Quotes About Commitment

Love is giving, marriage is buying and selling. You can't put love into a contract.

Love is a discipline, like prayer," I said.

Wedlock: it had a dull metallic sound, like an iron door clicking shut.

friendship was always contingent.

On impulse he might die for her, but living for her would be quite different. He has no talent for monotony.

If you worked out enough, maybe the man would too. Maybe you would be able to work it out together, as if the two of you were a puzzle that could be solved; otherwise, one of you, most likely the man, taking his addictive body with him and leaving you with bad withdrawal, which you could counteract by exercise. If you didn't work it out it was because one of you had the wrong attitude.

What else can I do? Once you've gone this far you aren't fit for anything else. Something happens to your mind. You're overqualified, overspecialized, and everybody knows it.

I was nervous. How was I to know he loved me? It might be just an affair. Why did we ever say just? Though at that time men and women tried each other on, casually, like suits, rejecting whatever did not fit.

Fuck that shit, I told them, I've started this and I'm going to finish it.

The more difficult it was to love the particular man beside us, the more we believed in Love, abstract and total.

As Saint Paul says, marry or burn.

The more it hurt, the more – he was convinced – he loved her.

No romance, he says. Okay? That would have meant something else, once. Once it would have meant: no strings. Now it means: no heroics. It means: don't risk yourself for me, if it should come to that.

What virtue was once attached to this notion – of going beyond your strength, of not sparing yourself, of ruining your health! Nobody is born with that kind of selflessness: it can be acquired only by the most relentless discipline, a crushing-out of natural inclination, and by my time the knack or secret of it must have been lost. Or perhaps I didn't try, having suffered from the effects it had on my mother.

I will bend, I will touch the ground, or as close to it as I can get without rupture. I will lay a wreath of invisible money on her grave.

How long will you demand I love you?

What else can I do? Once you've gone this far you aren't fit for anything else. Something happens to your mind. You're overqualified, overspecialized, and everybody knows it. Nobody in any other game would be crazy enough to hire me. I wouldn't even make a good ditch-digger, I'd start tearing apart the sewer-system, trying to pick-axe and unearth all of those chthonic symbols - pipes, valves, cloacal conduits... No, no. I'll have to be a slave to the paper-mines for all time.

Free love," Aunt Beatrice said scornfully. "It's never free. There's always a price.

Even microscopic offering cement our commitment to follow God in anything. This grace-given resolve to celebrate Christ in all things is fortified in the storms, not on the still seas.

Our efforts to fight back with joy are riddled with the temptation to turn our backs, throw up our hands, and abandon the battle. That's precisely when we need to praise, when our decision to rejoice matters most. Even microscopic offerings cement our commitment to follow God in anything. This grace-given resolve to celebrate Christ in all things is fortified in the storms, not on the still seas.

It's better to break one's heart than to do nothing with it.

Having someone wonder where you are when you don't come home at night is a very old human need.

Hush, he said. I am asking you to marry me. Would you be convinced if I knelt down?

Come, Scarlett, you are no child, no schoolgirl to put me off with foolish excuses about decency and so forth. Say you'll marry me when I come back or, before God, I won't go. I'll stay around here and play a guitar under your window every night and sing at the top of my voice and compromise you, so you'll have to marry me to save your reputation.