A bizarre sensation pervades a relationship of pretense. No truth seems true. A simple morning's greeting and response appear loaded with innuendo and fraught with implications. Each nicety becomes more sterile and each withdrawal more permanent.

— Angelou, Maya

I leave before being left. I decide.

— Bardot, Brigitte

When once estrangement has arisen between those who truly love each other, everything seems to widen the breach.

— Braddon, Mary Elizabeth

The best way will be to avoid each other without appearing to do so -- or if we jostle, at any rate not to bite.

— Byron, Lord

It's afterwards you realize that the feeling of happiness you had with a man didn't necessarily prove that you loved him.

— Duras, Marguerite

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.

— Eliot, George

Two separate, distinct personalities, not separate at all, but inextricably bound, soul and body and mind, to each other, how did we get so far apart so fast?

— Guest, Judith

There are few people who are not ashamed of their love affairs when the infatuation is over.

— La Rochefoucauld, Francois De

I was never one to patiently pick up broken fragments and glue them together again and tell myself that the mended whole was as good as new. What is broken is broken -- and I'd rather remember it as it was at its best than mend it and see the broken places as long as I lived.

— Mitchell, Margaret

I know a love may be revived which absence, inconstancy, or even infidelity has extinguished, but there is no returning from a dégoût given by satiety.

— Montagu, Lady Mary Wortley

Falling out of love is chiefly a matter of forgetting how charming someone is.

— Murdoch, Iris

In every question and every remark tossed back and forth between lovers who have not played out the last fugue, there is one question and it is this: Is there someone new?

— O'Brien, Edna

In a separation it is the one who is not really in loved who says the more tender things.

— Proust, Marcel

She's gone. I am abused, and my relief must be to loathe her.

— Shakespeare, William

In love, unlike most other passions, the recollection of what you have had and lost is always better than what you can hope for in the future.

— Stendhal, Henri B.

I hated her now with a hatred more fatal than indifference because it was the other side of love.

— Strindberg, J. August

When a man has once loved a woman, he will do anything for her, except continue to love her.

— Wilde, Oscar

There is always something ridiculous about the emotions of people whom one has ceased to love.

— Wilde, Oscar