Natasha Lunn > Quotes

“As I grew older, I learnt that the expectation that someone will save you from who you are, or from what you have or don’t have, is a fallacy. Expecting someone to fill in a hole that’s within you? That’s expecting too much of any one person. That’s not your friend’s job or your partner’s job. That’s your job.”
― Natasha Lunn, Conversations on Love: Lovers, Strangers, Parents, Friends, Endings, Beginnings

“Maybe, then, this is how you try to bear the burden of the mystery with grace: by finding humility where you once saw self-pity, and opportunity where you once saw absence. By saying, ‘Even if I don’t get what I want, I have a good life,’ then paying closer attention to the small details that make that life beautiful. And by never forgetting that not knowing what will happen next also means that anything could.”
― Natasha Lunn, Conversations on Love

“No one really wants to be idealized - we want to be seen and accepted and forgiven, and to know that we can be ourselves in our less edifying moments.”
― Natasha Lunn, Conversations on Love

“Because when you like who you are when you are with another person, you realize how important it is to be around people who make you feel that way. They reflect your goodness back to you, and you know you’ve got it.”
― Natasha Lunn, Conversations on Love: Lovers, Strangers, Parents, Friends, Endings, Beginnings

“Love is not a state of enthusiasm. It's a verb. It implies action, demonstration, ritual, practices, communication, expression. It's the ability to take responsibility of one's own behavior. Responsibility is freedom.”
― Natasha Lunn, Conversations on Love

“Nobody is right for anyone. Actually, what makes somebody right is commitment. Then when you’re committed to each other and you have true dialogue, that means you allow the other to impact upon you and they allow you to impact on them. You’re not rigid and unchanging; you are moved by each other. It’s like two stones rubbing together until suddenly they fit. You have your initial years of sexual attraction and then something deeper can hook in. Rather than having a relationship with your fantasy of that person you begin to have a real relationship with them; you’ve impacted each other enough to actually know each other. And to know someone is to love them.”
― Natasha Lunn, Conversations on Love

“But the truth of this life is that there's a lot of pain in it. There's more loss and grief than we want to believe. How we make peace with that is the journey we're all trying to figure out.”
― Natasha Lunn, Conversations on Love

“In my earliest efforts at love, imagination was a thief that stole truth and perspective.”
― Natasha Lunn, Conversations on Love

“When you stumble on something you didn’t know that somebody else felt too, you think, oh my gosh, I’m not the only one. That is a falling in love – it’s the self recognized in someone else. A union of souls.”
― Natasha Lunn, Conversations on Love: Lovers, Strangers, Parents, Friends, Endings, Beginnings

“When you are not being honest in a relationship – to another person or to yourself – it is a little like screwing on the top of a jam jar when the ridges are out of line. An onlooker might think you are screwing it on just fine, but you can feel a stiffness developing that warns you it’s not on properly, and you know then that, however hard you try to keep turning it, the lid will never tightly seal.”
― Natasha Lunn, Conversations on Love: Lovers, Strangers, Parents, Friends, Endings, Beginnings

“Sometimes, I realized, we lose more from fear itself than the thing we are afraid of.”
― Natasha Lunn, Conversations on Love

“I'm not referring to books or novels about love, specifically, but rather to passages of writing that have the power to make you feel a little more alive. The paragraph that gives you a tingle of recognition. The lines that feel as if they are directly written for a deep, secret part of you, that you weren't necessarily even aware of until it was woken up by words.

