Intimacy Quotes

Infidelity raises profound questions about intimacy.

New Yorkers have an intimacy with Trump, man. I mean, for decades.

I feel an intense intimacy with those who have this loathing interest in me. Further than this, I know what they mean, I sympathize with them, I understand them. There should be a name (as poetic as love) for this relationship between loather and loathed; it is of the closest and more full of passion than incest.

I’ve often thought that my lack of intimacy with those around me is the fault of those around me.

I don’t have any fear of intimacy, but rather thrive on it, which is rare in a public person.

A hostility to modernity is shared by ideologies that have nothing else in common – a nostalgia for moral clarity, small-town intimacy, family values, primitive communism, ecological sustainability, communitarian solidarity, or harmonies with the rhythms of nature.

The publishers, as I remember at the very beginning of my career, wrote letters with their fountain pens. A letter is different from a phone call or fax. It’s a different kind of intimacy. That pervaded the entire business of writing and publishing.

Sometimes, when you act with someone in an intimate capacity, you have to ask vulnerable questions to speed up intimacy – but that’s artificial.

Because I am afraid of commitment. This movie certainly has some bearing and is some reflection of my real feeling about relationships, because I do have commitment issues. My friends tell me I have intimacy problems, but they don’t know me, so who cares what they think?

Prenups are so unromantic – a sign of distrust, not love. Time for a reality check, my friends. First, drawing up a prenuptial agreement together is a sign of incredible trust and financial openness – you’re fooling yourself if you think you can achieve complete intimacy without it.

The true feeling of sex is that of a deep intimacy, but above all of a deep complicity.

Passion is the quickest to develop, and the quickest to fade. Intimacy develops more slowly, and commitment more gradually still.

When we learn from experience, the scars of sin can lead us to restoration and a renewed intimacy with God.

I have my outlet for my humor through my characters, and I also have the intimacy of rapport with my fans that allows me to explain my philosophy and spirituality.

The dominant characteristic of an authentic spiritual life is the gratitude that flows from trust – not only for all the gifts that I receive from God, but gratitude for all the suffering. Because in that purifying experience, suffering has often been the shortest path to intimacy with God.

I think it’s always harder in a film to convey intimacy.

We go into restaurants, and people aren’t talking anymore. They’re texting. While they are sitting at a restaurant with each other. So we’re losing this intimacy that we need to have as human beings.

I think when people go into something for the right reasons, you’re going to get a better film; you’re going to get more intimacy and a stronger foundation of trust.

I think I have a slight fear of intimacy.

I know what my sweet spot has been. It’s personal stuff, dysfunction, fear of intimacy, family stuff, psychology stuff. I eviscerate myself onstage.

Certain kinds of intimacy emerge on a phone call that might never occur if you were sitting right next to the other person.

Technology and communicating with people online or through a phone or through social media – it’s a false sense of intimacy and connection.

Some Christians see the biblical teaching on homosexuality as reflecting the culture and times in which the Bible was written and not reflecting God’s eternal perspective on homosexual people. Others believe these scriptures represent God’s timeless will for how human beings practice intimacy.

I could have done a night at the O2 in London, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it. I’m not being big-headed, but for my act I can’t be talking to an audience of 12,000 people. There’s no intimacy.

There’s something great about being on location with a bunch of people – there’s a camaraderie and intimacy that builds up over time.

I think the movie business, you meet people, and you work intensely with them, and you have these relationships – there’s an intimacy to it and a familiarity to the relationship because you’re having to let go of all your barriers so you can let people in and work with them.

Jealousy is unavoidable – it’s part of the price we pay for intimacy.

I love radio – its immediacy and especially its intimacy… it is part of your life, whispering into your ear. You can’t see it, but equally importantly it can’t see you.

Frank’s really different from everything I’ve done. Maybe the one thing that’s the same, and the thing that I tend to do, is that I think I can create an intimacy with the characters, like a sense of presence with the people in the film, and that’s what I tried to do in ‘Room’ as well.

Muslims have great reverence in their prayers but not much intimacy.

Intimacy, as I am using it, is sharing my reality with you.

The only thing I have never known is true intimacy with a man. I absolutely wanted to discover that before dying.

There’s something so great about platonic intimacy.

But one of the hardest things for me to do was to access anger. I could do it on stage. But when I did it on film it was hard for me. That probably has to do with the intimacy of film. And my own personal issues with expressing anger. So I had to learn how to do that.

The immediacy of improvisation is intoxicating, but there’s an intimacy that you get that’s very different when you’re doing drama.

