Marriage Quotes

A young man married is a man that's marred.

~ William Shakespeare

Edna felt depressed rather than soothed after leaving them. The little glimpse of domestic harmony which had been offered her, gave her no regret, no longing. It was not a condition of life which fitted her, and she could see in it but an apalling and hopeless ennui. She was moved by a kind of commiseration for Madame Ratignolle, - a pity for that colorless existence which never uplifted its possessor beyond the region of blind contentment, in which no moment of anguish ever visited her soul, in which she would never have the taste of life's delirium. Edna vaguely wondered what she meant by life's delirium. It had crossed her thought like some unsought, extraneous impression.

~ Kate Chopin

Sex is not about genitalia. It’s about relationship. When God said ‘the two shall become one flesh,’ he didn’t mean it only physically.

~ Sheila Wray Gregoire

JACKThat is nonsense. If I marry a charming girl like Gwendolen, and she is the only girl I ever saw in my life that I would marry, I certainly won't want to know Bunbury.ALGERNONThen your wife will. You don't seem to realize, that in married life three is company and two is none.JACKThat, my dear young friend, is the theory that the corrupt French Drama has been propounding for the last fifty years.ALGERNONYes; and that the happy English home has proved in half the time.

~ Oscar Wilde

Someone once said that marriage is like standing in a corridor lined with doors. You go off through your door, he goes through his, but at the end of the day you have to come back to the corridor, touch base, hold hands, because through every door are more doors, and beyond them, more again, and if you both go through too many without coming back to the corridor, you may never find your way back.

~ Carrie Adams

So many television marriages -that playing out of lives against a background of the tube.Instead of two lives filing the room,There are their two lives and the eleven o'clock news withConstant commercial interruption.Instead of what you say and what I say.You don't laugh with me;I don't laugh with you.All the wit comes pouring out of the tube.And we laugh at it together.The more we avoid talkingthe more passive the relationship becomes.Television permits us to walk through lifewith minor speaking parts.And the more we fail to speak,the more difficult speaking becomes

~ Lois Wyse

I had seen the light, come to believe that a wedding should be about a feeling between two people, not a show for the masses...It was a magical, romantic evening, and although I occasionally wish I had worn a slightly fancier dress, and that Nick and I had danced on our wedding night, I have no real regrets about the way we chose to do things.

~ Emily Giffin

Taking up marriage is a good excuse for taking up cursing.These is my words

~ Nancey E. Turner

His eyes ignited into a color found only in the heart of the sun. ‘‘Yes?’’‘‘Yes, already. I’ll marry you. Yes. Hell, yes. What am I, stupid?

~ Rachel Caine

Well married, a man is winged—ill-matched, he is shackled.

~ Henry Ward Beecher

The question was whether James would love me if I was someone else.

~ Barbara Delinsky

Not all marriages are made in heaven. Some, probably most, are constructed here on earth for any number of reason.

~ Farahad Zama

Oh! How many torments lie in the small circle of a wedding-ring!

~ Colley Cibber

The last time I was this confused I was watching a Fassbinder film.

~ Ken O'neill

The importance of falling in love lies not in how it feels, but in what it perceives. And as always with our feelings, the key moral issue is how truthful the perception is... Falling in love is a sign that this might be someone with whom you could make a good marriage. Still, it's not enough, because the feeling is not always as perceptive as it should be... So falling in love is not the basis for a good marriage. It's not even a requirement. Marriage does not depend on falling in love; it depends on the promises you make to each other in your wedding vows and then spend a lifetime keeping. As many people have pointed out, you can't promise how you'll feel. But you can promise to cultivate a virtue, such as the virtue of love.

~ Phillip Cary

This is joy's bonfire, then, where love's strong artsMake of so noble individual partsOne fire of four inflaming eyes, and of two loving hearts.

~ John Donne

An emptiness rules at its core, a rottenness, a silence when one of you retires to bed without saying good night, when you eat together without conversation, when the phone's passed wordlessly to the other. An emptiness when every night you lie in the double bed, restlessly awake, astounded at how closely hate can nudge against love, can wind around it sinuously like a cat. An emptiness when you realize that the loneliest you've ever been is within a marriage, as a wife.

~ Nikki Gemmell

Leaning against my car after changing the oil,I hold my black hands out and stare into themas if they were the faces of my children lookingat the winter moon and thinking of the snowthat will erase everything before they wake. In the garage, my wife comes behind meand slides her hands beneath my soiled shirt.Pressing her face between my shoulder blades,she mumbles something, and soon we are laughing,wrestling like children among piles of old rags,towels that unravel endlessly, torn sheets,work shirts from twenty years ago when I stoodin the door of a machine shop, grease blackened,and Kansas lay before me blazing with new snow,a future of flat land, white skies, and sunlight.After making love, we lie on the abandonedmattress and stare at our pale winter bodiessprawling in the half-light. She touches her belly,the scar of our last child, and the black printsof my hand along her hips and thighs.

