Affair Quotes

“If you truly want to be respected by people you love, you must prove to them that you can survive without them.”
― Michael Bassey Johnson, The Infinity Sign

“It is better to lock up your heart with a merciless padlock, than to fall in love with someone who doesn't know what they mean to you.”
― Michael Bassey Johnson, The Infinity Sign

“True love is not a hide and seek game: in true love, both lovers seek each other.”
― Michael Bassey Johnson

“I told my wife the truth. I told her I was seeing a psychiatrist. Then she told me the truth: that she was seeing a psychiatrist, two plumbers, and a bartender.”
― Rodney Dangerfield

“We were hooked when we woke.
We had arms for each other.
But I yearned to resume
My dreams of another.”
― Roman Payne

“Backstage at the Grand Ole Opry, I got on my knees and told her that I was going to marry her some day. We were both married to someone else at the time. ‘Ring Of Fire’—June and Merle Kilgore wrote that song for me-that’s the way our love affair was. We fell madly in love and we worked together all the time, toured together all the time, and when the tour was over we both had to go home to other people. It hurt.”
― Johnny Cash

“An attachment grew up. What is an attachment? It is the most difficult of all the human interrelationships to explain, because it is the vaguest, the most impalpable. It has all the good points of love, and none of its drawbacks. No jealousy, no quarrels, no greed to possess, no fear of losing possession, no hatred (which is very much a part of love), no surge of passion and no hangover afterward. It never reaches the heights, and it never reaches the depths.

As a rule it comes on subtly. As theirs did. As a rule the two involved are not even aware of it at first. As they were not. As a rule it only becomes noticeable when it is interrupted in some way, or broken off by circumstances. As theirs was. In other words, its presence only becomes known in its absence. It is only missed after it stops. While it is still going on, little thought is given to it, because little thought needs to be.

It is pleasant to meet, it is pleasant to be together. To put your shopping packages down on a little wire-backed chair at a little table at a sidewalk cafe, and sit down and have a vermouth with someone who has been waiting there for you. And will be waiting there again tomorrow afternoon. Same time, same table, same sidewalk cafe. Or to watch Italian youth going through the gyrations of the latest dance craze in some inexpensive indigenous night-place-while you, who come from the country where the dance originated, only get up to do a sedate fox trot. It is even pleasant to part, because this simply means preparing the way for the next meeting.

One long continuous being-together, even in a love affair, might make the thing wilt. In an attachment it would surely kill the thing off altogether. But to meet, to part, then to meet again in a few days, keeps the thing going, encourages it to flower.

And yet it requires a certain amount of vanity, as love does; a desire to please, to look one's best, to elicit compliments. It inspires a certain amount of flirtation, for the two are of opposite sex. A wink of understanding over the rim of a raised glass, a low-voiced confidential aside about something and the smile of intimacy that answers it, a small impromptu gift - a necktie on the one part because of an accidental spill on the one he was wearing, or of a small bunch of flowers on the other part because of the color of the dress she has on.

So it goes.

And suddenly they part, and suddenly there's a void, and suddenly they discover they have had an attachment.

Rome passed into the past, and became New York.

Now, if they had never come together again, or only after a long time and in different circumstances, then the attachment would have faded and died. But if they suddenly do come together again - while the sharp sting of missing one another is still smarting - then the attachment will revive full force, full strength. But never again as merely an attachment. It has to go on from there, it has to build, to pick up speed. And sometimes it is so glad to be brought back again that it makes the mistake of thinking it is love.

("For The Rest Of Her Life")”
― Cornell Woolrich, Angels of Darkness

“Being faithful and monogamous is not natural for human beings. It takes work. Deep down we all know that. We have all been tempted to stray at some point or another. Even when it was only a fleeting thought and we didn't act on it. Every time we acknowledge that someone of the opposite sex is "attractive" or "sexy" we are doing nothing other than pointing out that they would be a suitable mate. Not acting on that natural impulse to want to mate with a viable mating partner requires a conscious decision. It's a constant struggle between what your body wants, and what the civilized part of your brain says you should do, in order to avoid the negative consequences of cheating on your spouse and ruining your long-term relationship. That's why affairs, and extra-marital sex, are often referred to as "a moment of weakness.”
― Oliver Markus Malloy, Why Men And Women Can't Be Friends

“She was as sated with him as he was tired of her. Emma had rediscovered in adultery all the banality of marriage.”
― Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary

“They had a year of joy, twelve months of the strange heaven which the salmon know on beds of river shingle, under the gin-clear water. For twenty-four years they were guilty, but this first year was the only one which seemed like happiness. Looking back on it, when they were old, they did not remember that in this year it had ever rained or frozen. The four seasons were coloured like the edge of a rose petal for them.”
― T.H. White, The Once and Future King

