Quotes About Marriage

For me the act of marriage has proven, like most of the other disastrous acts of my life, little more than a hedge against any future lack of good material.

She is getting old, and he is getting old, right on schedule, and yet as time ruins them, they are not, strangely enough, married to each other.

But there was nothing at all safe about marriage. It was a doubtful enterprise, a voyage in an untested craft, across a hostile ocean, with a map that was a forgery and with no particular destination but the grave.

When the two of us were at last free and clear of our past entanglements, social and professional, Sara and I were married here, at the Town Hall, by a justice of the peace who was a distant cousin of my grandmother

But lately she had been starting to experience strong, inarticulate feelings of longing, of a desire to be with Joe all the time, to inhabit his life and allow him to inhabit hers, to engage with him in some kind of joint enterprise, in a collaboration that would be their lives. She didn't suppose they needed to get married to do that, and she knew that she certainly ought not to want to.

He and Dolores had been married thirty-one months before parting. There had been an extramarital kiss, entrepreneurial disaster, a miscarried baby, sexual malaise, and then very soon they had been forced to confront the failure of an expedition for which they had set out remarkably ill-equipped, like a couple of trans-Arctic travelers who through lack of preparation find themselves stranded and are forced to eat their dogs.

Don't worry about him, she would say, that's how he is—every time we start an argument I end up with a monologue. Or Some husbands take lovers, mine he take the Fifth.

they had not been able to bear the weight of married love upon their windpipes.

Whatever made her happy made me happy—except the time she thought divorcing me would make her life happier. That didn't do much for me.

Freeway traffic in Los Angeles was as mysterious as marriage. It moved and flowed, then stalled and stopped for no easily explainable reason.

It was terribly important that such women should marry. The failure to marry--spinsterhood--implied a kind of dreadful crippling, for it was universally acknowledged that a woman's true position was that of administratrix, mainspring, guiding star of the home, and if she was unable to perform this function, she became a sort of pitiful social misfit, an oddity.

What marriage doesn't involve uncountable accretions, a language of gestures, a sense of recognition sharp as a toothache? Unhappy, sure. What couple isn't unhappy, at least part of the time? But how can the divorce rate be, as they say, skyrocketing? How miserable would you have to get to be able to bear the actual separation, to go off and live your life so utterly unrecognized?

And so, a never-ending, rather edgy conversation between them, an undercurrent of roiling sound that reminded them they were married, they had two sons, they were living a life, they had preparations to make and disasters to avert and a world to interpret, sign by sign, symbol by symbol, to each other, and that at this point the only fate worse than staying together would be trying, each of them, to live alone.

Her first marriage, a distressing experience involving an umbrella, had to be annulled.

After all, what is a marriage if not an agreement to distort one's perception of another, in relation to everyone else?

After all, what is a marriage if not an agreement to distort one's perception of another, in relation to everyone else? "I

BILLY WOULD SAY later that his wife left him because she was unnerved by his intensity—that she could even see it in his hands when he drove an automobile.

An afternoon can fly by or it can take 5 hours. Like you probably do, I productively fill the gaps that most people leave as dead time. My drive to be productive probably cost me my first marriage and a few days ago almost cost me my fiancée. Before I went to college the military had this "we do more before 9am than most people do all day" and I used to think and I do more than the military.

If that involved some misperception on Amos's part—some exaggeration of the earthly status of Danny's ideas—well, then, Amos should continue to misperceive. After all, what is a marriage if not an agreement to distort one's perception of another, in relation to everyone else? "I wanted something from him, not from the world," said Danny.

Tornadoes aren't like that. Like the rest of the weather in the continental United States, they move from west to east, but the paths they take are random. Their force can be judged only after the fact, by the damage they've done. If a hurricane is another night in a bad marriage, a tornado is a blind date.

Amos said. "The big choices we make are practically random. The small choices probably tell us more about who we are. Which field we go into may depend on which high school teacher we happen to meet. Who we marry may depend on who happens to be around at the right time of life. On the other hand, the small decisions are very systematic. That I became a psychologist is probably not very revealing. What kind of psychologist I am may reflect deep traits.

I have spent weeks in the desert, forgetting to look at the moon, he says, as a married man may spend days never looking into the face of his wife.

Everyone has their own marriages, she thinks.

My grandmother, who was simultaneously a woman of manners and verve, fended off marriage proposals until she was 30 because she was having too much fun to settle down.