If you lie to your husband - even about something so banal as how much you drink - each lie is a brick in a wall going up between you, and when he tells you he loves you, it's deflected away.
Interpretation
Lying creates barriers in relationships, impacting emotional connections.
This quote emphasizes the detrimental influence of dishonesty on intimate relationships. Even seemingly trivial lies contribute to a growing distance between partners, ultimately affecting the authenticity of their love and communication. Trust, once eroded, makes genuine expressions of affection feel insincere and deflected, highlighting the importance of honesty in maintaining close bonds.
In practice
In a marriage counseling session, a therapist might use this quote to illustrate the impact of dishonesty.
There's a space at the bottom of an exhale, a little hitch between taking in and letting out that's a perfect zero you can go into. There's a rest point between the heart muscle's close and open - an instant of keenest living when you're momentarily dead. You can rest there.
Mother’s particular devils had remained mysterious to me for decades. So had her past. Few born liars ever intentionally embark in truth’s direction, even those who believe that such a journey might axiomatically set them free.
I was 40 years old before I became an overnight success, and I'd been publishing for 20 years.
I always say that a poet loves the world, and the prose writer needs to create an alternative world.
Childhood was terrifying for me. A kid has no control. You're three feet tall, flat broke, unemployed, and illiterate. Terror snaps you awake. You pay keen attention. People can just pick you up and move you and put you down.
Reading is socially accepted disassociation. You flip a switch and you’re not there anymore. It’s better than heroin. More effective and cheaper and legal.
People complain not because something sucks. People complain because they're looking for empathy and to feel connected with those around them. Unfortunately, complaining is maybe the least useful way to connect with other human beings.
There can be only two questions that are asked with regard to human relationships: Where am I going? Who is going with me? Do not invert the order of the questions. Do not - under any circumstances - invert the order of the questions. Is that clear?
I've wrecked and ravaged half my life in the pursuit of women, and I suffer the pangs of about seventeen regrets -- the seventeen who got away.
She respected her husband in the same way as she respected the General Post Office, as something large, secure and fixed: and though she knew the small number of his talents she appreciated his abstract value as a male.
Ninety-nine percent of the time humans have lived on this planet we've lived in tribes, groups of 12 to 36 people. Only during times of war, or what we have now, which is the psychological equivalent of war, does the nuclear family prevail, because it's the most mobile unit that can ensure the survival of the species. But for the full flowering of the human spirit we need groups, tribes.
Some people insist they've never met a gay person. But Three Degrees of Jason Collins dictates that no NBA player can claim that anymore. Pro basketball is a family. And pretty much every family I know has a brother, sister or cousin who's gay. In the brotherhood of the NBA, I just happen to be the one who's out.
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