c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
Practically all girls are capable of pulling off theLady Love stunt before marriage but alas, only toomany of them think a wedding ring gives them theright to flop down on the do-nothing stool, get fatand eat onions... When a man see his beauteous pride slouching around the house in a soiled house-coat with cold cream on her face, he feels he gotcheated at the altar.Too often after the first baby, [women] ceasebeing wives and are only mothers... giving all theirtenderness to Junior and letting poor husband goheart-hungry.
— Carol Shields, Dropped Threads: What We Aren't Told
Marriage has affected the laws of gravity. We will now revolve around each other. You will exert gravity on me, and I will exert gravity on you. We are one another's moons. You are holding onto my feet with both hands, as if otherwise you might fall right off the bed. I think I might float up and hit the ceiling, splat, if you let go. Please don't let go.
— Kelly Link, Stranger Things Happen
There is a saying that bad traders divorce their spouse sooner than abandon their positions. Loyalty to ideas is not a good thing for traders, scientists - or anyone.
— Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets
Had the love been permanent, there won’t have been divorces after love marriages. Had the love been everlasting, there won’t have been bad blood in the family.
— Girdhar Joshi, Some Mistakes Have No Pardon
With you, I am. Without you, I am not.
— Kamand Kojouri
When love dies and marriage lies in ruins, the first casualty is honest memory, decent, impartial recall of the past. Too inconvenient, too damning of the present. It's the spectre of old happiness at the feast of failure and desolation. So, against that headwind of forgetfulness I want to place my little candle of truth and see how far it throws its light.
— Ian McEwan, Nutshell
Whenever you keep score in love, you lose.
— Kamand Kojouri
Ran into him?  Are you not together?"Cassie shook her head.  "No."Gage contradicted her by saying, "We are.  We're getting married."Cassie leaned into him and hissed.  "Would you stop telling people that."  She turned back to Sam and gave her a smile.  "We're not getting married."Gage used Cassie's hair to tip her head back again.  He leaned over, giving her another kiss before saying, "Sunshine, we are."Cassie yanked her hair out of his fist and took a step away from him.  "Honey limpkins," she said, sarcastically, "we are not.
— Sarah  Curtis, Engaging
The only path wide for us all is love.
— Kamand Kojouri
Many couples spend a great deal of time planning their wedding, but little time planning their marriage.
— DeBorrah K. Ogans, How Do I Love Thee: Food for Thought Before You Say "I DO"
It's another man.I'll kill him. Check everything.Lock out the banks.Tuesday after the Unicef Gala.Fucked her Tuesday.She came.Did she come?Definitely came.What did I do wrong?It's me.What's his name? I'll kill—Apologize for nothing.Get access to her email.Where is she?Apologize for everything.She didn't mean it.Do something.Do something.Do.Something.
— C.D. Reiss, Marriage Games
By contrast, my wife at fifty-two yeas old seems to me just as attractive as the day I first met her. If I were to say this out loud, she would say, 'Douglas, that's just a line. No one prefers wrinkles, no one prefers grey.' To which I'd reply, 'But none of this is a surprise. I've been expecting to watch you grow older ever since we met. Why should it trouble me? It's the face itself that I love, not that face at twenty-eight or thirty-four or fourty-three. It's that face.'Perhaps she would have liked to hear this but I had never got around to saying it out loud. I had always presumed there would be time and now, sitting on the edge of the bed at four a.m., no longer listening out for burglars, it seemed that it might be too late.
— David Nicholls, Us
There are no words that can be said to justify the beauty of a bride walking down the aisle in anticipation of sharing the rest of her life with the man she esteems and loves the most, nor of the look on that man’s face, when he beholds the one who will be entrusting her life to him to protect and her heart for him to love. All that can be said is that all who witnessed it found themselves overwhelmed with the joy that comes with seeing that one moment when all feels and is as it should be.
— Trix Wilkins, The Courtship of Jo March: a variation of Louisa May Alcott's Little Women
have you killed me, false thief?
— Chaucer Geoffrey, Selections from Chaucer - Scholar's Choice Edition
It was in these moments, I knew, that my father loved my mother most. When my mother was broken and helpless, when her hard shell was stripped away and her spite and brittleness couldn't serve her. It was a sad dance of two people who were starving to death in each other's arms. Their marriage an X that forever joined murderer to victim.
— Alice Sebold, The Almost Moon
Earlier this year, I'd told a mother at school I'd been married fifteen year. She asked, "What's the secret to a long marriage?" I thought for a second, then answered, "Staying married.
— Maria Semple, Today Will Be Different
I may love him with everything in my being, all my thoughts and feelings might be bent towards him - every single one wishing for his joy, every single one praying for his safety, every single one desirous of his success - and I still would not marry him! - Jo to Aunt March
— Trix Wilkins, The Courtship of Jo March: a variation of Louisa May Alcott's Little Women
You boys are really turning into a bunch of Peter Pans," he said. "Willem, what are you? Thirty-six? I'm not sure what's going on with you lot. You’re making money. You've achieved something. Don't you think you guys should stop clinging to one another and get serious about adulthood?" But how was one to be an adult? Was couplehood truly the only appropriate option?
— Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life
Show your love by giving your spouse incredible admiration and encouragement. - A Love Forever, Creating An Amazing Marriage.