Those who have never known the deep intimacy and the intense companionship of mutual love have missed the best thing that life has to give.

I think intimacy is the last taboo in many ways.

Every time I imagine a garden in an architectural setting, it turns into a magical place. I think of gardens I have seen, that I believe I have seen, that I long to see, surrounded by simple walls, columns, arcades or the facades of buildings – sheltered places of great intimacy where I want to stay for a long time.

People with film careers get a whole onslaught of people they spend 12 hours a day with every three months. It’s like speed dating. You’ve got a fast-track to social intimacy with a whole bunch of people.

I would never say that claiming you’re a Christian is wrong. I understand that there is a human aspect of being able to identify people whether it’s African American, Hispanic or Asian. But the definition doesn’t define the relationship, meaning you can be married and still not know intimacy.

I appreciate the intimacy of a 300-to-500-person venue; it’s the sweet spot for me.

I figured if I played in the no-man’s land of intimacy, I would learn to be a performer.

If fear is the great enemy of intimacy, love is its true friend.

I have a well-documented history of trouble with intimacy.

There is this intimacy still in Botswana. It’s a country of just under two million people, and there’s this sense of connectedness, in that people tend to be related to one another.

Office life is very, very strange. It’s like no other way of living. You have an intimacy with people who you work with in the office, yet if you meet them on the streets, you both look the other way because you’re embarrassed.

Intimacy is something to be cherished, and intimacy is not something to be afraid of.

Throughout the past, there has been a lack of intimacy, affection, and regard for Islam by Christianity. This, to a large extent, has been due to a lack of knowledge of the great human and spiritual ideals for which Islam and the teachings of Islam stand.

In my mind, marriage is a spiritual partnership and union in which we willingly give and receive love, create and share intimacy, and open ourselves to be available and accessible to another human being in order to heal, learn and grow.

For a dinner date, I eat light all day to save room, then I go all in: I choose this meal and this order, and I choose you, the person across from me, to share it with. There’s a beautiful intimacy in a meal like that.

At any age, we struggle with intimacy. When you’re a kid, you think, ‘I won’t have that problem. I’ll have sex whenever I want when I’m a grown-up!’ And then, somehow, it doesn’t quite turn out that way, and it’s so surprising to people that connection remains so challenging even when you’re married.

I am not against any kind of physical intimacy on screen, but kissing is a big no unless it’s with Jennifer. I’d like to kiss her on-screen as we do it at home, too. If we get paid for it, that’s even better.

The married are those who have taken the terrible risk of intimacy and, having taken it, know life without intimacy to be impossible.

A plant I have grown for years without really taking much notice of is epimedium. You know how it is: someone gives you a plant, you stick it in the ground and somehow it never presses the trigger. There is no intimacy.

I get asked, ‘What do you miss most about being a pastor?’ I think it’s the intimacy, the incredible gift of intimacy. You go through death with somebody, with their families, and there’s an intimacy that comes through that that is just incomparable.

Students have tons of health and intimacy and relationship questions, and no one’s listening to them.

There’s a tendency to dismiss anything having to do with love and intimacy in medicine because it’s hard to measure.

I didn’t like England. I couldn’t take the look of the place or the style of friendship. I need more intimacy from people than is considered okay there, and I felt that my personality and my enthusiasms weren’t understood. I had to put a big lid on myself.

Kids have no sense of appropriateness. They can ask me whatever they want. You do develop a sense of intimacy with readers, and they tell you things about themselves. During a school year, I’ll get e-mails asking about the books. I’ll give them information, but I won’t do their homework for them.

Real connection and intimacy is like a meal, not a sugar fix.

I think invariably when you are dealing with relationships, the films really center on that, and the plot is really born out of that. That’s the most core part of a relationship: intimacy, I think, whether it’s expressed or not.

Intimacy can be about holding someone’s hand. It could be about stroking their hair.

It’s not like you can wake up and realize, ‘Oh, I want intimacy,’ and then it happens that day.

That’s the whole spiritual life. It’s learning how to die. And as you learn how to die, you start losing all your illusions, and you start being capable now of true intimacy and love.

The origins of modern marital instability lie largely in the triumph of what many people believe to be marriage’s traditional role – providing love, intimacy, fidelity, and mutual fulfillment. The truth is that for centuries, marriage was stable precisely because it was not expected to provide such benefits.

My bravery however was the effect of assurance for could I have believed the current report, I should have fled as fast as any man, no man can possibly have a greater reluctance to an intimacy with Sir William Howe than my Self.

