Together But Separate Quotes

“And it's a reminder that Mr. Right isn't out there. There's just Mr. Right-for-You. He may look totally different from what's right for your best friend. Your marriage is a unique being with as much of its own DNA as you and your husband bring to the table. I remember early on in our marriage, Perry and I were friends with a couple who did everything together, even grocery shopping. I thought something was wrong with us because we had so many separate interests. But that's just who we are. It's not wrong; it's different.”

— Melanie Shankle

“Dissociative parts of the personality are not actually separate identities or personalities in one body, but rather parts of a single individual that are not yet functioning together in a smooth, coordinated, flexible way. P14”

— Suzette Boon

“We hold these stories and mad idea and events in our head and they run around and around telling us we are different, separate, broken.
Then one day the mad idea escapes the asylum. Most times it's unplanned. It just tumbles out on the lap of the man sitting next to us on the bus, or it slips sideways into a conversation on line at the Trader Joe's or it falls out at the kitchen table when your neighbor comes to pick up her cat.
And there is a terrifying moment when it first hits the light of day, where we think, "holy mother of God! What have I done? How could I have been to casual with my crazy ways?"
But the man on the bus just smiles and nods his head, and the casher takes a moment to look us in the eye and the neighbor sits for a cup of tea and together we move into some new agreements that we are all in fact crazy and it's so much nicer to be out of the closet with it all.”

— Maureen Muldoon

“How dare I presume to say: He is my friend, or even, more cautiously, I think I know him? At the very most we are like two strangers meeting in the white wintry veld and sitting down together for a while to smoke a pipe before proceeding on their separate ways. No more.
Alone. Alone to the very end. I ... every one of us. But to have been granted the grace of meeting and touching so fleetingly: is that not the most awesome and wonderful thing one can hope for in this world?”

— André Brink

“And then she thought that you went on living one day after another, and in time you were somebody else, your previous self only like a close relative, a sister or brother, with whom you shared a past. But a different person, a separate life. Certainly neither she nor Inman were the people they had been the last time they were together. And she believed maybe she liked them both better now.”

— Charles Frazier

“I don't know why we stopped reading together, but gradually we were not doing it regularly, and then without realizing it was happening we were reading different books, and gradually we came not to care about the book the other one was reading, because it was not the book we were reading, and we became bored and drifted off when the other one talked about his book. What we were doing, reading different books, was furnishing different rooms, constructing separate worlds almost, in which we could sit and be ourselves again. Of course those were rooms in which we each sat alone, and we gradually spent more and more time in them and less and less in the house we lived in together.”

— Sam Savage

“It was a vicious circle, though. The more gratification we found in our own geniuses, the more isolated we grew. Our home was like an artists' colony. We ate together, but otherwise were absorbed in our separate pursuits. And in this isolation, our creativity took on an aspect of compulsion.”

— Alison Bechdel

“I no longer believed in the idea of soul mates, or love at first sight. But I was beginning to believe that a very few times in your life, if you were lucky, you might meet someone who was exactly right for you. Not because he was perfect, or because you were, but because your combined flaws were arranged in a way that allowed two separate beings to hinge together.”

— Lisa Kleypas

“[Memory] ... is a system of near-infinite complexity, a system that seems designed for revision as much as for replication, and revision unquestionably occurs. Details from separate experiences weave together, so that the rememberer thinks of them as having happened together. The actual year or season or time of day shifts to a different one. Many details are lost, usually in ways that serve the self in its present situation, not the self of ten or twenty or forty years ago when the remembered event took place. And even the fresh memory, the 'original,' is not reliable in a documentary sense ... Memory, in short, is not a record of the past but an evolving myth of understanding the psyche spins from its engagement with the world.”

— John Daniel

“Like the muscles knew from the beginning that it would end with this, this inevitable falling apart ... It's sad, but a relief as well to know that two things so closely bound together can separate with so little violence, leaving smooth surfaces instead of bloody shreds.”

— Julie Powell

“Even a paperback printed on acidic paper, whose pages have yellowed ten years on, can still be read, no matter how badly the spine is cracked or how inflated it's become from being dropped in the bathtub. The pages might separate from the spine, but a rubber band can keep them together. You may loan a book to your circle of closest friends, but shoes are another matter. A great book will never go out of style - books go with every outfit.”