— Thomas,  Lynne
Positive thoughts dramatically alter the direction of your life.
— Thomas,  Lynne
Contempt is born when we fixate on our spouse’s weaknesses. Every spouse has these sore points. If you want to find them, without a doubt you will. If you want to obsess about them, they’ll grow – but you won’t!Jesus provides a remedy that is stunning in its simplicity yet foreboding in its difficulty. He tells us to take the plank out of our own eye before we try to remove the speck from our neighbor’s eye (see Matthew 7:3–5).If you’re thinking “but my spouse is the one who has the plank,” allow me to let you in on a secret: You’re exactly the type of person Jesus is talking to. You’re the one He wanted to challenge with these words. Jesus isn’t helping us resolve legal matters here; He’s urging us to adopt humble spirits. He wants us to cast off the contempt – to have contempt for the contempt – and learn the spiritual secret of respect.Consider the type of people Jesus loved in the days He walked on earth – Judas (the betrayer); the woman at the well (a sexual libertine); Zacchaeus (the conniving financial cheat); and many others like them. In spite of the fact that Jesus was without sin and these people were very much steeped in sin, Jesus still honored them. He washed Judas’s feet; He spent time talking respectfully to the woman at the well; He went to Zacchaeus’s house for dinner. Jesus, the only perfect human being to live on this earth, moved toward sinful people; He asks us to do the same, beginning with the one closest to us – our spouse.
— Gary Thomes
The poor wish to be rich, the rich wish to be happy, the single wish to be married, and the married wish to be dead.
— Ann Landers
Heloise learned to love Abelard solely for who he was. That forbidden love brought her nothing but pain, but she would rather have shame and pain with Abelard than peace and happiness without him.
— Gary Thomas, Sacred Marriage: What If God Designed Marriage to Make Us Holy More Than to Make Us Happy?
People have been sleeping and/or marrying their way to the top since the first cavewoman said: ‘Ugh, that one’s the strongest and has the biggest club. I’ll shake my mastodon-skin-covered ass at him.’”“Ugh?”“Or whatever cave people said. And it’s not just women who do it. Cave guy goes: ‘Ugh, that one catches the most fish, I’ll be dragging her off to my cave now.’ Ava sees Tommy and—”“Says ugh.”“Or today’s equivalent thereof.”-Eve & Roarke. .
— J.D. Robb, Strangers in Death
When you begin to fantasize about what you don't have, you begin to kill what you do have. #marriage
— Jayce O'Neal
I am not only not going to be married, at present, but have very little intention of ever marrying at all.
— Jane Austen, Emma
mong the hundred thousand mysterious influences which a man exercises over a woman who loves him, I doubt if there is any more irresistible to her than the influence of his voice. I am not one of those women who shed tears on the smallest provocation: it is not in my temperament, I suppose. But when I heard that little natural change in his tone my mind went back (I can't say why) to the happy day when I first owned that I loved him. I burst out crying.
— Wilkie Collins
Among the hundred thousand mysterious influences which a man exercises over a woman who loves him, I doubt if there is any more irresistible to her than the influence of his voice. I am not one of those women who shed tears on the smallest provocation: it is not in my temperament, I suppose. But when I heard that little natural change in his tone my mind went back (I can't say why) to the happy day when I first owned that I loved him. I burst out crying.
— Wilkie Collins
In sickness and in sickness. That is what I wish for you. Don't seek or expect miracles. There are no miracles. Not anymore. And there are no cures for the hurt that hurts most. There is only the medicine of believing each other's pain, and being present for it.
— Jonathan Safran Foer, Here I Am
To agree to a marriage is to consent to a mutual act of transformation, to promise to ensure that the versions of yourselves that you will become will remain in harmony, though you yourselves can never stay the same.
— Dexter Palmer, Version Control
Why didn't you write all this time?Did you not remember us in a song?A dance?In the skies littered with stars?Did you not get drunk?Why didn’t you write all this time?Did you not remember us in a film?A book?In idyllic dusks and dawns?Did you not get high?It is good that you didn't.For all is well. I am drunk and dazed.I have already forgotten youand your bewitching ways.
— Kamand Kojouri
Like a pair of old slippers,I feel comfort andwarmth as I slip into you.No, that is too crude.Like the match to the wick,I ignite when we touch.My counterpart andlife's purpose.Yes, as though I've known you my whole life.Every scar, every failurehas become an affirmationof what should be:You.Yes, as though I've loved you my whole life.
— Kamand Kojouri
When your wife asks you for your opinion, she doesn't really want your opinion. She wants her opinion - just in a deeper voice.
— T. Rafael Cimino, The Heir Apparent
To a shameful extent, the charm of marriage boils down to how unpleasant it is to be alone. This isn’t necessarily our fault as individuals. Society as a whole appears determined to render the single state as nettlesome and depressing as possible: once the freewheeling days of school and university are over, company and warmth become dispiritingly hard to find; social life starts to revolve oppressively around couples; there’s no one left to call or hang out with. It’s hardly surprising, then, if when we find someone halfway decent, we might cling.
