Quotes About Commitment

You love new boyfriend? I think so. Yes. Then you must spoil him. And he must spoil you.

Until I can feel as ecstatic about having a baby as I felt about going to New Zealand to search for giant squid, I cannot have a baby.

Who loves you most? Who loves you best? Who thinks of you when others rest?

In the modern industrialized Western world, where I come from, the person whom you choose to marry is perhaps the single most vivid representation of your own personality. Your spouse becomes the most gleaming possible mirror through which your emotional individualism is reflected back to the world. There is no choice more intensely personal after all, than whom you choose to marry; that choice tells us, to a large extent, who you are.

I wonder if I am capable of being somebody's sun, somebody's everything. Am I centered enough now to be the center of somebody else's life?

A good-enough novel violently written now is better than a perfect novel meticulously written never.

most marriages are neither heavenly nor hellish, but vaguely purgatorial.

To be prosperous and happy in life, Henry, it is simple. Pick one woman, pick it well, and surrender.

It may be that same-sex couples will save the institution of marriage.

Devotion is diligence without assurance. Faith is a way of saying Yes, I pre-accept the terms of the universe and I embrace in advance what I am presently incapable of understanding.

Maybe the difference between first marriage and second marriage is that the second time at least you know you are gambling.

Then my mother shocked me. She said, All those things that you want from your relationship, Liz? I have always wanted those things too. [She] showed me the handful of bullets she'd had to bite over the decades in order to stay happily married (and she was happily married...) to my father. You have to understand how little I was raised to expect that I desired in life, honey. Remember- I come from a different time and place... and you have to understand how much I love your father.

for you, I am even willing to suffer. Whatever pain happens to us in the future, I accept it already, just for the pleasure of being with you now. Let's enjoy this time. It's marvelous.

It is not we as individuals, then, who must bend uncomfortably around the institution of marriage; rather, it is the institution of marriage that has to bend uncomfortably around us.

It all comes down to one simple question: Do you want your belly pressed against this person's belly forever--or not?

The Silly Putty-like malleability of the institution [marriage], in fact, is the only reason we still have the thing at all. Very few people... would accept marriage on it's thirteenth-century terms. Marriage survives, in other words, precisely because it evolves. (Though I suppose this would not be a very persuasive argument to those who probably also don't believe in evolution).

I've had to keep defining and defending myself as a writer every single day of my adult life -- constantly reminding and re-reminding my soul and the cosmos that I'm very serious about the business of creative living, and that I will never stop creating, no matter what the outcome, and no matter how deep my anxieties and insecurities may be.

And maybe it's like that with every important aspect of your life. Whatever it is you are pursuing, whatever it is you are seeking, whatever it is you are creating, be careful not to quit too soon.

He became as close to me as my own, beautiful, random, and real family. Love like that is a deep well, with steep sides. Once you fall in, that's it—you will love that person always

The emotional place where a marriage begins is not nearly as important as the emotional place where a marriage finds itself toward the end, after many years of partnership.

I will give you the sun and the rain, and if they are not available, I will give you a sun check and a rain check.

For the first time in my life, it occurred to me that perhaps I was asking too much of love. Or, at least, perhaps I was asking too much of marriage. Perhaps I was loading a far heavier cargo of expectation onto the creaky old boat of matrimony than that strange vessel had ever been built to accommodate in the first place.

Most of all, there is this truth: No matter how great your teachers may be, and no matter how esteemed your academy's reputation, eventually you will have to do the work by yourself. Eventually, the teachers won't be there anymore. The walls of the school will fall away, and you'll be on your own. The hours that you will then put into practice, study, auditions, and creation will be entirely up to you.

The sooner and more passionately you get married to this idea- that it is ultimately entirely up to you- the better off you'll be.