Interpersonal Challenges Quotes

"The Theory of Everything" is an extraordinary story because [Jane Hawing] was incredibly religious and [Stephen Hawking] was an atheist, so you have this conflict both on a domestic level between a couple in a difficult situation but also this bigger conflict of science versus religion, so it's a really fascinating project.

Marriage is - among other things - a study in contradiction and disappointment, and inside that reality there is space for us to truly learn how to love.

Just to prove i was right that it's harder to be friends than lovers and you shouldn't try and mix the two, cause if you do and then you're still unhappy, then you know that the problem is you.

If two lives join, there is oft a scar. They are one and one, with a shadowy third; One near one is too far.

To find love is the great human undertaking...and it's always complicated by our compulsions and unconscious patterns, to say nothing of issues of trust and control.

Over the years they both reached the same wise conclusion by different paths: it was not possible to live together in any other way, or love in any other way, and nothing in this world was more difficult than love.

It's a really bad idea to be in a band and get involved with each other.

I think human relationships - the whole thing is cruel. It's very difficult.

I don't make friends easily.

Human relations tend to be more difficult when you're dealing with someone who weighs 30 kilograms more than you do. That's when you worry about whether a well-meaning gesture could produce complications. We have no problems with countries like Madagascar or Bolivia, for example. But Germany is our neighbor and we have a shared past. Besides, Germany is powerful and ambitious and more than four times as large as we are. It makes complete sense that we would act cautiously. It's simply Realpolitik.

Nobody, who has not been in the interior of a family, can say what the difficulties of any individual of that family may be.

I think that part of being human is being alone, and being lonely. I think one of the stresses on a lot of our friendships is that we require the people we love to take away that loneliness. and they really can't. And so, when we still feel lonely, even in the company of people we love, we become angry with them because they don't do what we think they're supposed to. Which is really something that they can't do for us.

He always said she was smart, but their conversations were a mined field in which at any moment she might make the wrong verbal move and find her ignorance exploding in her face.

I find it very hard to approach people. I take a very long time to open up and become friends with someone.

People say children from broken homes have it hard, but the children of charmed marriages have their own particular challenges.

With girls, friendships are hard because you have to learn to get to a maturity level to love them but not want to be them.

We were to equally strong types [with my husband], equally pigheaded - neither of us wanted to give in. And...I like to think those quarrels made us better, that they enlivened our life, because without them we would have had a normal life, yes, but banal and boring.

Technically I have siblings, but they are quite a bit older than me - I was the accident - so I have the only-child syndrome going on. I'm a little more selfish, a little more independent, a little closed. I do wish I were softer. I wish I were able to form relationships better.

Marriage isn't a 50-50 proposition very often. It's more like 100-0 one moment and 0-100 the next.

One of the hardest things about being alive is being with other people.

Marriage is a wrestling match where you hold on tight while your mate changes into a hundred different things. The trick is that you're changing into a hundred other things, but you can't let go. You can only try to match up and never turn into a wolf while he's a rabbit, or a mouse while he's still busy being an owl, a brawny black bull while he's a little blue crab scuttling for shelter. It's harder than it sounds.

I'm not easy to live with and I know that it's true. However, you're no picnic either, babe, and that's one of the things I liked about you.

... I have always been a disappointment to my friends. I have no gift of talk, not much to say; and though I have always been an excellent listener, that only succeeds under auspicious circumstances.

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.

It never occurred to me that our lives, until then so closely interwoven, could unravel and separate over a thing like that. But the fact was, I suppose, there were powerful tides tugging us apart by then, and it only needed something like that to finish the task. If we'd understood that back then-who knows?-maybe we'd have kept a tighter hold of one another.