— Alain de Botton, The Course of Love
I've written you sixty-seven love poems.Here’s another one for you.But really, for me.These poems are the candles that I light with the fire you have ignited in me.I place this candle here and another thereso even if the stars have argued with the moonand are sulking away in a corner, you can still find your way to me.Sixty-eight poems now. What does the future hold for us?Joy? Disappointment? Gentle caresses? And subtle neglect?I hope the good is more than the bad. Much more. For what is the point of loveif by lighting these candlesour own flame loses its brightness?I know the good is more than the bad. Much more.I cannot wait to write you sixty-nine.
— Kamand Kojouri
Marriage is the ultimate solitude with minimal privacy.
— Nelson Rodrigues
This isn't a spotless life. There is much ahead, my immaculate little peach. And there is no way to say it other than to say it: marriage is indeed this horribly complex thing for which you appear to be ill prepared and about which you seem to be utterly naive. That's okay. A lot of people are. You can learn along the way. A good way to start would be to let fall your notions about "perfect couples." It's really such an impossible thing to either perceive honestly in others or live up to when others believe it about us. It does nothing but box some people in and shut other people out, and it ultimately makes just about everyone feel like shit. A perfect couple is a wholly private thing. No one but the two people in the perfect relationship know for certain whether they're in one. Its only defining quality is that it's composed of two people who feel perfectly right about sharing their lives with each other, even during the hard times.
— Cheryl Strayed, Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar
So many days in their shared life. So many experiences. How had they managed to spend the previous sixteen years unlearning each other? How had all the presence summed to disappearance?
— Jonathan Safran Foer, Here I Am
Accepting our greatness means no longer playing small. It often starts with baby steps. But eventually it means making major changes - in our lives, jobs, relationships, and dreams. If I had believed in my own self-worth, I would never have been willing to make the financial moves I made in the past. If I'd known my value, I couldn't have spent so many years ignoring the whispering - and sometimes screaming - voice that told me to leave my marriage. For a long time, that truth was just too scary and painful for me to face. Talk about keeping my head in the sand! But how many years did I waste, postponing what has proven to be a much better life - simply because I went into hiding and didn't see that I was worthy of something better?
— Nancy Levin, Worthy: Boost Your Self-Worth to Grow Your Net Worth
The woman of my dreams. The woman of my nightmares. Everything good and bad about my life. The “I do” that “I didn’t.
— Chris Fabry, Not in the Heart
Darling, I would follow you through the blackest midnight—just not without my trousers!
— Seth Adam Smith, Rip Van Winkle and the Pumpkin Lantern
The story is told of a famous German chemist that his marriage did not take place, because he forgot the hour of his wedding and went to the laboratory instead of to the church. He was wise enough to be satisfied with a single attempt and died at a great age unmarried
— Sigmund Freud, Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis
I look around at everybody laughing and joking together and struggle to understand my life has become a living hell that nobody present could even begin to imagine
— B.A. Paris, Behind Closed Doors
It seems to me that one of the great hazards is quick love, which is actually charm. We get used to smiling, hugging, bantering, practicing good eye contact. And it's easier then true, slow, awkward and painful connection with someone who sees all the worst parts of you. Your act is easy. Being with you, deeply with, is difficult.
— Shauna Niequist, Present Over Perfect: Leaving Behind Frantic for a Simpler, More Soulful Way of Living
For her, marriage was a sweetened version of murder.
— Daniel Saldaña París, En medio de extrañas víctimas
I am happy to be alone. Perhaps this is true. Or perhaps I am the biggest coward of all.
— Heather Day Gilbert, Forest Child
He knew how the audition was going to affect their lives for the next ten weeks as she slowly lost her mind from nerves and the strain of trying to scrounge precious practice time from an already jam-packed life. No matter how much time poor Sam gave her, it would never be quite enough, because what she actually needed was for him and the kids to just temporarily not exist. She needed to slip into another dimension where she was a single, childless person. Just between now and the audition. She needed to go to a mountain chalet (somewhere with good acoustics) and live and breathe nothing but music. Go for walks. Meditate. Eat well. Do all those positive-visualization exercises young musicians did these days. She had an awful suspicion that if she were to do this in reality, she might not even miss Sam and the children that much, or if she did miss them, it would be quite bearable.
— Liane Moriarty, Truly Madly Guilty
She meant that they'd never used words like "separation" and "divorce" even in their worst screaming matches. They yelled things like, "You're infuriating!" "You don't think!" "You are the most annoying woman in the history of annoying women!" "I hate you!" "I hate you more!" and they always, always used the word "always," even though Clementine's mother had said you should never use that word in an argument with your spouse, as in, for example, "You always forget to refill the water jug!" (But Sam did always forget. It was accurate.)
— Liane Moriarty, Truly Madly Guilty
This was historical revisionism at its best, and hadn't Sam always specialized in that, hadn't she always said she wished she had a permanent film rolling of their life so she could go back and prove that, yes, he did so say that thing he now denied?
— Liane Moriarty, Truly Madly Guilty
But then again, maybe 'I will' is nicer. It has the future in it. 'I do' just has the present.
— Gabrielle Zevin, Memoirs of a Teenage Amnesiac
They have been together for so many years that they are no longer like two people but one strange four-legged creature. For her, so much of their marriage is about talk: she likes to talk, he likes to listen. Without him, she has no one to whom she can address her remarks, her observations, her running commentary about life in general.
