Intimacy Closeness Quotes & Sayings

Intimacy between people requires closeness as well as distance. It is like dancing. Sometimes we are very close, touching each other or holding each other; sometimes we move away from each other and let the space between us become an area where we can freely move.
To keep the right balance between closeness and distance requires hard work, especially since the needs of the partners may be quite different at a given moment. One might desire closeness while the other wants distance. One might want to be held while the other looks for independence. A perfect balance seldom occurs, but the honest and open search for that balance can give birth to a beautiful dance, worthy to behold. — Henri J.M. Nouwen

Basically, secure people feel comfortable with intimacy and are usually warm and loving; anxious people crave intimacy, are often preoccupied with their relationships, and tend to worry about their partner's ability to love them back; avoidant people equate intimacy with a loss of independence and constantly try to minimize closeness. — Amir Levine

There is a magic to intimacy, a world built of sighs and skin that is thicker than brick, stronger than iron. There is only you, and him, so impossibly close that nothing can come between. Not the enemy, not your allies. In this safe haven, in this hallowed place and time, I could even ask the questions whose answers I feared. — Jodi Picoult

She doesnt want your dark embrace. She'll let you hold her for a short time but she won't submit to that kind of weakness and she'll only let you get so close. In the past it was easier pushing you into the arms of another rather than face what was or what could be. She doesn't want to love; not now, so she'll close the door and toss the key. — Donna Lynn Hope

Romantic love is sexually passionate love. Romance uses sexual intimacy to create or amplify closeness and mutual fulfillment. — Peter Breggin

Phyllis and I pray these chaplets together; at three o'clock, every first Saturday. We are never in the same town. For months, we do not speak on the phone or email. We pray these chaplets for just a few minutes, maybe as many as sixty minutes, once a month on a Saturday afternoon. Intimacy with the elusive God is that kind of intimacy. It is the closeness of praying together, apart. — Lauren F. Winner

Promises, is very much hidden. While trusting in their Savior for pardon and for help, and seeking to some extent to obey Him, they have hardly realized to what closeness of union, to what intimacy — Andrew Murray

All of a sudden I understand why I like Aliki Barnstones poems so much. They remind me of the one she has studied most - shall we call her her master - Emily Dickinson. Not in the forms, not, as such, in the music, and not in the references; but in that weird intimacy, that eerie closeness, that absolute confession of soul ... In Barnstone, too, the two worlds are intensely present, and the voice moves back and forth between them. She has the rare art of distance and closeness. It gives her her fine music, her wisdom, her form. She is a fine poet. — Gerald Stern

Parenting can be established as a time-share job, but mothers are less good "switching off" their parent identity and turning to something else. Many women envy the father's ability to set clear boundaries between home and work, between being an on-duty and an off-duty parent ... Women work very hard to maintain a closeness to their child. Father's value intimacy with a child, but often do not know how to work to maintain it. — Terri E Apter

For the first time in history, middle-class women do not need men in the traditional ways - for safety, for money, for a life. So they're demanding instead what they always wanted but couldn't ask for: emotional connection, presence, intimacy. Sex with enough foreplay, enough seduction, enough closeness to please them. Men are baffled not only because the needs they are being asked to fill differ so from what their fathers and grandfathers understood to be their jobs but also because full-fledged intimacy requires strengths and skills they've never learned. Moreover ... they're strengths and skills that were once left solely to women: Men didn't have to develop them. This maturational mismatch may be contributing to distrust among lovers of all ages. — Dalma Heyn

To mature is in part to realize that while complete intimacy and omniscience and power cannot be had, self-transcendence, growth, and closeness to others are nevertheless within one's reach. — Sissela Bok

Technologies of the soul tend to be simple, bodily, slow and related to the heart as much as the mind. Everything around us tells us we should be mechanically sophisticated, electronic, quick, and informational in our expressiveness - an exact antipode to the virtues of the soul. It is no wonder, then, that in an age of telecommunications - which, by the way, literally means "distant connections" - we suffer symptoms of the loss of soul. We are being urged from every side to become efficient rather than intimate. — Thomas Moore

For many men the moment of violent connection may be the only intimacy, the only attainable closeness, the only space where the agony is released. — Bell Hooks

Men come to sex hoping that it will provide them with all of the emotional satisfaction that would have come from love. Most men think that sex will provide them with a sense of being alive, connected, that sex will offer closeness, intimacy, pleasure. And more often than not sex simply does not deliver the goods. This fact does not lead men to cease obsessing about sex; it intensifies their lust and their longing. — Bell Hooks

Avoidant attachment: Whether the mother is present or absent, the child behaves the same - neither noticing nor caring whether she or a stranger is there. Because the child isn't agitated when the mother leaves, there is no need for soothing. In adulthood, people with this attachment style aren't comfortable with intimacy and closeness, and so they avoid it. — Robin S. Rosenberg

Even when I press against him his presence is too far away. — Johnny Rich

There is a great feeling in a small venue, with the closeness of the people and the intimacy. — Mavis Staples

With so much unknown in this life, how little it takes for a face, a grove of trees, an outcropping of stone to become familiar. — Larry Watson

It's like when you take a trip with someone you don't know very well. Sometimes, you can get very close very quickly, but then after the trip is over, you realize all that was a false sort of closeness. An intimacy based on the trip more than the travelers. — Gabrielle Zevin

Closeness was the promise of suffering and pain — Alice Jamieson

Inside marriage, those feelings are pure. God wouldn't order us to be fruitful and multiply if He didn't want us to share intimacy. It fosters a special closeness. — Cathy Marie Hake