I love the intimacy of venues like the House of Blues. When everyone is packed in and so close to you, it makes you play differently. It’s so much more fun to play because there’s so much more high energy in a place like that.

Total intimacy is a myth; that said, a particular kind of loneliness can be both beautiful and fruitful.

For TV I don’t think I could have gotten a better part than Uncle Junior because of the intimacy of the character based on David Chase’s brilliant writing.

My problem is with intimacy. That’s where I have my biggest problems.

Just with the basic one guitar, one piano and one vocal and an audience, I think that the intimacy comes through more. People feel much more connected to the song because there’s nothing in the way, and I actually enjoy doing that.

Intimacy is healing.

I’m a very shy person towards my intimacy and private life.

The need for love and intimacy is a fundamental human need, as primal as the need for food, water, and air.

Men may feel just disempowered by intimacy, by being close to a woman, and also by feeling the tender feelings that they’re ashamed of.

The cool thing about the smaller gigs – it’s the intimacy. You really feel connected to the crowd.

Is it any wonder that for millions of men the only intimacy is physical, silent, and predictable?

That’s one of the great lies of intimacy, to pretend you know everything – you cannot. No matter how close you’ve been, over however many years, there remain secrets. I think we all know that – that you don’t tell everybody everything.

Globalisation has obliterated distance, not just physically but also, most dangerously, mentally. It creates the illusion of intimacy when, in fact, the mental distances have changed little. It has concertinaed the world without engendering the necessary respect, recognition and tolerance that must accompany it.

On many occasions, an informal buffet and casual seating offer a little more intimacy than a loud gathering around a big table.

Fiction is about intimacy with characters, events, places.

Sex isn’t hard, but intimacy is terrifying.

I try to make my music have the quiet spaces of folk, the intimacy, and the energy of rock.

The most frequent thing people said to me about Princess Diana when I was conducting interviews for my biography was that she could create a circle of intimacy in the middle of a crowd.

What I treasure most at any moment is intimacy, surprise, a sense of mystery, wit, depth and love. A handful of cherished friends offer me this, and the occasional singer or film-maker or artist. But my most reliable sources of electricity are Henry David Thoreau, Shakespeare, Melville and Emily Dickinson.

There’s something about the intimacy of comics that gives you a false bravado; you don’t always consider the consequences.

I think companies psych themselves out and say, ‘Now that we’re public, we’ve got to get all stuffy. We’ve got to be a certain way,’ and the entrepreneurial spirit dies. What you got to keep alive is the intimacy, the energy, this crazed sense of purpose.

After my second marriage failed… I said, ‘You know, could I have a relationship with a man? A loving relationship with a man that would involve intimacy?’ For a while, before I did get into a relationship, I saw, for a few years, either women or men. And I found that I could be attracted to both.

Enlightenment is the key to everything, and it is the key to intimacy, because it is the goal of true authenticity.

I love the intimacy and the passion and the danger that go into independent filmmaking. Because it comes out of a creative necessity. It comes from people who really want to make a movie and want to make a difference and want to grab an audience by the gullet and show them something different.

In the late 90s I was hired to participate in a 2 year initiative discussing intimacy and depression which was funded by an educational grant by Glaxo Wellcome.

You can relate to somebody’s pain and you have compassion, which can lead to intimacy.

Stand-up and sketch and improv – that’s the most direct contact you can have with somebody, making them laugh. I like that. I like the intimacy.

There’s a kind of intimacy that can happen between musicians, and if they’re people you enjoy and respect as humans, that intimacy is a real privilege.

‘The Luminaries’ is such a different book to ‘The Rehearsal.’ There are only a couple of things that link the two books: there’s a certain preoccupation with looking at relationships from the outside, being shut out of human intimacy; and then there’s patterning.

The Old Vic is a beautiful theater to work in. It’s quite a large house, but it has a feeling of intimacy.

I think that musicians should never forget about the intimacy of bringing two people together, and the aesthetic transference where you’re almost vicariously involved in a romance between other people.

I think part of real intimacy is being able to leave the room mad, and knowing that the other person will be there when you get back.

When you’re writing, you think: How does intimacy happen in the work? You don’t know who your reader is, woman, man, child, black person, Asian, who knows?

When I’m dancing with any woman, I immediately get rid of intimacy barriers. I just give her a big hug and crack on.

Games are a compromise between intimacy and keeping intimacy away.

Since a thing cannot be known directly or totally, one can only attune to it, with greater or lesser degrees of intimacy.