— Maggie O'Farrell, Instructions for a Heatwave
Marriage requires maturity. Marriage requires two people who, for the rest of their lives, are willing to listen, to really listen to each other. And that marriage requires the greatest of all things, compromise.
— Coach Taylor
[Marriage] promote[s] the moral order of the world - Edith Wharton "The Eyes
— S.T. Joshi, The Cold Embrace: Weird Stories by Women
The 'institution of marriage' is being threatened - by people getting married? Huh?
— Christina Engela, Inanna Rising: Women Forged in Fire
I couldn't fit my whole self into a marriage, no matter who my husband was. There were parts of me that John liked, and different parts for the others, but no one could deal with all of me, So I'd lop some part off, but then I'd start missing it, wanting it back.
— Karen Joy Fowler, The Jane Austen Book Club
Marriage is work, Cora, I'm not going to lie. It’s glorious some days and not so much on others.
— Rachel Hauck, Wedding Shop
Before a marriage, a man will lie awake all night thinking about something you`ve said; after marriage, he`ll fall asleep before you finish saying it.
— Helen Rowland
The early months of marriage often are times of critical tumult, - whether that of a shrimp pool or of deeper water, - which afterwards subside into cheerful peace.
— George Elliott
My parents told me to marry for money,' said her husband. 'But I chose the love of a strong woman.''And look what trouble I turned out to be,' she said.
— Helen Simonson, The Summer Before the War
I was a crazy creature with a head full of carnival spangles until I was thirty, and then the only man I ever really cared for stopped waiting and married someone else. So in spite, in anger at myself, I told myself I deserved my: fate for not having married when the best chance was at hand. I started traveling. My luggage was snowed under blizzards of travel stickers. I have been alone in Paris, alone in Vienna, alone in London, and all in all, it is very much like being alone in Green Town, Illinois. It is, in essence, being alone. Oh, you have plenty of time to think, improve your manners, sharpen your conversations. But I sometimes think I could easily trade a verb tense or a curtsy for some company that would stay over for a thirty-year weekend.
— Ray Bradbury, Dandelion Wine
Am I the I she tried to save, still lopsided with trying to be a little less or more, escaping who I was a minute ago?
— Philip Schultz, Failure
Before marriage, a man declares that he would lay down his life to serve you; after marriage, he won`t even lay down his newspaper to talk to you.
— Helen Rowland
It is in the perfect union of two hearts that complete and total marriage consists.
— Bernard of Clairvaux
Behind every successful woman is a hungry man.
— Ljupka Cvetanova, The New Land
Nor do I want the woman that I’m married to and that I love to leave me, but the thought of her doing so moves me in a way that our growing old together and contentedly slipping, in affectionate tandem, toward the grave does not.
— Richard Russo, Straight Man
The fact of your heart's enfoldment in mine is evidence enough that there is, underneath it all, some hidden order to this world.
— Eric Micha'el Leventhal
But even as she was going through with it she knew it was useless, just as it was useless to save a single earring when the other half of the pair was lost
— Jhumpa Lahiri, The Lowland
I would like to have a dollar for every person in a courtship who knew he or she had felt the guidance of the Lord in that relationship, had prayed about the experience enough to know it was the will of the Lord, knew they loved each other and enjoyed each other’s company, and saw a lifetime of wonderful compatibility ahead—only to panic, to get a brain cramp, to have total catatonic fear sweep over them. They ‘draw back,’ as Paul said, if not into perdition at least into marital paralysis. I am not saying you shouldn’t be very careful about something as significant and serious as marriage…Yes, there are cautions and considerations to make, but once there has been genuine illumination, beware the temptation to retreat from a good thing. If it was right when you prayed about it and trusted it and lived for it, it is right now. Don’t give up when the pressure mounts.
— Jeffrey R. Holland
Well, that brings us to the point: There is only one way to protect ourselves from the deadly diseases that stalk the human family. It is abstinence before marriage, then marriage and mutual fidelity for life to an uninfected partner.
— James C. Dobson, Life on the Edge: A Young Adult's Guide to a Meaningful Future
Destiny brought two souls, Jeremiah and Lailah Akita, to light the world with love.
— Lailah Gifty Akita
If ever a man and his wife, or a man and his mistress, who pass nights as well as days together, absolutely lay aside all good breeding, their intimacy will soon degenerate into a coarse familiarity, infallibly productive of contempt or disgust.
— Philip Chesterfield
Conflicting egos destroy many relationships. Lasting, stable marriages are a true treasure because they demand that both parties adjust to the constant cellular flux of their partner as they metaphase through changing seasons of life.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
A wash of relief poured through her, along with a kindling of hope. Her bridegroom wasn't Gauri; he wasn't even human. He was, however, congenial and gracious. She had proclaimed his appearance ghastly and his honesty handsome. Ildiko still stood by both opinions. She could have done infinitely worse. More than a few Gauri women had the misfortune to marry human men with handsome faces and ghastly souls.
— Grace Draven, Radiance
I was his “little girl with the William Burroughs mind,” his “secret fairy,” “female Frank Zappa” and “window onto a magical world.” He said I fell to earth, leaving wing-marks on the ceilings of our dreams.