— Lewis Buzbee

“Suffering is part of life,' she said. 'All the parts of life are jumbled up together; you can't separate out just the one thing.' She parred his hand again, kindly. 'I could let you kill me now, lovely man, and have peace and good dreams forever. But who knows what I get instead, if I stay? Maybe time to see a new grandchild. Maybe a good joke that sets me laughing for days. Maybe another handsome young fellow flirting with me.' She grinned toothlessly, then let loose another horrible, racking cough. Ehiru steadies her with shaking hands. 'I want every moment of my life, pretty man, the painful and the sweet alike. Until the very end. If these are all the memories I get for eternity, I want to take as many of them with me as I can.”

— N.K. Jemisin

“Weddings have always been a fascinating thing to me. A time when people look in each others eyes and promise each other they will never allow anyone or anything to divide them. Out of two families, they come together to form a separate branch that links back to their roots. It's a time when two families are joined together because of the hearts of two people. A time when ill will and bad feelings should be put to rest along with the past. Weddings signify a new beginning. After all, no human alive has ever been able to choose his family ... God knows, I would never have chosen mine. But as the Roman playwright Terence once wrote, 'From many a bad beginning great friendships have formed.' (Zarek)”

— Sherrilyn Kenyon

“If you had actually screwed me it would have wrecked everything. It
would have convinced me that you were only interested in pleasure with
my animal body and that you didn't really care about the part that was
a person. It would have meant that you were using me like a woman
when I really wasn't one and needed a lot of help to grow into one. It
would have meant you could only see my body and couldn't see the real
me which was still a little girl. The real me would have been up on the
ceiling watching you do things with my body. You would have seemed
content to let the real me die. When you feed a girl, you make her feel
that both her body and her self are wanted. This helps her get joined
together. When you screw her she can feel that her body is separate and
dead. People can screw dead bodies, but they never feed them.”

— R.D. Laing

“I know vaudeville isn't supposed to be art. It's supposed to be entertainment, which is different. But I think art ... I think it's making something from nothing, basically. It's taking something as simple as movement, or a few notes, or steps, or words, and putting them all together so that they're bigger than what they ever could have been separate. They're transformed. And just witnessing that transformation changes you. It reaches into your insides and moves things around. It's magic, of a sort.
I never really knew that until I saw your act. But when you walked out on that stage, I knew I was seeing something ... different. Something maybe more amazing than what the professor and Silenus had done. You were making something up there, out of just the simplest elements possible, and seeing it changed something in me. I'd never encountered anything like that.”

— Robert Jackson Bennett

“Do you love her" Wulfgar asked suddenly, and the drow was off his guard.
"Of course I do," Drizzt responded truthfully. "As I love you, and Bruenor, and Regis."
"I would not interfere-" Wulfgar started to say, but he was stopped by Drizzt's chuckle.
"The choice is neither mine nor yours," the drow explained, "but Catti-brie's. Remember, what you had, my friend, and remember what you, in your foolishness, nearly lost."
Wulfgar looked long and hard at his dear friend, determined to heed that wise advice. Catti-brie's life was Catti-brie's to decide and whatever, or whomever, she chose, Wulfgar would always be among friends.
The winter would be long and cold, thick with snow and mercifully uneventful. Things would not be the same between the friends, could never be after all they had experienced, but they would be together again, in heart and in soul. Let no man, and no fiend, ever try to separate them again!”

— R.A. Salvatore

“I could see us sitting at the old piano, while he tried to explain how music worked. I could see the Iron glamour in the notes, the strict lines and rigid rules that made up the score, but the music itself was a vortex of song and pure, swirling emotion. They weren't separate entities, creative magic and Iron glamour. They were one; cold logic and wild emotion, merged together to create something truly beautiful.”

— Julie Kagawa

“It was long before they moved, and when they moved it was with great reluctance. They stood together in front of the looking-glass, and with a brush tried to make themselves look as if they had been feeling nothing all the morning, neither pain nor happiness. But it chilled them to see themselves in the glass, for instead of being vast and indivisible they were really very small and separate, the size of the glass leaving a large space for the reflection of other things.”

— Virginia Woolf

“I think the invitation offered the non-black reader is to join us in this expression of our familiarity and via that joining, come to understand that when black people come together to celebrate and rejoice in black critical thinking, we do so not to exclude or to separate, but to participate more fully in world community. However, we must first be able to dialogue with one another, to give one another subject-to-subject recognition that is an act of resistance that is part of the decolonizing, anti-racist process.”

