Quotes About Marriage

Married and unmarried women waste a great deal of time in feeling sorry for each other.

The ceremony took six minutes. The marriage lasted about the same amount of time though we didn't get a divorce for almost a year.

Every woman in love with a married man believes that her relationship is "special," that no one else feels as she does, and that her being with him isn't really illicit because the two of them are in love and there are extenuating circumstances. And, with rare exceptions, they all get hurt when they learn that their romance isn't special at all.

Marriage founded upon deception can never lead to happiness.

A maiden-woman, as independent as myself, need not envy any girl the doubtful blessing of a husband. I chose to be independent, and I am, and what more is there to be said about it?

When you are that- when a woman is a guiding star to her husband- she may face the ills of life without fear, for the blessing of Heaven is upon her.

It's great to find that one special person you want to annoy for the rest of your life.

I know from experience that those least capable of truly assessing any marriage are the children who come out of it. We style them as we need them, to excuse our faults, to insulate ourselves from our own expendability or indispensability.

As I looked at [my future husband] I realized that, while I would never be my mother nor have her life, the lesson she had left was that it was possible to love and care for a man and still have at your core a strength so great that you never even needed to put it on display.

Nearly everyone I meet expresses deep sympathy about the fact that I have never married. Sometimes I wonder why.

It's a complicated relationship, being a good grandparent, because it hinges on a series of other relationships... Because being a grandparent is determined by the relationship your child has with you, partly determined by the one a son or daughter has with his or her spouse, partly determined by the relationship you have with the person your child has chosen to have a child with.

Maybe that was true of marriage everywhere. Between times, in their own living rooms, the men seemed to be resting for the next round of pontificating and so saved their strength by staying silent.

This is what it is like to be married: conversations in which no one actually speaks.

She thought that people sought marriage because it meant they could put aside the mascara, the bravado, the good clothes, the company manners, and be themselves, whatever that was, not try so hard. But what that seemed to mean was that they didn't try at all. 

Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. She actually sometimes thought that was the definition of marriage.

You could argue they'd lost their way, in their choices, their work, their marriage. But the truth was, there wasn't any way. There was just day after day, small stuff, idle conversation, scheduling. And then after a couple of decades it somehow added up to something, for good or for ill or for both.

It was notable because they rarely quarreled anymore. Their marriage had become like the AA prayer: 'God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change.

The truth was that their marriages were like balloons: some went suddenly pop, but more often than not the air slowly leaked out until it was a sad, wrinkled little thing with no life to it anymore.

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

We're part of a mixed marriage -- he's male; I'm female.

As with many marriages, hers was based on essential misconceptions. In her case she had been misled into thinking Peter was reliable, perhaps because he was very careful always to put cedar shoe trees into his shoes and because he always wore the same cologne, a bay rum that could be had only from a shop in a London arcade. It turned out that he was not reliable, just finicky about small personal things like that. He still used a shaving brush and a straight razor.

There are two kinds of men: men who want a wife who is predictable, and men who want a wife who is exotic. For some reason, Peter had thought she was the latter. But even if that had been the case, the problem inherent remains the same-- once she becomes a wife, the exotic becomes familiar, and thus predictable, and thus not what was wanted at all. Those few women who stayed exotic usually were considered, after a few years, to be crazy.

It's children, children whose parents' marriage is bedrock for them even if they're not children anymore. Perhaps especially if they're not children anymore.

Even in a marriage as truncated as her own—nine years, more or less—most of it is the mundane middle part. That was the part Peter couldn't bear. That was the part Rebecca had liked most.