— Jalina Mhyana, Dreaming in Night Vision: A Story in Vignettes
I cut our paper dinner with a pair of scissors borrowed from the front desk of the hotel. I cooked with a spice rack box of crayons – sixteen colors. I seasoned the pumpkin pie with orange crayon, and basted the turkey's crisp skin in brown. I was remorseless with my sketchbook abattoir, playing the part of carnivore just as surely as I was play-acting the role of wife. I may as well have been a wax figure in a dollhouse eating the wax-scented food.
— Jalina Mhyana, Dreaming in Night Vision: A Story in Vignettes
Moonrise is a fabulous novel and my damn wife wrote it and that’s me up there near Highlands shouting it out to the hills.
— Pat Conroy, A Lowcountry Heart: Reflections on a Writing Life
It eases my soul that I share a house with [Cassandra King] a novelist of such rare and distinctive gifts.
— Pat Conroy, A Lowcountry Heart: Reflections on a Writing Life
If I must die young, bury me in a music box. I’ll be the pale ballerina with dirtin her hair. Attach my painless feet to metal springs and open the lid when you visit.Watch me rise and pirouette, my arms overhead tickling the dark night’s belly until I’m dizzy, until the stars melt and spiral into a halo over my head and I’ve stirred my death into the sky.
— Jalina Mhyana, The Wishing Bones
Any man with a grain of sense knows that marriage is the only way, these days, to acquire a full-time maid who works twenty-five hours a day, with no time off and no pay except room and board. (p9)
— Elizabeth Peters, Borrower of the Night
Proximity to reality induces feelings of emptiness, horror and depression. Do not approach it alone.
— Anthony Marais, Delusionism
But it may be asked, could a man of real honor give his hand to one woman, while his heart was in the possession of another? In most cases of a similar description this question may be easily answered: in the present one, general conclusions, drawn from received opinions, will probably prove erroneous.
— Helen Craik, Stella of the North
I can’t remember what I’ve done with my lingerie. I look in the containers under my bed, as if my sexual self has been relegated to the wrong side of the mattress. I imagine my husband’s sexuality down there too, our shadow selves making love deep in our unconscious as we cuddle above the mattress as brother and sister.
— Jalina Mhyana, Dreaming in Night Vision: A Story in Vignettes
A broken heart is not a broken glass
— ABC
Remember that pornography is dangerous. It can warp the mind and destroy sexual intimacy in marriage. Stay away from it. A monster is crouched behind that door.
— James C. Dobson, Life on the Edge: A Young Adult's Guide to a Meaningful Future
Transparent tubes divided Phil’s blood into shades of red, fading to straw colored plasma. I watched his fluid swirl past his shoulders and disappear into machines. He offered himself to blood banks all over the city, his plasma rushed to hospitals where it would circulate through other people’s bodies. The map of my love’s tapped arteries would look like a bloodshot eye over the city of Albuquerque. His blood bought us dinner. I dreamed he was my mother, and I nursed his arm. I wrote a poem about it, how I suckled his arm dry like a sore teat.
— Jalina Mhyana, Dreaming in Night Vision: A Story in Vignettes
Every Sunday behind bibles, virgins,soldiers tight against me, longing,and my pelvis rubbing gods'to the big black woman voices.Soldiers tight against me, longing,all that rising, sitting, kneelingto the big black woman voices,spirits warming, tensing, folding, thenall that rising, sitting, kneelinglike some kind of dance, a mating,spirits warming, tensing, folding andgod went “Shhhhh” between my thighs –
— Jalina Mhyana, Dreaming in Night Vision: A Story in Vignettes
His grief at your leaving is also his fear of losing the power he has had for lifetimes. Those days are over for him, and he is in turmoil. But if you are to help him on his soul's quest, you will leave him. It is your job--your sacred contract--to free him, and to free yourself.
— Elizabeth Lesser, Broken Open: How Difficult Times Can Help Us Grow
All of the sudden, we were a grown-up married couple! Like little figures in a doll's house, we sat there dazed, in awe, wishing a chubby little arm would pass through a window and move us around, tell us what to do. We would have given anything for a magnificent child to show us how to be husband and wife.
— Jalina Mhyana, Dreaming in Night Vision: A Story in Vignettes
When both partners strive for a marriage that honours and pleases God, they can be assured of an everlasting joy and peace.
— Gugu Mona
Perhaps, deep down inside that rugged shell of yours, there is a little girl desperately waiting for her Prince Charming to propose.""Of course there is. Only until now, I'd been pretty successful at keeping that little brat's mouth shut.
— Sylvain Neuvel, Sleeping Giants
If he could just have one more chance, he'd act like the man he'd always believed himself to be.
— Liane Moriarty, Truly Madly Guilty
When choosing a life partner, do not leave anything to chance. If a young girl gets pregnant for you, it is not enough reason to marry her. You should take responsibility and care for the young child and mum as far as you can, but, that shouldn't be a compulsion towards matrimony! If you are the lady, you must decide if you would ordinarily marry this young man if there were no pregnancies. If no, move on.When choosing a life partner, look as far into the future as you can and see what is required in the goal you have chosen to pursue and get someone who is as hungry and as interested in those goals as you.When choosing a life partner, LEAVE NOTHING TO DOUBT AND CHANCE.