— Bell Hooks

“Me and Kylie are sisters, but not everything we can always do together. She's not trying to be a model. She's trying to be more like a personality. We're trying to kind of separate ourselves - not in a bad way!”

— Kendall Jenner

“I used to think of two people in love like that. Like puzzle pieces, fitting together. But it's not like that at all. Love pulls a part of you out, and it pulls a part of him - like taffy, stretching but not separating. The tendrils of each one wrap around the other, until they meld together. One, but not quite. Separate, but not quite.”

— Tammara Webber

“We both have our independence and freedom, but we have those things with each other. It's a paradox, but it works. It all reminded me of what my friend Henry Cloud told me, that when two people are entirely and completely separate they are finally compatible to be one. Nobody's self-worth lives inside of another person. Intimacy means we are independently together.”

— Donald Miller

“The fatal day rarely announces itself, but comes disguised as midsummer. Our private lives are like a colony of worlds expanding, contracting, breathing universal air into separate knowledges. Or like several packs of cards shuffled together by an expert anonymous hand, and dealt out in a random, amused or even hostile way.”

— Gregory Maguire

“I'm not saying that kinda life's bad. But I wonder, y'know, if life should really be that easy, that comfortable. It might be better to go our separate ways for a while, and if we find out that we really can't get along without each other, then we get back together.”

— Haruki Murakami

“6So they are no longer two but one flesh. w What therefore God has joined together, let not man separate.”

— Anonymous.

“It's like the old thing: The parents stay together for the kids, but the kids know that you don't want to be together. The kids would rather you be happy - and separate - than together and miserable. I don't want my kid to grow up around two parents who just don't work.”

— Jaime Pressly

“He must prove himself strong enough to protect her, gentle enough to win her heart, and worthy of the great gift of her love and her unconditional trust. She must find the courage to embrace the darkest shadows of his soul, and the even greater courage to bare the shadows of her own soul to him. When all barriers are sundered, all secrets revealed and accepted, she can complete the bond; and they will no longer be two separate people, but rather one person, one soul, complete for eternity, stronger together than either could ever be apart.”

— C.L. Wilson

“My husband and I have together created three children, but we have separate finances, and that's the way I like it.”

— Anna Quindlen

“Souls, like rays of light, exist in perfect, parallel equality, always. But for when infinitely short a time they pass through the rough and delaying mechanism of life, they separate and disentangle, encountering different obstacles, traveling at different rates, like light refracted by the friction of things in its path. Emerging on the other side, they run together once more, in perfection. For the short and difficult span when confounded by matter and time they are made unequal, they try to bind together as they always were and eventually will be. The impulse to do so is called love. The extend to which they exceed is called justice. And the energy lost in the effort is called sacriface. On the infinite scale of things, this life is to a spark what a spark is to all the time man can imagine, but still, like a sudden rapids or bend in the river, it is that to which the eye of God may be drawn from time to time out of interest in happenstance.”

— Mark Helprin

“M. and I have plagued each other with our differences for more than forty years. But it is also a tonic.
Along with the differences that abide in each of us, there is also in each of us the maverick, the darling stubborn one who won't listen, who insists, who chooses preference or the spirited guess over yardsticks or even history. I suspect this maverick is somewhat what the soul is, or at least that the soul lives close by and companionably with its agitating and inquiring force. And of course all of it, the differences and the maverick uprisings, are part of the richness of life. If you are too much like myself, what shall I learn of you, or you of me? I bring home sassafras leaves and M. looks and admires. She tells me how it feels to float in the air above the town and the harbor, and my world is sweetened by her description of those blue miles. The touch of our separate excitements is another of the gifts of our life together.”

— Mary Oliver

“But who among us is perfect? Even the greatest strategists have their eclipses, and the greatest blunders, like the thickest ropes, are often compounded of a multitude of strands. Take the rope apart, separate it into the small threads that compose it, and you can break them one by one. You think, 'That is all there was!' But twist them all together and you have something tremendous.”

— Victor Hugo

“The thing with Joy Division's music is that each member was playing like a separate line. We hardly ever played together; we all played separately. But when you put it together, it was like the ingredients in a cake.”

