Merle Shain Quotes - Page 2

One can never change the past, only the hold it has on you.

Men who take advantage of one woman take advantage of them all.

It takes great generosity to accept generosity.

you have to be very careful when you give to others that you don't tell them how great you are rather than how much you value them.

Love is short, forgetting is long, and understanding longer still.

There are many pages in the book, many kinds of lives we each can live, many ways to be rich, and even more to be poor.

The best kind of men have a certainty in themselves that isn't done in when countered by a certainty in their women, and they are much adored.

We marry to grow up, to escape our parents and to inherit our share of the world, not knowing who we are and who we will become, so it is left to marriage to make it clear which ones of us are growing in the same directions and which are ships meant to have passed in the night.

No marriage is one person's failure any more than it's one person's success, so it works best to see a marriage that has ended simply as something that didn't work out.

The older I get, the clearer it becomes to me that no one is cheated in this world, unless it's by himself.

Perhaps the old view of 'Me breadwinner, you hausfrau' worked for our grandparents, when people obligingly popped off before boring each other to death, but it won't work any longer because we are living too long and divorce is needed today to do what death acomplished more economically before.

You can tell a lot about what a man lacks by watching what he is cynical about, and many of us are cynical about love.

It can be much harder to be on the receiving end of a transaction than to be the one who gets to give. In fact, being given to can mean being taken from. There is a very strong connection between pride and giving, and those who do the giving get to feel that they are worthy, while those who are given to often feel that they are not.

It's hard to tell our good luck sometimes. Hard to tell sometimes for many years to come. And most of us have wept copious tears over someone or something, when if we'd understood the situation better, we might have celebrated our good fortune insteadOne can never change the past, only the hold it has on you and while nothing in your life is reversible, you can reverse it nevertheless.

There are some decisions in life that only you can make.

Some men are more perfect than others.

when you put something good into the world, something good comes back to you.

Girls gave sex to get love and boys gave love to get sex and conning girls was the favorite indoor sport.

Most women would rather have someone whisper their name at optimum moments than rocket with contractions to the moon.

Each of us is a seed, a silent promise, and it is always Spring.

Marriage is supposed to do everything, like Duz, which is more than half its problem. It is said to save us, define us, give us purpose, keep us from loneliness, and incidentally balance our diet and wash our socks, and when it doesn't, we get divorced.

Compassion is the thing that leads you gently back to yourself.

There are no perfect men of course, but some are more perfect than others, and we can use all of those we can get.

It takes a lot of mulch, love does, to create a froth.

The dream of romantic love is taken more seriously in North America than it is anywhere else in the world, which is why we believe in fidelity and why we believe in infidelity as well. It is also, of course, what makes our divorce rate as high as it is. Falling in love at first sight and instant gratification are part of the world in which we live, so there are people who believe adamantly in fidelity. They just don't believe in it for long.