Quotes About Commitment

For marriage to work, couples need to share the same basic views and expectations, have similar value systems, and a compatible set of goals and desires for the future.

For the rest of your life, you must work every day at your marriage for it to be rewarding and healthy.

We picked the Red Sox because they lose. If you root for something that loses for 86 years, you're a pretty good fan. You don't have to win everything to be a fan of something.

Troy: Why do we inflict this on ourselves? Ben: Why? I'll tell you why, 'cause the Red Sox never let you down. Troy: Huh? Ben: That's right. I mean - why? Because they haven't won a World Series in a century or so? So what? They're here. Every April, they're here. At 1:05 or at 7:05, there is a game. And if it gets rained out, guess what? They make it up to you. Does anyone else in your life do that? The Red Sox don't get divorced. This is a real family. This is the family that's here for you.

Writing a dissertation is very much like being in a long-term relationship: there are likely to be some very good times and some perfectly dreadful ones, and it's a big help if you like what you've chosen.

Marriage is memory, marriage is time. Marriage is not only time: it is also, parodoxically, the denial of time.

I could tell you that I came back because I had promises to keep, but maybe it was because nobody asked me to stay.

There's a point when you go with what you've got. Or you don't go.

I promised myself that I would maintain momentum. Maintain momentum was the imperative that echoed all the way downtown. In fact I had no idea what would happen if I lost it. In fact I had no idea what it was.

Another thing I need to do, when I'm near the end of the book, is sleep in the same room with it...Somehow the book doesn't leave you when you're asleep right next to it.

you can love more than one person." Of course you can, but marriage is something different. Marriage is memory, marriage is time.

Through most of my life I would have interpreted the growth of the prison system and the diminution of the commitment to public education as evidence of how California had changed. Only recently have I come to see them as quite the opposite, evidence of how California had not changed, and to understand change itself as one of the culture's most enduring misunderstandings about itself.

Marriage is memory, marriage is time

Marriage is the classic betrayal

As it happens I am comfortable with the Michael Laskis of this world, with those who live outside rather than in, those in whom the sense of dread is so acute that they turn to extreme and doomed commitments; I know something about dread myself, and appreciate the elaborate systems with which some people manage to fill the void, appreciate all the opiates of the people, whether they are as accessible as alcohol and heroin and promiscuity or as hard to come by as faith in God or History.

I would like you to believe that I kept working out of some real professionalism, to meet the deadline, but that would not be entirely true; I did have a deadline, but it was also a troubled time, and working did to the trouble what gin did to the pain.)

One of the promises we make to one another is that we will try to retrieve our casualties, try not to abandon our dead to the coyotes.

You have to pick the places you don't walk away from.

People who respect themselves are welling to accept the risk…they are willing to invest something of themselves; they may not play at all, but when they do play, they know the odds.

People who respect themselves...are willing to invest something of themselves; they may not play at all, but when they do play, they know the odds. That kind of self-respect is a discipline, a habit of mind that can never be faked but can be developed, trained, coaxed forth.

The only thing that will defeat me will be if you don't love me the way i love you

Work, Work, Work

Some folks called Dewar a dilettante; he did not consider it an appropriate term, indicating as it did a lack of seriousness, a trifling sort of interest.

When Arthur was present, you did not look at anyone else.