Intimacy Quotes

“The paradox of real love is that our capacity to sustain intimacy rests on our capacity to tolerate aloneness inside the relationship.”

“Each bump or challenge in our intimate connections offers us a perfect opportunity to deepen our level of intimacy, while allowing us to grow and evolve both individually and together.”

“The growth of intimacy will teach us how to love—both ourselves and the other person. If we will allow ourselves to practice the skills of intimacy, we will learn to love. Boundaries protect love and intimacy. Certain behaviors support the integrity of intimacy. Other behaviors, harm, disrupt, or reverse, intimacy. By using skills that promote intimacy, boundaries are created that protect the relationship.”

“Sound crazy? It may well be, but it is precisely in relationships of intimacy that your craziness (and mine) will be hardest to conceal. p.215”

“…I have fallen in love with a painting. Though that phrase doesn’t seem to suffice, not really—rather’s it that I have been drawn into the orbit of a painting, have allowed myself to be pulled into its sphere by casual attraction deepening to something more compelling. I have felt the energy and life of the painting’s will; I have been held there, instructed. And the overall effect, the result of looking and looking into it’s brimming surface as long as I could look, is love, by which I mean a sense of tenderness toward experience, of being held within an intimacy with the things of the world.”

“But love doesn’t control, and I suppose that’s why it’s the ultimate risk. In the end, we have to hope the person we’re giving our heart to won’t break it, and be willing to forgive them when they do, even as they will forgive us. Real love stories don’t have dictators, they have participants. Love is an ever-changing, complicated, choose-your-own adventure narrative that offers the world but guarantees nothing. When you climb a mountain or sail an ocean, you’re rewarded for staying in control. Perhaps that’s another reason true intimacy is so frightening. It’s the one thing we all want, and must give up control to get.”

“Physical intimacy isn’t and can never be an effective substitute for emotional intimacy.”

“oaking” seems like a crazy word in an intimacy book. Yet that is exactly what you want to do in your relational time with Him, you want to “soak in and soak up” His presence, “soak in and soak up” His love. Soaking is positioning yourself before God for the sole purpose of experiencing His presence and His love for you.”

“For a knowledge of intimacy, localization in the spaces of our intimacy is more urgent than determination of dates.”

“Intimacy is about sharing something with your spouse that you don’t share with anybody else. It’s letting him in. It’s laughing together. And it’s also feeling that deep hunger for each other!”