Arthur Helps Quotes

For girls and women, talk is the glue that holds a relationship together - and the explosive that can blow it apart. That's why you can think you're having a perfectly amiable chat, then suddenly find yourself wounded by the shrapnel from an exploded conversation.

No, Mom. I said fine." "It's just your tone." Ah, yes- the tone. The nasty traitor.

Most of the trouble in life comes from misunderstanding, I think,' said Anne.

The conversation of human beings seldom interested him, but it crossed his mind that the males and females always got along best when neither actually listened fully to what the other one was saying.

A thought for today: 'People change and forget to tell each other.'

One realizes that human relationships are the tragic necessity of human life; that they can never be wholly satisfactory, that every ego is half the time greedily seeking them, and half the time pulling away from them. In those simple relationships of loving husband and wife, affectionate sisters, children and grandmother, there are innumerable shades of sweetness and anguish which make up the pattern of our lives day by day, though they are not down in the list of subjects from which the conventional novelist works.

Marriage is such hard work. And it's full of rage and real human drama.

You write about my flower as if I think and see what you think and see of the flower - and I don't.

Nothing like being with people you’ve known almost your entire life. Having a shared history is something you just can’t create with the new ones. No matter how much you like that, it just isn’t the same.

When you're trying to get laid, everything's great, but once you've been with someone eight years and the future is not finite, you have time to sit and really examine every little thing that irritates you.

I know that when people pull apart, they usually employ misunderstanding as a weapon, deliberately getting hold of the stick's wrong end, impaling themselves on its point in order to prove the perfidy of the other.

One night I came home. I figured, let my wife come on. I'll play it cool. Let her make the first move. She went to Florida.

They ended as all great passions do end - by a misunderstanding.

It is more difficult to maintain friendship with people that you work with five minutes ago, than from many years ago. For some reason we've just remained friends, we talk to each other all the time. For a while, for years, we spent New Year together.

In love, as in life, one misheard word can be tremendously important. If you tell someone you love them, for instance, you must be absolutely certain that they have replied "I love you back" and not "I love your back" before you continue the conversation.

Perhaps if they had stayed together longer, Sabina and Franz would have begun to understand the words they used. Gradually, timorously, their vocabularies would have come together, like bashful lovers, and the music of one would have begun to intersect with the music of the other. But it was too late now.

Sometimes I don't get you,' I said. She didn't even glance at me. She just smiled toward the television and said, 'You never get me. That's the whole point.

A woman told me her child was autistic, and I thought she said artistic. So I said, 'Oh great. I'd like to see some of the things he's done.

[The integrative system] deals with such matters as respect, legitimacy, community, friendship, affection, love, and of course their opposites, across a broad scale of human relationships and interactions.

The message sent is not always the message received.

With this book in my hands, reading aloud to my friends, questioning them, explaining to them, I was made clearly to understand that I had no friends, that I was alone in the world. Because in not understanding the meaning of the words, neither I nor my friends, one thing became very clear and that was that there were ways of not understanding and that the difference between the non-understanding of one individual and the non-understanding of another created a world of terra firma even more solid than differences of understanding.

There's no more usual basis of union than mutual misunderstanding.

I made you take time to look at what I saw and when you took time to really notice my flower, you hung all your associations with flowers on my flower and you write about my flower as if I think and see what you think and see—and I don't.

Here’s how a child listens: you tell him something, and he puts his own interpretation on what you said. That’s what he hears. No one has ever heard you.

Human relationships always help us to carry on because they always presuppose further developments, a future - and also because we live as if our only task was precisely to have relationships with other people.