Quotes about marriage

To "catch" a husband is an art; to "hold" him is a job.

The curse which lies upon marriage is that too often the individuals are joined in their weakness rather than in their strength, each asking from the other instead of finding pleasure in giving. It is even more deceptive to dream of gaining through the child a plenitude, a warmth, a value, which one is unable to create for oneself; the child brings joy only to the woman who is capable of disinterestedly desiring the happiness of another, to one who without being wrapped up in self seeks to transcend her own existence.

He was bookish, she was not; he was theoretical, she political. She called a rose a rose. He called it an accumulation of cultural and biological constructions circulating around the mutually attracting binary poles of nature/artifice.

No, there are three people in a marriage, there's the woman, there's the man, and there's what I call the third person, the most important, the person who is composed of the man and woman together.

The difference between what you counted on and what you got explained why so many people had unhappy marriages.

Chester almost said so—almost, but not quite. He and Rita had been married a while now. He’d learned a wise man didn't antagonize his wife over something inherently unprovable, especially when she’d just given him breakfast.

A wise husband didn’t quarrel even when he was right. Quarreling when you knew you were wrong was a recipe for disaster.

Agnes might know what she was doing heading into this marriage, but he didn’t. He had no clue; marriage wasn’t part of the curriculum at West Point. Maybe it should be, he thought. It might not produce better officers, but was very likely to produce happier ones.

“How am I supposed to surprise you, Lucius?”

He spread his hands and shrugged. “As long as we’ve been married, and you still expect to surprise me? You make me happy. That is enough, and more than enough. What do I need of surprises?”

It is the mother and children who make up the core and the husband only a contributor to the economy as a paying lodger might be.

Men are like that. They marry for reasons that have nothing to do with what they expect from matrimony and then damn their wives for not being what they want later. They marry for beauty and charm and sex, and then expect their wives to be sensible, parsimonious and efficient.

That certain women were ready to sell themselves caused no excessive disgust in Isabelle. It was inevitable that a number of both men and women should compromise the institution of marriage by marrying for money, and once that happened there could be no question of impressing on the toughly logical female mind the unique vileness of prostitution. She had sometimes wondered, too, whether the contempt men felt for women who market their favors did not in part proceed from the sense of grievance eternally felt by buyers against vendors.