— Magnus Nwagu Amudi
I thought women enjoyed affairs. I thought they got sparks of pleasure at the buzz of their phone, thought they ran around with a glow, their world suddenly on fire with new love. I thought they were women with terrible husbands and unhappy lives, an affair the first step in an eventual ending of their marriage. I thought that they were horrible, selfish women. I never thought that I would be one of them. I never thought that I'd be so weak. It turned out being the perfect wife was only easy when there was no temptation, no mistake haunting and overshadowing your marriage.
— Alessandra Torre, Moonshot
That's what marriage is, isn't it? Taking the rough with the smooth. At least, that's what it should be.
— Laura  Barnett, The Versions of Us
When I think of New York City, I think of all the girls, the Jewish girls, the Italian girls, the Irish, Polack, Chinese, German, Negro, Spanish, Russian girls, all on parade in the city. I don't know whether it's something special with me or whether every man in the city walks around with the same feeling inside him, but I feel as though I'm at a picnic in this city. I like to sit near the women in the theaters, the famous beauties who've taken six hours to get ready and look it. And the young girls at the football games, with the red cheeks, and when the warm weather comes, the girls in their summer dresses . . .
— Irwin Shaw, The Girls in Their Summer Dresses
God, had it really been that long? It had. Nineteen years since Georgie stumbled across Seth in the Spoon offices, seventeen years since she first noticed Neal, fourteen since she married him, standing beside a row of lilac trees in his parents' back yard. Georgie never thought she'd be old enough to talk about life in big, decade-long chunks like this. It's not that she'd thought she was going to die before now, she'd just never imagined it would feel this way, the heaviness of the proportions. Twenty years with the same dream, seventeen with the same man. Pretty soon she'd have been with Neal longer than she'd been without him. She'd know herself as his wife better than she'd ever known herself as anyone else. It felt like too much, not too much have, just too much to contemplate. Commitments like boulders that were too heavy to carry. Fourteen years since their wedding, fifteen years since Neal tried to drive away from her, fifteen since he drove back. Seventeen since she first saw him, saw something in him that she couldn't look away from.
— Rainbow Rowell, Landline
Even fifteen hundred miles away, even on the phone, Georgie was more alive than anything else in his life. He felt his cheeks warm just thinking about seeing her again. That's what Georgie did to him, she pulled the blood to the surface of his skin. She acted on him, tidally. She made him feel like things were happening, like life was happening, and even if he was miserable sometimes, he wasn't going to sleep through it.He ran his hand over his pocket. The ring was still there. It had been there since he left the nursing home. His great aunt had pressed it into Neal's hands. 'I don't need this anymore, I never really needed it, but Harold liked to see it on my finger. It was a family ring,' she said. 'It should stay in the family.' Neal made up his mind as soon as he saw it. The future was going to happen, even if he wasn’t ready for it. Even if he was never ready for it. At least he could make sure he was with the right person. Wasn’t that the point of life? To find someone to share it with? And if you got that part right, how far wrong could you go? If you were standing next to the person you loved more than everything else, wasn’t everything else just scenery?
— Rainbow Rowell, Landline
Our marriage ended because I couldn’t make him see me or hear me or do anything I wanted or needed. I could only be as selfish and mean as he was to get his attention. And that was ruinous.
— Susan Rieger, The Divorce Papers
Learning how to fight properly and deciding what to fight about are two of the secrets to a successful marriage. It usually comes down to the "line of respect" one way or the other.
— James C. Dobson, Life on the Edge: A Young Adult's Guide to a Meaningful Future
I'm older now, I'm a man getting near middle age, putting on a little fat and I still love to walk along Fifth Avenue at three o'clock on the east side of the street between Fiftieth and Fifty-seventh streets, they're all out then, making believe they're shopping, in their furs and their crazy hats, everything all concentrated from all over the world into eight blocks, the best furs, the best clothes, the handsomest women, out to spend money and feeling good about it, looking coldly at you, making believe they're not looking at you as you go past.
— Irwin Shaw, The Girls in Their Summer Dresses
Whether idyllic or defective, relationships are the fabric of life.
— John Tracy Wilson, Of Life, Love and Family
Perhaps she would never really know him. A year and a half ago that though would have been unbearable to her, but now she had learnt to live with uncertainty, even to love it.
— Daisy Goodwin, The American Heiress
You have asked her to marry you, I hope''''I might have demanded it'', he admitted.''Even better
— Julia Quinn, Because of Miss Bridgerton
You know all of the young gentlemen better than I do,” Lady Manston continued. “Are there any we should avoid?” All of them, George wanted to say.  ''What about Ashbourne’s son?''“No.” “No?” his mother echoed. “No, as in you don’t have an opinion?” “No, as in no. He is not for Billie.” Who, George could not help but note, was watching the mother-son exchange with an odd mix of curiosity and alarm. “Any particular reason?” Lady Manston asked. “He gambles,” George lied. Well, maybe it wasn’t a lie. All gentlemen gambled. He had no idea if the one in question did so to excess. “What about the Billington heir? I think he —” “Also no.” His mother regarded him with an impassive expression. “He’s too young,” George said, hoping it was true. “He is?” She frowned. “I suppose he might be. I can’t remember precisely.