— Peter Hook

“We're the Septembers now. The real ones. We are everything to one another. We don't need to say so; it's just true. Sometimes it seems like we're so close we form one single complete person rather than four separate ones. We settle into types- Bridget the athlete, Lena the beauty, Tibby the rebel, and me, Carmen, the ... what? The one with the bad temper. But the one who cares the most. The one who cares that we stick together.”

— Ann Brashares

“I wanted to tell her that the pleasure for me wasn't planning or doing or leaving; the pleasure was seeing our strings cross and separate and then come back together - but that seemed to cheesy to say, and anyway, she was standing up.”

— John Green

“A man leads a dree life who's not i' th' Union. But once i' the' Union, his interests are taken care on better nor he could do it for himsel', or by himsel', for that matter. It's the only way working men can get their rights, by all joining together. More the members, more chance for each one separate man having justice done him. Government takes care o' fools and madmen; and if any man is inclined to do himsel' or his neighbour a hurt, it puts a bit of a check on him, whether he likes it or no. That's all we do i' th' Union. We can't clap folk into prison; but we can make a man's life so heavy to be borne, that he's obliged to come in, and be wise and helpful in spite of himself.”

— Elizabeth Gaskell

“Swampy [ Marsh] and I live as far away from each other as we possibly can and still work together. But we just always felt like we were funnier when we were in the room together than we are when we're separate.”

— Dan Povenmire

“You put together two people who have not been put together before; and sometimes the world is changed, sometimes not. They may crash and burn, or burn and crash. But sometimes, something new is made, and then the world is changed. Together, in that first exaltation, that first roaring sense of uplift, they are greater than their two separate selves. Together, they see further, and they see more clearly.”

— Julian Barnes

“Christ, how did you ever get this screwed up! his mind demanded of
him. He knew the answer, but even that was not a full explanation.
Different segments of the organism called John Terrance Kelly knew
different parts of the whole story,
but somehow they'd never all come together, leaving the separate
fragments of what had ... once been a tough, smart, decisive and to blunder
about in confusion - and despair! There was a happy thought.”

— Tom Clancy

“Now they had to sit in separate places and sometimes they'd even have to sit outside and look through the windows. But they did worship together.”

— Michael Emerson

“I've learned, finally, how to balance work with having a personal life. I had to separate my personal and my professional life but now that I only have loving people in my life my personal and professional life blend together.”

— Doreen Virtue

“There are three things, and it depends on the group that we're talking about, but there's history, there's culture, and then there's social networks. So, you know, historically black and white, they worship together until about the end of slavery, and people started moving out into separate churches. But it was because of discrimination and racism and such that blacks began to establish their own denominations and their own churches.”

— Michael Emerson

“There are five fundamental qualities that make every team great: communication, trust, collective responsibility, caring and pride. I like to think of each as a separate finger on the fist. Any one individually is important. But all of them together are unbeatable”

— Mike Krzyzewski

“I think life is more interesting when everybody's jumbled up together. When people separate out into cliques and things, it's okay, but it's a bit limiting. You can always learn things from other people. This is my theory.”

— Jarvis Cocker

“In this world we find that all happiness is followed by misery as its shadow. Life has its shadow, death. They must go together, because they are not contradictory, not two separate existences, but different manifestations of the same unit, life and death, sorrow and happiness, good and evil.”

— Swami Vivekananda

“The opposite of love is not to hate but to separate. If love and hate have something in common it is because, in both cases, their energy is that of bringing and holding together”

— John Berger

“I feel like the personal me and the artistic me are separate, but connected. It's almost like a Jekyll and Hyde thing. As much as you try to keep them apart, they end up together. I'm very much aware that when I'm miserable on the creative side - if I can't make things work a certain way - it really detracts from being the father I want to be. So in order to ultimately be a good father and the man I want to be I know I need to keep my creative side in check, or at least a little bit happy. It's weird how it's intertwined that way.”

— Frank Iero

“Man must begin to the unitary principle of man - knowing that there are not separate men or separate individuals, but hat the whole man idea is one. He must know that all mankind is connected with every other part of mankind, all geared together by the one omnipresent Light of God which centers all as ONE and motivates all as ONE. Until man knows that separation from God is impossible, even for one second, he does not begin to have knowledge.”

— Walter Russell

“The Rhapsody is not a composition at all. It's a string of separate paragraphs stuck together - with a thin paste of flour and water ... I don't think there has been such an inspired melodist on this earth since Tchaikovsky ... but if you want to speak of a composer, that's another matter.”

— Leonard Bernstein