love you when you bow in your mosque, kneel in your temple, pray in your church. For you and I are sons of one religion, and it is the spirit.

You should not have taken advantage of my sensibility to steal into my affections without my consent.

What gift has providence bestowed on man that is so dear to him as his children?

I was always interested in choreography – in making people think and feel something.

Perfect friendship is the friendship of men who are good, and alike in excellence; for these wish well alike to each other qua good, and they are good in themselves.

Red is such an interesting color to correlate with emotion, because it’s on both ends of the spectrum. On one end you have happiness, falling in love, infatuation with someone, passion, all that. On the other end, you’ve got obsession, jealousy, danger, fear, anger and frustration.

Ultimately, who you choose to be in a relationship with and what you do in your bedroom is your business.

The experience of pain or loss can be a formidably motivating force.

Marriage is the death of hope.

I look upon every day to be lost, in which I do not make a new acquaintance.

What greater thing is there for two human souls than to feel that they are joined – to strengthen each other – to be at one with each other in silent unspeakable memories.

A pessimist? That’s a person who has been intimately acquainted with an optimist.

Justice that love gives is a surrender, justice that law gives is a punishment.

Love many things, for therein lies the true strength, and whosoever loves much performs much, and can accomplish much, and what is done in love is done well.

One of my big goals as a human being is to continue to write what’s really happening to me, even if it’s a tough pill to swallow for people around me… I do fear that if I ever were to have someone in my life who mattered, I would second-guess every one of my lyrics.

‚Harry Potter‘ gave me back self respect. Harry gave me a job to do that I loved more than anything else.

Human beings must be known to be loved; but Divine beings must be loved to be known.

There’s nothing in the world like the devotion of a married woman. It’s a thing no married man knows anything about.

If you want to know your true opinion of someone, watch the effect produced in you by the first sight of a letter from him.

He who does not trust enough, Will not be trusted.

I think that everybody needs four things in life. Everybody needs something to do regardless of age. Everybody needs someone to love. Everybody needs something to hope for, and, of course, everybody needs someone to believe in.

A lot of Jews are great friends of mine.

In God’s family, there are no outsiders, no enemies.

Love is a state of Being. Your love is not outside; it is deep within you. You can never lose it, and it cannot leave you. It is not dependent on some other body, some external form.

Like any creative human being, I would like a bit more control so that it would be a little easier for me when the director says, ‚One tear, right now,‘ that one tear would pop out.

Man is an idea, and a precious small idea once he turns his back on love.

Wisdom I know is social. She seeks her fellows. But Beauty is jealous, and illy bears the presence of a rival.

So far is it from being true that men are naturally equal, that no two people can be half an hour together, but one shall acquire an evident superiority over the other.

I love wisdom. And you can never be great at anything unless you love it. Not be in love with it, but love the thing, admire the thing. And it seems that if you love the thing, and you don’t just want to possess it, it will find you.

We want justice, but at the same time, we gotta love and come together and bring unity, and I feel it’s gonna happen.

To abandon oneself to principles is really to die – and to die for an impossible love which is the contrary of love.

Nothing is as obnoxious as other people’s luck.

I know that I came into the world with what I call ‚big dharma‘ – with a blueprint to teach self-reliance and a positive loving approach to large numbers of people all over the globe. I am ever so grateful for the circumstances of my life that allowed me to be pretty much left alone and to develop as I was so intended in this incarnation.

I have a brother and sister; my mother does not care for thought, and father, too busy with his briefs to notice what we do. He buys me many books, but begs me not to read them, because he fears they joggle the mind.

My songs have always been frustrating themes, relationships that I’ve had. And now that I’m in love, I expect it to be really happy, or at least there won’t be half as much anger as there was.

I think ‚The Color Purple‘ is so bursting with love, the need for connection, the showing of the need for connection around the globe.

Only two things are necessary to keep one’s wife happy. One is to let her think she is having her own way, and the other is to let her have it.

There are more love songs than anything else. If songs could make you do something we’d all love one another.

When you have really exhausted an experience you always reverence and love it.

A man’s growth is seen in the successive choirs of his friends.

For the woman, the man is a means: the end is always the child.

I used to tell my husband that, if he could make me ‚understand‘ something, it would be clear to all the other people in the country.