~ B.h. Fairchild

He knew himself well enough to know his own faults. Impatient and judgmental and stubborn and often too quick to act: he would try never to crush her, never to overwhelm her or bend her to his will, but if she did not demand only the best from him, it would happen. It might happen. Possibly.

~ Meredith Duran

My friend Kate once went to a concert of Mongolian throat singers who were traveling through New York City on a rare world tour. Although she couldn't understand the words to their songs, she found the music almost unbearably sad. After the concert, Kate approached the lead Mongolian singer and asked, What are your songs about? He replied, Our songs are about the same things that everyone else's songs are about: lost love, and somebody stole your fastest horse.

~ Elizabeth Gilbert

They say marriages work better if you don't know the person too well. Maybe we should stop writing each other posthaste.

~ Bill Callahan

The wedding was in Monterey, a sombre boding ceremony in a little Protestant chapel. The church had so often seen two ripe bodies die by the process of marriage that it seemed to celebrate a mystic double death with its ritual.

~ John Steinbeck

You don't do so well with marriage. I don't think you've begun to realize all there is for you to love. And I know you better than anyone & here's what I know about you: You have so much love to give! But I feel like you're all the time digging in the tomato bin, saying, Where are the apples?

~ Elizabeth Berg

Couples are jigsaw puzzles that hang together by touching in just enough points. They're never total fits or misfits. ... We marry children who have grown up and still rejoice in being children .... [p. 15]

~ Diane Ackerman

Miss Bingley's congratulations to her brother, on his approaching marriage, were all that was affectionate and insincere.

~ Jane Austen

He had never thought the question over clearly, but vaguely imagined that his wife had long suspected him of being unfaithful to her and was looking the other way. It even seemed to him that she, a worn-out, aged, no longer beautiful woman, not remarkable for anything, simple, merely a kind mother of a family, ought in all fairness to be indulgent. It turned out to be quite the opposite.

~ Leo Tolstoy

I know that many, if not most, women would have a problem with my acceptance of what happened with Lara. The reality is I shall always be grateful to Lara for helping my husband when I could not do so. I couldn’t have chosen a better or kinder surrogate.

~ Deirdre-Elizabeth Parker

But a good wife—a good unworldly woman—may really help a man, and keep him more independent.

~ George Eliot

I'm married. And pregnant.

~ Edan Lepucki

The next morning he drove the stranger’s car half way to the Registry of Motor Vehicles before he realized he could not apply for a driver’s license. He suddenly realized he had left his name at the prison.

~ Deirdre-Elizabeth Parker

I have spent my whole life preparing to be William Wallace’s wife. The choices I make are defined by the person I am.“I am Mrs. William Victor Wallace. I am married to a federal felon whom I love unconditionally.I hold my head high, I take pride in my life and I walk this world without regret.I will be the perfect wife and my husband deserves nothing less.

~ Deirdre-Elizabeth Parker

Philosophers have a long tradition of marrying stupid women, from Socrates on. They think it clever.

~ Simon Gray

Why is it that married people always say Come in when everything they do says Get out? They talk about their miseries and then ask you why you're unmarried.

~ Malcolm Bradbury

She had a vision of the two of them trapped on a tiny raft surrounded by miles of open water. It would be a kind of test, like surviving on a desert island--but that's what a marriage was, wasn't it? They would have to help each other or die.

~ Stewart O'nan

For the hundreds of thousands of Californians in gay and lesbian households who are managing their day-to-day lives, this decision affirms the full legal protections and safeguards I believe everyone deserves.

~ Arnold Schwarzenegger

Not every woman is obsessed with shoes. But every woman is more obsessed with shoes than her husband is (although that's not too difficult to accomplish, since your husband has exactly two pairs--black shoes that are ten years old and barely broken in and sneakers that are so dirty they classify as a biohazard).

~ Peter Scott

Livvy noted there seemed some communal feeling between the married: any wife could be faintly rude to anyone else's husband.

~ Elizabeth Bowen

Those were the best days in the life of Tancredi and Angelica, lives later to be so variegated, so erring, against the inevitable background of sorrow. But that they did not know then; and they were pursuing a future which they deemed more concrete than it turned out to be, made of nothing but smoke and wind. When they were old and uselessly wise their thoughts would go back to those days with insistent regret; they had been days when desire was always present because it was always overcome, when many beds had been offered and refused, when the sensual urge, because restrained, had for one second been sublimated in renunciation, that is into real love.

~ Giuseppe Tomasi Di Lampedusa

... A man's wife can hold him devilish uneasy, if she begins to scold and fret, and perplex him, at a time when he has a full load for a railroad car on his mind already.

~ David Crockett

Oh, I forgot to tell you the rest of it—he’s a widower now, so they can ride off together into the sunset, their wedding rings glinting.

~ Brenda Joyce