MERLE SHAIN

Through tattered clothes, small vices do appear. Robes and furred gowns hide all.

Loving can cost a lot but not loving always costs more, and those who fear to love often find that want of love is an emptiness that robs the joy from life.

Friends are like windows through which you see out into the world and back into yourself. If you don't have friends you see much less than you otherwise might.

You can employ men and hire hands to work for you, but you must win their hearts to have them work with you.

The act is unjustifiable that either begs for a blessing, or, having succeeded gives no thanksgiving.

One often learns more from ten days of agony than ten years of contentment.

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

Loving can cost a lot but not loving always cost more.

Sex deepens love and love deepens sex, so physical intimacy transforms everything and playing with it is playing with fire.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

One 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.

Our times are obsessed with finding fulfillment, so there are times when some people try too hard, and there are people who want to have the newest feelings just as there are those who want to have the latest model car. You can't play at love any more than you can be proud of your humility, or add water to your perfume and have it smell the same, but men and women both have been known to try.

It takes great generosity to accept generosity.

There are really only two ways to approach life - as victim or as gallant fighter - and you must decide if you want to act or react, deal your own cards or play with a stacked deck. And if you don't decide which way to play with life, it always plays with you.

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.

I'm not sure there can be loving without commitment, although commitment takes all kinds of forms, and there can be commitment for the moment as well as commitment for all time. The kind that is essential for loving marriages - and love affairs, as well - is a commitment to preserving the essential quality of your partner's soul, adding to them as a person rather than taking away.

The romantic myth is so strong that it survives the wear and tear of marriage by simply detaching from it and floating up on ahead, and women who are rather fond of the men they married, as well as ones who are not, go through life with a bag packed for the day when the shining knight on a white charger arrives, just in case he does.

Anger is a passion, so it makes people feel alive and makes them feel they matter and are in charge of their lives. So people often need to renew their anger a long time after the cause of it has died, because it is a protection against helplessness and emptiness just like howling in the night. And it makes them feel less vulnerable for a little while.

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.

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.