— Julia Quinn, Because of Miss Bridgerton
Oh, come now, you two,” Lady Manston said, “surely it can be no surprise that I have long hoped for an alliance between the Rokesbys and Bridgertons.” “Alliance?” Billie echoed, and all George could think was that it was a terrible, clinical word, one that could never encompass all that he had come to feel for her.
— Julia Quinn, Because of Miss Bridgerton
Marriage is a public declaration of a man and a woman that they have formed a secret alliance, with theintention to belong to, and share witheach other, a mystical estate; mysticalexactly in the sense that the realexperience cannot be communicated toothers, nor explained even to oneselfon rational grounds.
— Katherine Anne Porter
Despite all of their flaws and difficulties, these men don't want to walk out on their own lives, leave their wives and children. They want to come home.
— Terrence Real, How Can I Get Through to You? Closing the Intimacy Gap Between Men and Women
A person's character is but half formed till after wedlock.
— Charles Simmons
In part, that's because when we delay marriage, it's not just women who become independent. It's also men, who, like women, learn to clothe and feed themselves, to clean their homes iron their shirts and pack their own suitcases.
— Rebecca Traister, All the Single Ladies: Unmarried Women and the Rise of an Independent Nation
Don’t make the mistake of looking down on your partner. You’re only on that pedestal because they put you up there.
— Kamand Kojouri
Troy and I loved each other. We called it 'unconditional love', which was true. Once conditions arose, the love dissipated.
— Joseph Fink, Welcome to Night Vale
The fact that you do not trust your spouse or lover doesn’t necessarily mean that they are cheating on you
—  and the fact that you do doesn’t necessarily mean that they aren’t.
For five years I didn't think it was possible to be this happy.But then he forgot all those promises he made. He forgot why he loved me. He simply stopped loving me.And this is how he did it:He stopped talking to me unless I spoke to him.He stopped holding my hand.He stopped kissing me good night.He stopped kissing me good morning.He stopped kissing me.He stopped smiling at me.He stopped laughing.He stopped bathing and showering with me.He stopped wanting me.He started swearing at me.He started lying to me.He started cheating on me.He hurt me.And then he told me he was in love with another woman and wanted a divorce.Oh, I forgot. He said he was sorry.I wanted to blow his fucking brains out.
— Terry McMillan, I Almost Forgot About You
Women are unhappy in their marriages because they want men to be more related than most men know how to be. And men are unhappy in their marriages because their women seem so unhappy with them.
— Terrence Real, How Can I Get Through to You? Closing the Intimacy Gap Between Men and Women
Why bother getting married, going through all the pomp and pageantry, if you didn't think it was going to last? It was far easier to live in sin and not have to deal with the paperwork.
— Emma Straub, Modern Lovers
When love is real, even when you can't find it under mountains of hurt feelings and shuttered emotions, it's not really gone. All it takes is finding one new reason to fall in love. Just one, and all the other reasons become clear again.
— Amy E. Reichert, Luck, Love & Lemon Pie
Was marriage invented to cage love?
— Nilesh Rathod, Destiny of Shattered Dreams
One time, on a pleasure cruise, he saw a young couple, fiancés, sitting and looking at the water--the boy had his right arm around the girl's shoulder and held her right wrist tight and she had put her left hand on his right hand, and they sat like that, pressed close together. The little poet looked at them, it's so lovely to see a nice young couple like that. That these children are excited because they want more, that they are only getting each other worked up for what they can't do and don't dare to do, that they never know where to stop--no one ever notices that or thinks about that. It was very lovely, and maybe the truth was that they had just recently gotten engaged and were still satisfied with being madly in love with each other.
— Nescio, Amsterdam Stories
Life during the wedding day can be so simple, but life after the wedding day can be THE HARDEST.
— Auliq-Ice
She clung to her husband. And it was just at the time when he needed her most, because he suffered the disadvantage of being ten years ahead of her as he stumbled alone through the mists of old age, with the even greater disadvantage of being a man and weaker than she was. In the end they knew each other so well that by the time they had been married for thirty years they were like a single divided being, and they felt uncomfortable at the frequency with which they guessed each other’s thoughts without intending to, or the ridiculous accident of one of them anticipating in public what the other was going to say. Together they had overcome the daily incomprehension, the instantaneous hatred, the reciprocal nastiness and fabulous flashes of glory in the conjugal conspiracy. It was the time when they loved each other best, without hurry or excess, when both were most conscious of and grateful for their incredible victories over adversity. Life would still present them with other mortal trials, of course, but that no longer mattered: they were on the other shore.
— Gabriel García Márquez, Love in the Time of Cholera
Each marriage is a living thing, just as complex as the two individuals within it.
— Penny Reid, Happily Ever Ninja
Marriage requires a radical commitment to love our spouses as they are, while longing for them to be what they are not yet. Every marriage moves either toward enhancing one another's glory or toward degrading each other.
— Dan B. Allender, Intimate Allies
Being called ‘love’ or ‘my love’ by someone doesn’t necessarily mean that you are loved or even liked by them.
— Mokokoma Mokhonoana
For breakfast to be called ‘in bed’ instead of ‘on top of a bed,’ the house in which it is about to be eaten has to have at least two rooms (excluding the kitchen); (at least) three, if it has a bathroom.
