People From Baltimore

"Love is often gentle, desire always a rage."

"The marriage of convenience has this to recommend it: we are better judges of convenience than we are of love."

"As we are human, we can't do what we can't do; as we're neurotic, we can't do what we can."

"The excesses of love soon pass, but its insufficiencies torment us forever."

"It is a feeling at once stimulating and flat, to know that someone you do not love is in love with you."

"We lavish on animals the love we are afraid to show to people. People might not return it; or worse, they might."

"No one can understand love who has not experienced infatuation. And no one can understand infatuation, no matter how many times he has experienced it."

"Love unlocks doors and opens windows that weren't even there before."

"When we first fall in love, we feel that we know all there is to know about life, and perhaps we are right."

"Anything you do from the heart enriches you, but sometimes not till years later."

"Most of us can easily do two things at once; what’s all but impossible is to do one thing at once."

"The hardest-learned lesson: that people have only their kind of love to give, not our kind."

"When we have been humiliated by someone we love, it takes all our strength to pretend to recover from it."

"When a man comes to love a woman exactly as she had dreamed, she decides he is a weakling."

"In retrospect, our triumphs could as easily have happened to someone else; but our defeats are uniquely our own."

"A childhood can be judged sheltered or not according to which was learned first, the four-letter word or the euphemism."

"What we love about love is the fever, which marriage puts to bed and cures."

"If the second marriage really succeeds, the first one didn't really fail."

"When children are bored, it reflects on us all."

"After the chills and fever of love, how nice is the 98.6 degrees of marriage!"

"How can a man marry wisely in his twenties? The girl he's going to wind up wanting hasn't even been born."

"A husband only worries about a particular Other Man; a wife distrusts her whole species."

"Children lack morality, but they also lack fake morality."

"One of life's few really reliable pleasures: to have a family you love, and to leave them for a week."

"'Pull yourself together' is seldom said to anyone who can."

"The neurotic doesn't know how to cope with his emotional bills; some he keeps paying over and over, others he never pays at all."

"If you had an unhappy childhood, you will always want to sleep late in the morning."

"The neurotic circles ceaselessly above a fogged-in airport."

"The neurotic is always half-drowning in anxiety, and always being half-rescued."

"Neurosis is no worse than a bad cold; you ache all over, and it's made you a mess, but you won't die from it."

"The family unit is man's noblest device for being bored."

"Likely as not, the child you can do the least with will do the most to make you proud."

"Naturally, the neurotic wants you to love him twice as much, for he's going to cut it in half anyway."

"The neurotic feels as though trapped in a gas-filled room where at any moment someone, probably himself, will strike a match."

"The fault no child ever loses is the one he was most punished for."

"The neurotic usually obeys his own Golden Rule: Hate thy neighbor as thyself."

"Neurotic: Someone who can go from the bottom to the top, and back again, without ever once touching the middle."

"Neurotics are sure that no one understands them, and they wouldn't have it any other way."

"Your children tell you casually years later what it would have killed you with worry to know at the time."

"It’s easy enough to get along with a loved and loving child–at least till you try to get him to do something."

"A doctor recently described to me "benign positional vertigo": it means you get dizzy in certain positions, but you can get over it without necessarily changing the position. Change "vertigo" to "anxiety," and you've summed up the neurotic's plight."

"Humiliation is a vast country of imprecise boundaries. If you think you're there, you are."

"Most of us become parents long before we have stopped being children."

"Neurotics are anxiety prone, accident prone, and often just prone."

"Of all second-class citizens, neurotics are the only ones who are so by choice."

"Broadway audiences are dependably square. "Well, I'll be a son of a bitch" always gets a laugh; spoken by a little old lady, it brings down the house."

"There's no way to repay a mother's love, or lack of it."

"The neurotic believes that life has meaning, but that his life hasn't."

"The ideal home: big enough for you to hear the children, but not very well."

"True remorse is never just a regret over consequence; it is a regret over motive."