Louisa May Alcott Quotes

There will just always be a distance between you and the people around you. Now, [Hillary Clinton] can clearly emotionally connect with her intimates within the zone of trust. It's just the wall outside the zone of trust is so impermeable.

It's hard for me to pry with people I know.

There is safety in reserve, but no attraction. One cannot love a reserved person.

I'm not really in Louis CK's circle. It'd probably be harder if we were really close and I went off on him.

The best quality about Kobe Bryant? You want me to be honest? I don't know. I'll tell you why. I open my arms to everybody. But he never stepped forward for the embrace. So I never really got to know him. I don't know anything about him, and it's kinda sad.

There are some people who become best friends with everyone they photograph. There are people that I really like and admire and respect, but in a way I think it's better to keep a distance. I think you get better pictures of people that you don't know very well.

I am not somebody who likes to give advice, or anything like that, unless it's my closest friends or family.

I'm not an intimate person, really.

I find it really hard to be close to anybody.

I've never been fully transparent or an open book, even to those you'd call close friends.

I'm not an open person. Something's really got to be troubling me to have heart to heart talks with anybody.

Society, dead or alive, can have no charm without intimacy and no intimacy without an interest in trifles.

Your distance from your partner is the distance from your heart. The things that make relationships difficult are some of the most precious aspects to us.

I would say our social relationships are relatively shallow. We are actually afraid to be intimate, with people - many people even with their wives and husbands.

You can only really get under anybody's skin if you are married to them.

Even when I detach, I care. You can be separate from a thing and still care about it. If I wanted to detach completely, I would move my body away. I would stop the conversation midsentence. I would leave the bed. Instead, I hover over it for a second. I glance off in another direction. But I always glance back at you.

...it's closeness that does you in. Never get too close to people, son.

It is my secrecy which makes you unhappy, my evasions, my silences. And so I have found a solution. Whenever you get desperate with my mysteries, my ambiguities, here is a set of Chinese puzzle boxes. You have always said that I was myself a Chinese puzzle box. When you are in the mood and I baffle your love of confidences, your love of openness, your love of sharing experiences, then open one of the boxes. And in it you will find a story, a story about me and my life. Do you like this idea? Do you think it will help us to live together?

Love requires that we overcome the traditional and self-defeating fears that place distance between ourselves and others.

Be courteous to all, but intimate with few.

Tangled in one another's arms and nine times out of ten the things you think about a person make it impossible to touch them.

You have to be intimate with a person to know that person.

Everything he'd done with regard to her in the last three years had been calculated to foreclose the intensely personal sort of talks they'd had when he was younger: to get her to shut up, to train her to contain herself, to make her stop pestering him with her overfull heart and her uncensored self. And now that the training was complete and she was obediently trivial with him, he felt bereft of her and wanted to undo it.

He was thirty-one now, not too old, but old enough to be lonely. He hadn't dated since he'd been back here, hadn't met anyone who remotely interested him. It was his own fault, he knew. There was something that kept a distance between him and any woman who started to get close, something he wasn't sure he could change even if he tried. And sometimes in the moments right before sleep came, he wondered if he was destined to be alone forever.

There are things that you can't do - like writing letters to a part of yourself. To your feet or hair. Or heart.