“It is still cheating, even if nobody comes.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“When a man cheats, it is said it is because he is a dog. When a woman cheats, it is said it is because her man is a dog.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana, Divided & Conquered

“Death never mattered at those times - in the early days I even used to pray for it: the shattering annihilation that would prevent for ever the getting up, the putting on of clothes, the wathchign her torch trail across to the opposite side of the common like the tail-light of a low car driving away.”
― Graham Greene, The End of the Affair

“Always guarding one's real, precious self in a cocoon of tranquility within a thousand masks.
Life itself had become a secret affair.”
― Mary Balogh, A Secret Affair

“Because in the long run' Stoner said, 'it isn't Edith or even Grace, or the certainty of losing Grace, that keeps me here; it isn't the scandal or the hurt to you or me; it isn't the hardship we would have to go through, or even the loss of love we might have to face. It's simply the destruction of ourselves, of what we would do'.”
― John Williams, Stoner

“For most affairs, this eventually becomes the most fundamental of questions, the only one that matters: Do we love each other more than the lives we already have? It is the question that hovers in the background of every secret phone call, flavors every tryst with the head of possibilities of apocalypse and renewal; and it is the answer to that question, or the lack thereof, that so often dooms an affair to failure.”
― Brady Udall, The Lonely Polygamist

“...bunches of flowers and kisses, their bodies locked together by a stopwatch."

Descriptive on an affair”
― Susan Richards Shreve, You Are the Love of My Life

“My husband ran off with his secretary. His male secretary. the only passion I have lately seems to center around buying a handgun. Unfortunately, I can't decide which one of us to shoot.”
― Kristin Hannah, Distant Shores

“TRUE LOVE MAKES US HAPPY. If love doesn’t make us happy, it’s not love; it’s something else. Love is a wonderful thing. It gives us the ability to offer joy and happiness, relieve suffering, and transcend all kinds of separation and barriers.”
― Thich Nhat Hanh, Fidelity: How to Create a Loving Relationship That Lasts

“A caprice is handled like a stew, and the pepper is added at the last minute.”
― Rachilde, Monsieur Vénus

“We are aware that blaming and arguing can never help us and only create a wider gap between us; that only understanding, trust, and love can help us change and grow”
― Thich Nhat Hanh, Fidelity: How to Create a Loving Relationship That Lasts

“The person you love has all kinds of seeds in her: joy, suffering, and anger. If you water her anger, then in just five minutes you can bring the anger out in her. If you know how to water the seeds of her compassion, joy, and understanding, then these seeds will blossom. If you recognize the good seeds in her, you are watering her self-confidence and she will become the source of her own happiness as well as yours.”
― Thich Nhat Hanh, Fidelity: How to Create a Loving Relationship That Lasts

“A sensual lifestyle is a lifestyle you can have an affair with for the rest of your life.”
― Lebo Grand

“Back at home, days later, feel cranky and tired. Sit on the couch and tell him he's stupid. That you bet he doesn't know who Coriolanus is. That since you moved in you've noticed he rarely reads. He will give you a hurt, hungry-to-learn look, with his James Cagney eyes. He will try to kiss you. Turn your head. Feel suffocated. (from "How")”
― Lorrie Moore, Self-Help

“A Medical Affair is more than compelling fiction. It also is a powerful narrative about how relationships between physicians and patients can evolve in unethical, even unlawful ways. And as a medical ethicist and educator, I was delighted to see Strauss deftly weave important information about sexual misconduct by physicians into her story line.”
David Orentlicher
Professor of law, medicine and ethics at Indiana University. Oversaw drafting of American Medical Association's ethical guidelines on intimate relationships between physicians and their patients”
― Anne McCarthy Strauss, A Medical Affair

“When restless sexual desire arises, we pay attention to it with enough understanding and enough love that it dissipates and does not grow.”
― Thich Nhat Hanh, Fidelity: How to Create a Loving Relationship That Lasts

“Tu as les jambes longues mais la mémoire courte !”
― Gratien Gélinas, Bousille et les Justes

“If Jamie had been heartless, he would be here right now and not with his wife and children where he belonged.”
― Carole Matthews, Let's Meet on Platform 8 / A Whiff of Scandal

“You're not going to end it with me are you, Harry? Not this time?'
'No, I'm not' he replied without hesitation. 'Not this time'.
Emma nodded slowly. 'I thought not'. Then she looked past him, avoiding his eye until she said 'then I must. I'm sorry Harry but I can't be your mistress. I could do it in France when everyday could have been our last. but not back here. Not in London. You understand that don't you?'
and it was absolutely no consolation to Harry Walsh that he did.”
― Howard Linsky

“I hope the memory of it keeps you going, Jennifer, because it has destroyed me.”
― Jojo Moyes, The Last Letter from Your Lover