Merle Shain > Quotes

“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.”
― Merle Shain

“The people in your life are like the pillars on your porch.
Sometimes they hold you up, and sometimes they lean on you.
Sometimes it's enough to know they are standing by.

”
― Merle Shain

“Loving someone means helping them to be more themselves, which can be different from being what you’d like them to be, although often they turn out the same”
― Merle Shain

“Until you divest yourself of the notion that you are a collection of needs, an empty vessel that someone else must fill up, there will be no safe place to harbor yourself, no safe shore to reach. As long as you think mostly of getting, you will have nothing real to give.”
― Merle Shain, Hearts That We Broke Long Ago

“Intimacy requires accommodation and gentleness at it's core, and does with phrases like "If it bothers you I won't do it," and "Now I understand." And "Thank you for telling me that. I hadn't seen it in that light." And "I appreciate you taking the time to get through my defences. I am sorry I put up such a fight."
You'd be surprised how much power there is in respect, and how much respect comes back, and how much intimacy there is when you empower someone instead of overpower them, and how much more love.”
― Merle Shain, Courage My Love

“We are all persons courtesy of someone else, and since we need others to perceive us in order to experience ourselves, it is very hard to like yourself when those nearest you seem to doubt your worth. And when those around you don't see you as you want to see yourself, it is only too easy to lose the way and start auditioning instead for them.”
― Merle Shain, When Lovers Are Friends

“It has been said that a lot of women of our generation "grew up to be the men they always wanted to marry”
― Merle Shain, Hearts That We Broke Long Ago

“ Whether the melon falls on the knife or the knife falls on the melon, it's the melon that suffers." And so it would appear to me”
― Merle Shain, Hearts That We Broke Long Ago

“Power breeds resentment and withers the slow-growing plant that is trust, and people who use it to capture others not only fail to make friends but often end up captives themselves. And perhaps what is sadder still is that when you control other people you take away all that there might be in a real encounter with them and replace it with your fears. And while you might get gratitude for a while, or guilt and tears, you won't get what they had to offer if you'd let them give you what was really in their hearts.”
― Merle Shain, When Lovers Are Friends

“Romantic love has highs and lows and lots of rare emotions and dangerous sensations but it bores easily and has no friendship in it, and often when it's over, it is as if a tornado passed. It's a very expensive form of recreation, a theatre play with daydreams, a frolic of your own in which you are the main event.

Human love is based in every day, not fantasies or illusions. It acknowledges the other person as a separate person and even loves them for their imperfections, for their vulnerabilities and their incompleteness, and allows them to change and to grow. It seeks to honour, not to use, to empower, not to overpower, and when it fails, it just gets cranky, it does not blow a fuse.”
― Merle Shain, Courage My Love

“I overheard a young man once saying to his wife, "I can't control you. That's the problem and it's been the problem ever since day one!" And then I heard her answer him and heard her terrible voice. "No!" she said. "The problem isn't that you can't control me, the problem is that you're trying to. Why don't you stop worrying about controlling me and start worrying about controlling yourself?”
― Merle Shain

“But what is this psychic space, this common ground we seek to share, called intimacy - this place where you can exist in your own inner light and not be judged, this haven where your vulnerabilities don't humiliate you, where sex is always warm and close and all your funny lines are understood, and there is always someone back to back with you when you take on the world?

It's a place where not only joy can be shared but hardship too, it's an eye that catches yours across a room, it's not having to look your best, it's knowing someone else so well you can no longer tell where they begin and you leave off.”
― Merle Shain, Courage My Love

“And they say that there is no intimacy unless there is mutual acceptance and mutual trust, no matter whatever else there is, and I would side with them.”
― Merle Shain, Courage My Love

“There isn't a more perfect person somewhere, only a more perfect person we might become, and there isn't a paradise someone can lead us to unless it's the world we make for ourselves when we stop expecting it to be delivered by someone else.”
― Merle Shain, Courage My Love

“Power is anathema to intimacy, as it is to love, because when you have power, you have fear. So if you are trying to get closer to someone than you are right now, try recognizing their power rather than showing them yours.”
― Merle Shain, Courage My Love