Marriage Quotes

Thy husband is thy lord, thy life, thy keeper,Thy head, thy sovereign, one that cares for thee,And for thy maintenance; commits his bodyTo painful labor, both by sea and land;To watch the night in storms, the day in cold,Whilst thou li’st warm at home, secure and safe;And craves no other tribute at thy handsBut love, fair looks, and true obedience-Too little payment for so great a debt.Such duty as the subject owes the prince,Even such a woman oweth to her husband;And when she is froward, peevish, sullen, sour,And no obedient to his honest will,What is she but a foul contending rebel,And graceless traitor to her loving lord?I asham’d that women are so simple‘To offer war where they should kneel for peace,Or seek for rule, supremacy, and sway,When they are bound to serve, love, and obey.Why are our bodies soft, and weak, and smooth,Unapt to toil and trouble in the world,But that our soft conditions, and our hearts,Should well agree with our external parts?

~ William Shakespeare

Marriage is a wrestling match where you hold on tight while your mate changes into a hundred different things. The trick is that you're changing into a hundred other things, but you can't let go. You can only try to match up and never turn into a wolf while he's a rabbit, or a mouse while he's still busy being an owl, a brawny black bull while he's a little blue crab scuttling for shelter. It's harder than it sounds.

~ Catherynne M. Valente

After a universal silence, Leo was the first to speak. “Did anyone else notice—”“Yes,” Catherine said. “What do you make of it?”“I haven’t decided yet.” Leo frowned and took a sip of port. “He’s not someone I would pair Bea with.”“Whom would you pair her with?”“Hanged if I know,” Leo said. “Someone with similar interests. The local veterinarian, perhaps?”“He’s eighty-three years old and deaf,” Catherine said.“They would never argue,” Leo pointed out.

~ Lisa Kleypas

I nod, thinking of how difficult marriage can be, how much effort is required to sustain a feeling between two people - a feeling that you can't imagine will ever fade in the beginning when everything comes so easily. I think of how each person in a marriage owes it to the other to find individual happiness, even in a shared life. That is the only real way to grow together, instead of apart.

~ Emily Giffin

I have a new mantra, which I chant softly to myself: Oh My God Oh My God.

~ Suzanne Finnamore

The problem is simply finding the right person. Ask Plato. Just make sure she finishes your thoughts and you finish hers. That's all you need.

~ Elizabeth Kostova

When you have to face up to the fact that marriage to the man you love is really over, that's very tough, sheer agony. In that kind of harrowing situation, I always go away and cut myself off from the world. Also, I sober up immediately when there is genuine bad news in my life; I never face it with alcohol in my brain. I just rented a house in Palm Springs and sat there and just suffered for a couple of weeks. I suffered there until I was strong enough to face it.

~ Ava Gardner

It is to be broken. It is to betorn open. It is not to bereached and come to rest inever. I turn against you,I break from you, I turn to you.We hurt, and are hurt,and have each other for healing.It is healing. It is never whole.

~ Wendell Berry

Did you pick that out? I asked Dimitri. Honestly, I would have expected him to bend a piece of steel with his bare hands and present her with that.

~ Richelle Mead

Insecurity is the worst sense that lovers feel: sometimes the most humdrum desireless marriage seems better. Insecurity twists meanings and poisons trust.

~ Graham Greene

Do you think it's possible to finally decide that you really, truly love someone but not end up marrying him?

~ Robin Jones Gunn

The Cheesecake Factory is a great business model, but if you take your wife there for your 25th wedding anniversary, you might not reach your 26th.

~ Scott Adams

Maybe, in the final analysis, they saw me as something I wasn't and I tried to turn them into something they could never be. I loved them all but maybe I never understood any of them. I don't think they understood me.

~ Ava Gardner

Often a Christian man or woman falls prey to that cruel and vexatious spirit, wondering how to find marriage, who, when, where? It is on God that we should wait, as a waiter waits--not for but on the customer--alert, watchful, attentive, with no agenda of his own, ready to do whatever is wanted. 'My soul, wait thou only upon God; for my expectation is from him.' (Ps. 62:5 KJV) In Him alone lie our security, our confidence, our trust. A spirit of restlessness and resistance can never wait, but one who believes he is loved with an everlasting love, and knows that underneath are the everlasting arms, will find strength and peace.

~ Elisabeth Elliot

Nobody knows you as well as our spouse. And that means no one will be quicker to recognize a change when you deliberately start sacrificing your wants and wishes to make sure his or her needs are met.

~ Stephen Kendrick

In the true married relationship, the independence of husband and wife will be equal, their dependence mutual, and their obligations reciprocal.

~ Lucretia Mott

My mother is convinced that yellow is a happy color and that a happy girl would get a husband.-Penelope Featherington

~ Julia Quinn

I first learned the concepts of non-violence in my marriage.

