Catherynne M. Valente Quotes

The only things that are really permanent are love, family, friendship, and that is a lesson. At the end of the day, that's really what it boils down to. The rest of it is just stuff.

I guess a lot of things I make are relationship movies. Maybe all movies are relationship movies, because they're all about how we relate to each other.

Relationships are people's No. 1 priorities. They want to have good relationships, and a lot of times they don't.

Grief knits two hearts in closer bonds than happiness ever can; and common sufferings are far stronger links than common joys.

The moments that matter most are with your family, your friends. They are the realest moments.

Life is about connections, and some people have better chemistry with others. That don't make you bad people.

My dad is my heart. My family is my heart.

Male mastery in marriage is a social illusion, nurtured by women exhorting their creations to play and walk. At the emotional heart of every marriage is a pietà of mother and son.

Friendships offer good practice in accepting the transience of experience and the persistence of feeling.

Then you think that one can keep a hopeless love in one's heart for so long as that?...And that life can breathe upon it every day, without extinguishing it?

O heart! O heart! if she'd but turn her head You'd know the folly of being comforted.

Friendship is constant in all other things Save in the office and affairs of love. Therefore all hearts in love use their own tongues. Let every eye negotiate for itself, And trust no agent; for beauty is a witch Against whose charms faith melteth into blood.

I always knew one thing, that life is made bearable and possible and liveable by the relations of one human being to another, the individual love and gentleness between persons, or in any case, the unbreakable bond that grows and fastens lives together in all sorts of mysterious ways.

It is love and friendship, the sanctity and celebration of our relationships, that not only support a good life, but create one. Through friendships, we spark and inspire one another's ambitions.

Kindness is the connection that links us all together and strengthens the bonds within our communities, neighborhoods, and families.

The heart may think it knows better: the senses know that absence blots people out. We really have no absent friends. The friend becomes a traitor by breaking, however unwillingly or sadly, out of our own zone: a hard judgment is passed on him, for all the pleas of the heart.

Why, Robert Singh often wondered, did we give our hearts to friends whose life spans are so much shorter than our own?

Community is a place where the connections felt in our hearts make themselves known in the bonds between people, and where the tuggings and pullings of those bonds keep opening our hearts.

They said love made you strong, but in Louise's opinion it made you weak. It corkscrewed into your heart and you couldn't get it out again, not without ripping your heart to pieces.

One of the things that you see ancient philosophers and contemporary scientists agree on is that strong relationships are a key to happiness, maybe the key to happiness. People who have more strong relationships in their lives just feel happier.

There are no friends; only moments of friendship.

The ties that bind us are stronger than the occasional stresses that separate us.

Happiness, for me, is a function of the number of people I love, and I think joy and happiness is directly related to how many people are in our lives and how deeply we are bonded with those people. And so I'm happy if I'm with Ann; I'm happier if I'm also with my family and my grandchildren.

What interests me, ... is why people are so repelled when, after all, everyone started life attached. In a sense, the twins have never been born because they are still tied by an umbilical cord. Relationships between women - daughters, mothers, friends - are one of my strong interests.

No good friends, no bad friends; only people you want, need to be with. People who build their houses in your heart.