Paradoxical Relationship Quotes

Love commingled with hate is more powerful than love. Or hate.

Toil and pleasure, dissimilar in nature, are nevertheless united by a certain natural bond.

Time is the tiger that devours me, but I am that tiger.

Without you, without your onslaughts, without your uprootings of us, we should remain all our lives inert, stagnant, puerile, ignorant both of ourselves and of God. You who batter us and then dress our wounds, you who resist us and yield to us, you who wreck and build, you who shackle and liberate, the sap of our souls, the hand of God, the flesh of Christ: it is you, matter, that I bless.

Sometimes we have our perfect foils, or you can call them their bete noir: the person who brings out both the best and the worst in you because you disagree with them so completely. Yet, you understand and respect them enough to give it your all.

Our enemy is by tradition our savior, in preventing us from superficiality.

We seriously irritate each other and don't want to spend any time together. And yet we have a profound respect for the partnership. We're like a couple of dogs with a rag.

Just about every children's book in my local bookstore has an animal for its hero. But then, only a few feet away in the cookbook section, just about every cookbook includes recipes for cooking animals. Is there a more illuminating illustration of our paradoxical relationship with the nonhuman world?

Pleasure and pain, though directly opposite are contrived to be constant companions.

I feel an intense intimacy with those who have this loathing interest in me. Further than this, I know what they mean, I sympathize with them, I understand them. There should be a name (as poetic as love) for this relationship between loather and loathed; it is of the closest and more full of passion than incest.

They that endeavour to abolish vice destroy also virtue, for contraries, though they destroy one another, are yet the life of one another.

I shall speak of how melancholy and utopia preclude one another. How they fertilize one another... of the revulsion that follows one insight and precedes the next... of superabundance and surfeit. Of stasis in progress. And of myself, for whom melancholy and utopia are heads and tails of the same coin.

I have a love/hate relationship with just about everything, but certainly with America.

I have a sense of destiny because of my mother, who was an extraordinary person but a terrible candidate for mother. She was like the god Cronus, who gave birth to his children in the morning and then ate them at night.

I sometimes feel I have met everyone he ever met, but I never met him. I am afraid to say I have always been - the word I would have to use is - amused by Howard Hughes.