Almost all of our relationships begin and most of them continue as forms of mutual exploitation, a mental or physical barter, to be terminated when one or both parties run out of goods.

Persons are fine things, but they cost so much! for thee I must pay me.

The famous carry about with them a great weight of patriarchal baggage-the footnotes of their lives.

Without wearing any mask we are conscious of, we have a special face for each friend.

The first thing to learn in intercourse with others is non-interference with their own peculiar ways of being happy, provided those ways do not assume to interfere by violence with ours.

To really know someone is to have loved and hated him in turn.

We can't all be friends and relatives as the world is; most of us have to be strangers.

The only thing as challenging as getting tangled in the underbrush of relationship is trying to write about it.

The bonds that unite another person to ourself exist only in our mind.

The opinions which we hold of one another, our relations with friends and kinsfolk are in no sense permanent, save in appearance, but are as eternally fluid as the sea itself.