But happiness is a difficult thing-it is, as Aristotle posited in The Nicomachean Ethics, an activity, is is about good social behavior, about being a solid citizen. Happiness is about community, intimacy, relationships, rootedness, closeness, family, stability, a sense of place, a feeling of love. And in this country, where people move from state to state and city to city so much, where rootlessness is almost a virtue ("anywhere I hang my hat ... is someone else's home"), where family units regularly implode and leave behind fragments of divorce, where the long loneliness of life finds its antidote not in a hardy, ancient culture (as it would in Europe), not in some blood-deep tribal rites (as it would in the few still-hale Third World nations), but in our vast repository of pop culture, of consumer goods, of cotton candy for all-in this America, happiness is hard. — Elizabeth Wurtzel

There is no medicine that can ignite the bond of love. Friendship is compulsory, love comes around when friendship ripes, and sex is a matter of choice. — Michael Bassey Johnson

That night we push our cots just a little closer together, and look into each other's eyes in the moments before we fall asleep. When he finally drifts off, our fingers are twisted together in the space between the beds.
I smile a little, and let myself go. — Veronica Roth

The closer he was the less confident I was. — Shannon A. Thompson

Our daily existence requires both closeness and distance, the wholeness of self, the wholeness of intimacy. — Judith Viorst

I have tried to preserve in my relationship to the film the same closeness and intimacy that exists between a painter and his canvas. — Norman McLaren

Essentially, we fall into grace. By that I mean that a certain mysterious quality reveals itself and cradles us within an intimacy with all of existence. This is something that many people are looking for without even knowing it. Almost everybody is looking for intimacy - a closeness, a sense of union with their own existence or with God, or whatever their concept of higher reality is. All this yearning actually comes from our longing for closeness, intimacy, and true union. When we open to life in this way, we begin to find an inner stability simply because we're no longer at odds with our experience. — Adyashanti

Intimacy transcends the physical. It is a feeling of closeness that isn't about proximity, but of belonging. It is a beautiful emotional space in which two become one. — Steve Maraboli

The central idea in this book is that highly aroused, negative emotion - dysregulated emotion - is the core problem for high-conflict couples and that there are specific skills partners can learn to manage their emotions effectively, which in turn makes effective communication (accurate expression followed by understanding and validation) possible. With enough practice, conflict can be transformed into closeness and couples can achieve the closeness, friendship, intimacy, peace, and support that brings us joy and reduces our suffering. — Alan E. Fruzzetti

Our moment had passed somehow. I was different. He was, too. Without our "madness" to unite us, there wasn't anything much there. Or maybe too much had happened in too short a time. It's like when you take a trip with someone you don't know very well. Sometimes you can get very close very quickly, but then after the trip is over, you realise all that was a false sort of closeness. An intimacy based on the trip more than the travellers, if that makes any sense. — Gabrielle Zevin

Sharing the emotional part of us with others creates closeness and intimacy. Also, being accepted by someone else for being who we are helps us accept ourselves. This is always a marvelous experience. — Melody Beattie

For a moment he was lost in the scent and the closeness of her, the grief and self-loathing vanished by this new intimacy. He knew he should tell her to stop, that this was inappropriate, but found himself too intoxicated to care. — Anthony Ryan

In my stolen photographs
for the photographer must be a thief, he must steal instants of other people's time to make his own tiny eternities
it was this intimacy I sought, hte closeness of the living and the dead. — Salman Rushdie

Well, I've kept you waiting long enough, he said, peering at me from that distance which drinking adds between people and which, at odd turns in the evening, seems closeness itself. — Ray Bradbury

While struggling with all the loss in her life, she mournfully thought, "If only I could forget ... " But that would be too easy, wouldn't it? However, she did with most; she never got too close and she never stayed too long, but there she was ... struggling with all the loss in her life. — Donna Lynn Hope

Successful relationships are those relationships were conflicts are successfully resolved and in fact peoples intimacy, closeness, and love are enhanced through the resolution of conflicts. I have always become closer to my wife and to my friends when we have conflicts and work through them successfully because conflicts will always arise. They are an opportunity for intimacy, self-knowledge, and a greater connection. — Stefan Molyneux

When we invite friends for a meal, we do much more than offer them food for their bodies. We offer friendship, fellowship, good conversation, intimacy, and closeness. When we say, 'Help yourself ... take some more ... don't be shy ... have another glass ... ' we offer our guests not only our food and drink but also ourselves. A spiritual bond grows, and we become food and drink for one another. — Henri J.M. Nouwen

Without knowledge, there can be no intimacy. Without closeness, there can be no knowledge. Without trust, there can be no closeness. — Yonason Goldson

The ache of it. The ache of missing Gudmmund is so great he can barely stand it. Of missing how safe being with him felt, how easy it was, how funny and relaxed. Of missing the physical stuff, of course, but more than that, the intimacy, the closeness. Of missing just being held like that, cared for. — Patrick Ness

We commonly confuse closeness with sameness and view intimacy as the merging of two separate I's into one worldview. — Harriet Lerner

Cities can be lonely places, and in admitting this we see that loneliness doesn't necessarily require physical solitude, but rather an absence or paucity of connection, closeness, kinship: an inability, for one reason or another, to find as much intimacy as is desired. — Olivia Laing

Intimacy is not a happy medium. It is a way of being in which the tension between distance and closeness is dissolved and a new horizon appears. Intimacy is beyond fear. — Henri Nouwen