~ Mahatma Gandhi

It´s like watching someone do a triple backflip dismount and land on two feet, solid, arms splayed in the air. I know I could never do it, don´t even know where I would begin to learn, but some people are built for it. He was handcrafted to leave, had practiced on other women since adolescence. I was one of an unnumbered series.

~ Suzanne Finnamore

What we do for each other before marriage is no indication of what we will do after marriage.

~ Gary Chapman

When you give each other everything, it becomes an even trade. Each wins all.

~ Lois Mcmaster Bujold

I travel back in time, falling back into what I know for certain, the historical data I cling to in order to not go mad, not assume I made a suicidal and well-informed error in marrying this man.

~ Suzanne Finnamore

I am not ready to think of him as either insane or evil, to consider in full how I could love and have a child with such a person. I am not ready to think about anything, except ways in which this may still be averted.

~ Suzanne Finnamore

When you have been just told that the girl you love is definitely betrothed to another, you begin to understand how Anarchists must feel when the bomb goes off too soon.

~ P.g. Wodehouse

A good marriage, like any partnership, meant subordinating one's own needs to that of the other's, in the expectation that the other will do the same.

~ Nicholas Sparks

Women like clothes, they like shoes, they like flowers and they like people to look at them and think,‘God, she’s gorgeous.’ The more people who think that, the better it is. The one day in your life where you get all that rolled up into one is your wedding day. And itcomes with jewelry and presents and endswith a vacation where it’s practically law that you have to wear fabulous underwear and have lots of sex.

~ Kristen Ashley

You, Jane, I must have you for my own--entirely my own.

~ Charlotte Brontë

But some characters in books are really real--Jane Austen's are; and I know those five Bennets at the opening of Pride and Prejudice, simply waiting to raven the young men at Netherfield Park, are not giving one thought to the real facts of marriage.

~ Dodie Smith

In the modern industrialized Western world, where I come from, the person whom you choose to marry is perhaps the single most vivid representation of your own personality. Your spouse becomes the most gleaming possible mirror through which your emotional individualism is reflected back to the world. There is no choice more intensely personal after all, than whom you choose to marry; that choice tells us, to a large extent, who you are.

~ Elizabeth Gilbert

They are the we of me.

~ Carson Mccullers

I played possum. I did this, as the possum does, out of fear.

~ Suzanne Finnamore

George, who is out somewhere there in the dark, who is good to me - whom I revile, who can keep learning the games we play as quickly as I can change them. Who can make me happy and I do not wish to be happy. And yes, I do wish to be happy. George and Martha: Sad, sad, sad. Whom I will not forgive for having come to rest; for having seen me and having said: “Yes, this will do”. Who has made the hideous, the hurting, the insulting mistake of loving… me, and must be punished for it. George and Martha… Sad, sad, sad.

~ Edward Albee

...marriage is foremost a vocation. Two people are called together to fulfill a mission that God has given them. Marriage is a spiritual reality. That is to say, a man and a woman come together for life, not just because they experience deep love for each other, but because they believe that God loves each of them with an infinite love and has called them to each other to be living witnesses of that love. To love is to embody God's infinite love in a faithful communion with another human being.

~ Henri J.m. Nouwen

When you love someone - when you create a child with him - you don't just suddenly lose that bond. Like any other energy, it can't be destroyed, just channeled into something else.

~ Jodi Picoult

Never marry something until you've established the perfect pizza ratio...The premise is simple. My husband and I knew we were made for each other because we're a 6:2 ratio, six slices for him and two for me...Never marry a man who wants two slices one week and four the next. They're undependable and highly unpredictable and will likely dump you for some Internet honey who says she doesn't mind his back hair.

~ Celia Rivenbark

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

Izzy was utterly convinced. Never mind Arabian horses, African cheetahs. No creature in the world could bolt so quickly as a rake confronted with the word marriage. They ought to shout it out at footraces rather than using starting pi

~ Tessa Dare

A man approaching retirement called the retirement office to inquire about his pension. Afterward, he was asked if his wife worked. “She’s worked all her life making me happy”, he replied. “Yes sir, but has she earned money to receive her pension?” “When we got married we agreed on an arrangement”, he said. “I would earn the living, and she would make the living worthwhile”.“Make the living worthwhile”…have we forgotten the very essence of that? Have we forgotten to live for someone else, that doing so IS what makes a living worthwhile?

~ Kelly Crawford

It may be that same-sex couples will save the institution of marriage.

~ Elizabeth Gilbert

I had that hole in me, that empty space. I could have lived my life with it, content enough. I wasn’t an unhappy man.”.....................The tears came now. He watched them drip down her cheeks, wondered if she were even aware they leaked out of her. “She was part of my life. You are my life. If I have a regret, it’s that even for an instant you could think otherwise. Or that I allowed you to.”-Roarke

~ J.d. Robb