— Mokokoma Mokhonoana
During, he looked away from all the strain, all the scratchiness, all the fights that never got going, he closed his eyes and waited until her smile came back. He allowed himself to believe in that smile, that brilliant counterfeit of joy
— Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses
As long as he lived, it would always be a pleasure and a gift to fill his hands with the weight of her flesh.
— Yaa Gyasi, Homegoing
In fact, it is the progressive nature of a nation that permits continuing revisions to its bedrock institutions –– its constitution, its electorate, its definition of marriage –– that has allowed marriage to evolve, to become more inclusive, more equal, and potentially more appealing to more people.
— Rebecca Traister, All the Single Ladies: Unmarried Women and the Rise of an Independent Nation
The bonds between husband and wife spring from deep laws of destiny and should not be broken lightly.
— Lian Hearn, The Emperor of the Eight Islands
Marriage is just like business, only a few succeed, many manage & the REST RESIGN.
— Auliq-Ice
Then I’ll have more fun searching in vain then marrying one of the wrong sort.
— Erle Stanley Gardner, The Case Of The Vagabond Virgin
According to the American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, the definition of the word ‘rebellion’ is ‘an act or a show of defiance toward an authority or established convention. Extensions of the expression include to fly in the face of danger and to fly in the face of providence, both of which carry a sense of reckless or impetuous disregard for safety.’Because we did not grow up with our fathers, we became reckless with our lives and disregarded the lives of others as well. Therefore, the problem is not the gangs, so to speak; rather, it’s the conditions that create them. It is the dismantling of our homes and marriages that create the right conditions for gangs to flourish. If homes could be put back together or prevented from falling apart, then these symptoms could be, root cause eradicated.
— Drexel Deal, The Fight of My Life is Wrapped Up in My Father
Women marry men hoping they will change. They don't. Men marry women hoping they won't change. They do.
— Bettin Arndt
I'm square. My sense of right and wrong makes it very difficult for me to have an affair. I have to be really in love in order to sleep with a man and when I'm really in love I want to be married.
— Elizabeth Rosemond Taylor
When you love someone, you end up caring about each and every person they love. When you hate someone, you end up caring about every single person who hates them.
— Mokokoma Mokhonoana
It's not the end if you're too shy to say 'I love you.' It's only the beginning
—  because you're first meant to show it anyway.
I had complete faith that this was a man who would keep his promises, who would always be there when I needed him, who would always have my best interests at heart. Together we would be able to face anything in life.
— Rosemary K. West, For Better - Or What?
Joel Kotkin, a professor of urban development, argued in the daily beast that the power of the single voter is destined to fade, since single people "Have no heirs," while their religious, conservative, counterparts will repopulate the nation with children who will replicate their parents politics, ensuring that "conservative, more familial-oriented values inevitably prevail." Kotkin's error, of course, is both in assuming that unmarried people do not reproduce -- in fact, they are doing so in ever greater numbers -- but also in failing to consider whence the gravitation away from married norms derived. A move toward independent life did not simply emerge from the clamshell: it was born of generations of dissatisfaction with the inequalities of religious, conservative, social practice.
— Rebecca Traister, All the Single Ladies: Unmarried Women and the Rise of an Independent Nation
Whatever else remained the same, the light had changed, and you cannot find the pearly dawn at noonday. The fact is unalterable, that a fellow-mortal with whose nature you are acquainted solely through the brief entrances and exits of a few imaginative weeks called courtship, may, when seen in the continuity of married companionship, be disclosed as something better or worse than what you have preconceived, but will certainly not appear altogether the same.
— George Eliot, Middlemarch
We believe that Jesus has made His home in our hearts, and as long as we carry Him there, God's love will keep our love strong no matter where we are.
— Nick Vujicic, Love Without Limits: A Remarkable Story of True Love Conquering All
It was mathematical, marriage. Not, as one might expect, additional. It was exponential.
— Lauren Groff, Fates and Furies
When are you going to marry her? “As soon as I can find a preacher willing to perform a ceremony with a handcuffed and gagged bride,” Zach replied grimly.
— Kori David, In Zach's Arms
Married life had taught Toran the futility of arguing with a female in dark-brown mood. He shrugged, and left her.
— Isaac Asimov, Foundation and Empire
Emerson is a remarkable person, considering that he is a man. Which is not saying a great deal.
— Elizabeth Peters, The Curse of the Pharaohs
If you dump the fear of failure, you will eventually marry success.
— Jeanette Coron
Before marriage she thought hserself in love; but the happiness that should have followed this love not having come, she must, she thought, have been mistaken. And Emma tried to find out what one meant exactly in life by the words felicity, passion, rapture, that had seemed to her so beautiful in books.
— Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary
My mother could see that as far as my father's relationship with the Party was concerned, she was an outsider. One day, when she ventured some critical comments about the situation and got no response from him, she said bitterly, "You are a good Communist, but a rotten husband!" My father nodded. He said he knew.
— Jung Chang, Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China
Mum is a perfectionist and Dad is a pedant and that was partly why their marriage didn't work so well, Elsa figures. Because a perfectionist and a pedant are two very different things.
— Fredrik Backman, My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She's Sorry
Just because you say you will do something does not mean that you are also willing to do that thing. Ensuring that both things are true is especially important in the matter of either making or receiving a proposal of marriage.
— Clifford Cohen