“To be deeply loved, means a willingness to cut yourself wide open, exposing your vulnerabilities… hopes, hurts, fears and flaws. Hiding behind the highlight reel of who you are, is the real you and that person is just as worthy of love. There is nothing more terrifying or fulfilling, than complete love, it’s worth the risk… reach for it.”

“The supreme happiness of life is the conviction that we are loved; loved for ourselves—say rather, loved in spite of ourselves.”

“Seize the moments of happiness, love and be loved! That is the only reality in the world, all else is folly. It is the one thing we are interested in here.”

“It’s a strange thing to discover and to believe that you are loved when you know that there is nothing in you for anybody but a parent or a God to love.”

“Well, it’s true that I have been hurt in my life. Quite a bit. But it’s also true that I have loved, and been loved. and that carries a weight of its own. A greater weight, in my opinion. It’s like that pie chart we talked about earlier. in the end, I’ll look back on my life and see that the greatest piece of it was love. The problems, the divorces, the sadness… those will be there too, but just smaller slivers, tiny pieces.”

“He’s not your prince charming if he doesn’t make sure you know that you’re his princess.”

“My great hope is to laugh as much as I cry; to get my work done and try to love somebody and have the courage to accept the love in return.”

“Real isn’t how you are made,’ said the Skin Horse. ‘It’s a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real.”Does it hurt?’ asked the Rabbit. ‘Sometimes,’ said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. ‘When you are Real you don’t mind being hurt.’ ‘Does it happen all at once, like being wound up,’ he asked, ‘or bit by bit?’ ‘It doesn’t happen all at once,’ said the Skin Horse. ‘You become. It takes a long time. That’s why it doesn’t happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don’t matter at all, because once you are Real you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand.”

“I want to be in a relationship where you telling me you love me is just a ceremonious validation of what you already show me.”

“To be fully seen by somebody, then, and be loved anyhow – this is a human offering that can border on miraculous.”

“We’re all seeking that special person who is right for us. But if you’ve been through enough relationships, you begin to suspect there’s no right person, just different flavors of wrong. Why is this? Because you yourself are wrong in some way, and you seek out partners who are wrong in some complementary way. But it takes a lot of living to grow fully into your own wrongness. And it isn’t until you finally run up against your deepest demons, your unsolvable problems—the ones that make you truly who you are—that we’re ready to find a lifelong mate. Only then do you finally know what you’re looking for. You’re looking for the wrong person. But not just any wrong person: it’s got to be the right wrong person—someone you lovingly gaze upon and think, “This is the problem I want to have.”I will find that special person who is wrong for me in just the right way.”