Reading such a passage is, I think, a form of love. Like any relationship, that intrinsic recognition is a way of understanding and being understood, of seeing and being seen.”
― Natasha Lunn, Conversations on Love

“We spend our whole lives trying to meet targets set by someone else. We lose sight of who we are, because we're so busy chasing external things.”
― Natasha Lunn, Conversations on Love

“Love is a place where we feel seen, where we can see.”
― Natasha Lunn, Conversations on Love

“Through all of these small moments - the joyful familiar Sunday afternoons and the painful drunken fights - we have a choice. In the joyful ones, will we overlook the beauty, or will we be consciously present? And in the painful ones, will we decide it's easier to shut the conversation down than to dig for the uncomfortable truths? Or will we find a way back to a loving place?”
― Natasha Lunn, Conversations on Love

“Part of trying to figure out what you really want from life is ensuring you're selective about who you surround yourself with.”
― Natasha Lunn, Conversations on Love

“Now I think it’s about separating the idea of ‘I will only be happy if I have a partner’ from wanting companionship. Because it’s not the wanting love that’s the problem, it’s believing that you can only be happy in a relationship.”
― Natasha Lunn, Conversations on Love: Lovers, Strangers, Parents, Friends, Endings, Beginnings

“The best definition of happiness is the ability to approach your life as this gorgeous, unfolding work of art that's always changing, and never quite what you expect it to be.”
― Natasha Lunn, Conversations on Love

“hope I will remember that love is not a narrow thing. That love is what makes us care, connects us to each other and the world. That love is a quest, a promise, a home.”
― Natasha Lunn, Conversations on Love

“For me, the most beautiful thing about long-term love is understanding that a person has become necessary to your life. My life doesn’t make sense without my partner in it and I feel as necessary to her life as she is to mine.”
― Natasha Lunn, Conversations on Love

“All of us take so much for granted. Life is beautiful and we don’t have time to realize it. We let silly and petty things rule us and lead us into criticism. We find fault with life because we are tired and grumpy, instead of relishing the fact that we are with other people who are healthy, who love us and want to be with us.”
― Natasha Lunn, Conversations on Love

“The search for any kind of love, I now believe, is a continual process of looking in and out. Looking inwards to understand yourself, to be curious about your needs and desires and gifts and flaws, to develop generosity and self-compassion. Then looking outwards to use the power those things give you to love other people, and the life you are living too. What I had learnt is that you don’t really find love at all; you create it, by understanding that you are part of something bigger. A small speck of colour vital to a picture of life.”
― Natasha Lunn, Conversations on Love

“It doesn't matter who you meet or when you meet them; there's pain and joy on each side of the ledger. So don't stick rigidly to one story about what your life means, because it's likely to be wrong. In fact, there are many ways of living this life.”
― Natasha Lunn, Conversations on Love

“The best frame of mind to be in for anything you want is an ability to walk away from it, or it not to come right. Otherwise, you put yourself at the mercy of chance and people abusing your desperation. So...the capacity to say 'I could be alone' is strangely one of the most important guarantees of one day being with somebody else in a happy way.”
― Natasha Lunn, Conversations on Love

“Love is a lifelong project, a story that we can’t skip to the end of. How lucky are we, to know we will never finish it? Because there is never a final page, only a series of beginnings.”
― Natasha Lunn, Conversations on Love

“We need to stop tying ourselves so narrowly to this punitive vision that we've got to date in our twenties, find the ideal partner by twenty-eight, and have our first child at thirty-one, otherwise our life will be miserable. If that sort of narrative happens, it'll be great in some ways and it'll be awful in others. We need to show more imagination about what a good life might look like.”
― Natasha Lunn, Conversations on Love

“We learn to keep our jagged bits inside for fear of appearing unattractive. I always thought there was a part of your messiness you saved for yourself, that no one else would ever see. It’s enormously humbling to realize how many times and ways my partner will pierce that. I can pretend I have all sorts of things together, but when I am at my most broken, he is still the person I turn to.”
― Natasha Lunn, Conversations on Love

“And I grew to understand that the grief I felt equalled the love. - Greg Wise”
― Natasha Lunn, Conversations on Love: Lovers, Strangers, Parents, Friends, Endings, Beginnings

“I learnt that the loneliest place of all is lying in bed at night next to someone who makes you feel small, with your back to theirs, still hoping they will turn over and put their arms around you.”
― Natasha Lunn, Conversations on Love

“Even if I don't get what I want, I have a good life.”
― Natasha Lunn, Conversations on Love