Our culture is so celebrity-obsessed that for individuals to show they matter, they need to display their intimacy to fame.

I find myself consistently drawn to writing about intimacy and the way we construct one another.

In ‘Tree of Life,’ the cinematography records a small story, a celebration of the courage of everyday life. But it does it so up close and so effortlessly that it has the effect of elevating the intimacy of the story to a grand scale.

Portland has all the accoutrements of a big city, but the heart and soul of it is a small town, so that creates an intimacy in a large environment.

The larger your audience, the smaller your vocabulary and range of referents – the fewer your means of expression. You can’t rely on the luxury of intimacy.

I would venture to warn against too great intimacy with artists as it is very seductive and a little dangerous.

If you’ve had intimacy in your life, you can be intimate onscreen. I mean, come on – I didn’t know how to hold a gun, but I could play a cop.

I have been driven by romance my whole life because I crave the intimacy that comes with that.

As Americans lose the wider face-to-face ties that build social trust, they become more dependent on romantic relationships for intimacy and deep communication and more vulnerable to isolation if a relationship breaks down.

Each couple’s version of intimacy is so fascinating to me. A friend will tell me about her marriage, and I’ll think, ‘Yikes, they have horrible communication! They’re going to get divorced!’ And then I’ll hear about them at another time and think, ‘Wow, they love each other so much!’

We allow ourselves to unclench when we’re home with our families, which is one of the truly wonderful advantages of human intimacy.

When you think about Broadway, you think broad and big, but the fact is there are so many plays that are very intimate, but fill a 1,500-seat house. Plays like ‘Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?’ have deep moments of silence and intimacy to them.

Acting, for me, has never been about wanting attention or wanting to be seen. It’s funny that I’m in a profession where that’s where I am. There’s so much I want to express; it’s about connecting with another person and the intimacy of what that is, and so I have to overcome my shyness.

Intimacy is a wonderful thing. It’s frustrating that growing up I thought it was wrong. It isn’t. Exploring your sexuality is important when you’re growing up.

To say the word Romanticism is to say modern art – that is, intimacy, spirituality, color, aspiration towards the infinite, expressed by every means available to the arts.

The digitally-native vertical brand drives a lot more customer intimacy than its competition. The data is better because every transaction and interaction is captured.

Communication is a continual balancing act, juggling the conflicting needs for intimacy and independence. To survive in the world, we have to act in concert with others, but to survive as ourselves, rather than simply as cogs in a wheel, we have to act alone.

The knot of intimacy at the center of ‘Ten Thousand Saints’ is the friendship between Teddy McNicholas and Jude Keffy-Horn.

I started so slowly and had so few followers and then it kind of sort of snowballed. I still feel an intimacy on Twitter, which I think a lot of us do. It feels intimate, doesn’t it? I love it. I never thought I would.

There is an intimacy and trust that is needed between leaders, between their assistants and advisers. Usually, you have the real substance behind closed doors; and the press conferences, you have niceties, nice photo ops.

The Hebrew Bible has long been the world’s possession, and those who come to it by any means, through whatever language, are equals in ownership, and may not be denied the intimacy of their spiritual claim.

Interestingly, the best way to promote intimacy is to demand it.

Few things tend more to alienate friendship than a want of punctuality in our engagements. I have known the breach of a promise to dine or sup to break up more than one intimacy.

So much of movie acting is in the lighting. And in loving your characters. I try to know them, and with that intimacy comes love. And now, I love Voldemort.

Intimacy, in my opinion, is when you are vulnerable with someone, you share secrets, are open to love, and you take care of their emotional well-being.

Romantic scenes are a part of Bollywood cinema, and if the script demands some kind of intimacy, I have no issues with my daughter doing those scenes.

Among men, sex sometimes results in intimacy; among women, intimacy sometimes results in sex.

Being able to laugh at a situation can help you hang on to your perspective. And there’s an intimacy in laughter that nothing else can come close to.

I don’t think I’d ever start making a film until I had both the intimacy with the subject and the distance to make it live in a certain way.

My friends tell me I have an intimacy problem. But they don’t really know me.

The relationship with the words someone uses is more intimate and integrated than just a quick read and a blurb can ever be. This intimacy – the words on the page being sent back and forth from engaged editor to open author – is unique in my experience.

Real intimacy is only possible to the degree that we can be honest about what we are doing and feeling.

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.

‘River’ is all about tension and release. It’s about intimacy and solace. It’s about staring someone in the face and not backing down.

For me, it’s the ultimate to be able to nurture and nourish someone. They trust you. It’s a basic form of intimacy in a community.

