quotations about marriage
Marriage is a dance of growing together, apart, together.
DANI SHAPIRO
PBS News Hour, November 3, 2017
Marriage is a wrestling match where you hold on tight while your mate changes into a hundred different things. The trick is that you're changing into a hundred other things, but you can't let go. You can only try to match up and never turn into a wolf while he's a rabbit, or a mouse while he's still busy being an owl, a brawny black bull while he's a little blue crab scuttling for shelter. It's harder than it sounds.
CATHERYNNE M. VALENTE
The Fairyland Series
Marrying a man is like buying something you've been admiring for a long time in a shop window. You may love it when you get it home, but it doesn't always go with everything else in the house.
JEAN KERR
The Snake Has All the Lines
Wives are young men's mistresses, companions for middle age, and old men's nurses.
FRANCIS BACON
Essays
If variety is the spice of life, marriage is the big can of leftover Spam.
JOHNNY CARSON
The Tonight Show
Although a wedding cannot turn a flimsy relationship into a strong one, it adds scaffolding that can save one that is in between. Making a public, lifelong commitment to another person is not the same as drifting into cohabitation to share the rent. And this matters a lot if children are involved.
ANNA PARINI
"A More Perfect Union", The Economist, November 23, 2017
Chains do not hold a marriage together. It is threads, hundreds of tiny threads which sew people together through the years. That is what makes a marriage last--more than passion or even sex.
SIMONE SIGNORET
London Daily Mail, July 4, 1978
The married are those who have taken the terrible risk of intimacy and, having taken it, know life without intimacy to be impossible.
CAROLYN HEILBRUN
Ms. Magazine, August 1974
Unfortunately, a marriage license doesn't come with a job description or a set of instructions. There is definitely "some assembly required." In fact, putting together a modern-day marriage can be likened to assembling an airplane in flight.
PATRICIA LOVE
The Truth About Love
Marry'd in haste, we oft repent at leisure.
BENJAMIN FRANKLIN
Poor Richard's Almanac
Squeeze marriage as much as you like, you will never extract anything from it but fun for bachelors and boredom for husbands.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Physiology of Marriage
Marriage is the lightning rod that absorbs anxiety and stress from all other sources, past and present. When marriage has a firm foundation of solid friendship and mutual respect, it can tolerate a fair amount of raw emotion. A good fight can clear the air, and it's nice to know we can survive conflict and even learn from it. Many couples, however, get trapped in endless rounds of fighting and blaming that they don't know how to get out of. When fights go unchecked and unrepaired, they can eventually erode love and respect, which are the bedrock of any successful relationship.
HARRIET LERNER
Marriage Rules: A Manual for the Married and the Coupled Up
Marriage? That's for life! It's like cement!
WOODY ALLEN
What's New, Pussycat?
Marriage is like a coffin and each kid is another nail.
HOMER SIMPSON
"How I Spent My Strummer Vacation", The Simpsons
Keep the eyes wide open before marriage and half shut afterwards.
BENJAMIN FRANKLIN
attributed, Wise Words and Quotes
More marriages might survive if the partners realized that sometimes the better comes after the worse.
DOUG LARSON
attributed, Better Off Wed
Therefore shall a man leave his father and mother, and shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh.
BIBLE
Genesis 2:24
So are the early unions of an unfixed Marriage: watchful and observant, jealous and busy, inquisitive and careful, and apt to take alarm at every unkind word. For infirmities do not manifest themselves in the first Scenes, but in the succession of a long Society.
JEREMY TAYLOR
The Marriage Ring
The world must be peopled. When I said I would die a bachelor, I did not think I should live till I were married.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
Much Ado About Nothing
You never know anyone until you marry them.
ELEANOR ROOSEVELT
Book of Common Sense Etiquette