"Once a little boy sent me a charming card with a little drawing on it. I loved it. I answer all my children’s letters — sometimes very hastily — but this one I lingered over. I sent him a card and I drew a picture of a Wild Thing on it. I wrote, “Dear Jim: I loved your card.” Then I got a letter back from his mother and she said, “Jim loved your card so much he ate it.” That to me was one of the highest compliments I’ve ever received. He didn’t care that it was an original Maurice Sendak drawing or anything. He saw it, he loved it, he ate it."
Maurice Sendak
"There's something of a magic to the perspective that a post-relationship experience gives you. It profoundly changes your perspective on not just your own heart and decisions, but every single person in your life and the people who may enter it tomorrow. I mean, what's the fucking deal with hindsight, right? Could there be a more inconvenient educator?
Thing is, you just have to trust yourself, give yourself a break, and except that hindsight always wins and you'll never get it perfect and the people who are fucking up your world or undermining your foundations are in their own tailspin of it's own severity and you sit on a bench in front of something pretty, take a deep breath, and take in the fact that 'okay...so that fucking happened'.
And you're still standing, and he (or she) may not be, but you're still standing, and you have everything you went into the relationship with...it's just all shifted around and a little swollen here or there, but you know you like you and that's where you start. Or you don't like little bits of you and you start with the bits you like and you work on the ones you don't. A boy (or girl) comes along and likes lots of your bits. Wants to jump in the ring... help you on the bits you want help on.
All in all, this is life, I think. We move through lessons to the point at which a relationship (the forever one) is about learning them together in full. The lessons never stop though. We find perfection in the fact that imperfection is constant, and a way to live among it sans destruction becomes the symphony of true love."
DShan
“We are, all of us, abominably human.
We are broken and we are flawed and even we ourselves barely recognize the degree to which this is true. And Love is this concept that, in its platonic ideal form, makes over other people and conceals those flaws and convinces us for brief moments that, Hey, perhaps this Other is not so flawed, is not broken, is not abominably just-like-me.
And then we realize they are; and then they realize we are.
But sometimes it’s just nice to be broken and flawed with someone. And it’s nice to have someone to get fucked up on bourbon and fall asleep half-naked on the couch with. And sometimes it’s nice to just pretend we’re not so flawed and broken and abominable. And it’s this concept of Love that is the problem, after all. We are broken and flawed and we created a broken and flawed concept because we have brains able to dream of things beyond ourselves and to imagine the nonexistent.
But we have our bourbon and our couches and half of our clothes, so that’s okay. It’s really all okay.”
Raymond Carver