It was all about music, about getting your friends to come and see you play. I don’t see that same intimacy happening very much today.

Intimacy comes from being yourself on the stage and making the audience feel, without trying, that you’re sittin’ down there with ’em, playing, and that can happen in a big hall, if you have a good audience that want to listen.

I love the intimacy of making movies. The focus is deeper and much more intense than musical theatre.

A big difference between podcasts and radio is the intimacy. Radio oftentimes feels big and loud. To me, podcasting is closest to that weird late night stuff, whether it’s late night love song request lines, or it’s some talk radio show where you feel like you’re the only person listening to it.

I feel like in an interview situation, it’s a kind of intimacy that I can understand and handle – versus in real life, when I’m much more of a bumbler and have a hard time.

The sound of a mother’s voice expresses a feeling of intimacy, which has a truly magical effect on the listener.

That’s the power of television. You come into people’s homes every week, and that creates a familiarity and a false sense of intimacy.

Any time you have intimacy with someone, there is something between them.

Perhaps my problem in marriage – and it is the problem of many women – was to want both intimacy and independence. It is a difficult line to walk, yet both needs are important to a marriage.

I think there is something special about living in a small town. Everyone knows your business and there is an intimacy you don’t get in a large town.

The digitally native generation has no idea what has been lost to the freedom of intimacy that has no fear of being recorded.

Anything that takes you out of the context of being separate is healing. Anything that takes you out of the context of separateness is intimacy.

Life is cold. People stay warm through the intimacy of a story.

When I started, you didn’t focus so much on production, certainly not – gosh – down to the finest little detail of how you shifted your eyes or how you turned to somebody. A lot of the shots were far away from a still camera. There weren’t as many close-ups and intimacy.

I think when one becomes very close to another person, it can mean loving and intimacy, but on the other hand, there’s also the danger of one destructing another under the name of love. I think that is the scariest thing for me in various relationships.

I know that in writer’s rooms across North America, there are still conversations about how much is too much when it comes to intimacy between, in my case, two men. That’s an insane conversation to be having.

Television has the obvious benefits of regularity and intimacy.

I always thought that if you don’t feel the breath in the actors’ bodies, you lose all the intimacy and truth.

Most teams are naturally flat; they have fewer members than a large enterprise, which allows for intimacy and trust to form. This makes collaborative problem solving in individual teams more straightforward.

Intimacy and community buffer stress.

There’s an energy and intimacy around a foosball table that nothing else compares to.

The thing you can’t underestimate is the true fan’s intimacy. So Lady Gaga or anybody’s true fan, I don’t think they’re going anywhere. There are people who are into commitment. If they’re connecting with an artist, I think they’ll be there over the long course.

Part of being an actor is the rhythm of the life of being an actor, and that involves coming together with a group of people, making something together that is intense and requires a lot of intimacy, and then walking away from it with the possibility that you will never see any of those people again.

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

I’ve always written – about music, art, things going on around the world. The danger is that it becomes too personal. I don’t think people want it at that level of intimacy.

My writing partner, Joni Lefkowitz, and I love studying girl friendships in particular because they seem defined by a combination of codependent intimacy and subtle, constant passive-aggressiveness.

In 1979, I moved to England and photographed Joy Division and Bowie and Beefheart. At that time I got images that I felt had that special, well – power is a big word to say – more like intimacy and ambition that outlasted the photo shoot. I felt that they would have a longer life.

I’m just basically trying to make music that feels good. Right now in the music industry there’s a real lack of intimacy. You don’t really connect with the artist as much anymore, and you don’t really understand where they are. I’m basically doing music that illustrates who I am and where I am in my life.

With fame there is a crosswire between intensity and intimacy. You have decoy intimacy, but you are also very much alone.

In this play we’re dealing with relative truths – who’s lying, who’s telling the truth. But underneath that, Ed and I have hit this deeper level of intimacy between old friends that comes out in the play.

In the early days of Christianity the exercise of chastity was frequently combined with a close and romantic intimacy of affection between the sexes which shocked austere moralists.

In the art world, sentimentality and intimacy and the emotive side of lives are considered very uncool. There’s nervousness around intimacy.

But that intimacy of mutual embarrassment, in which each feels that the other is feeling something, having once existed, its effect is not to be done away with.

Performing on stage is my first love – it’s why I wanted to be an actor in the first place – and ‘Arcadia’ is the highlight of my career so far. I love the intimacy of a live theatre audience – you can really squeeze every last drop out of each scene.