Quotes about marriage

Jane has learned that there is a fate more terrible than solitude: it’s solitude in the company of a husband who essentially misunderstands you.

People go on quarrelling and fancying this and that, and thinking that the world is full of romance and poetry. When they get married they know better.

He had married, let us say for love; — probably very much by chance.

I don’t know about that. — A poet doesn't want to marry a poetess, nor a philosopher a philosopheress.

Men are so seldom really good. They are so little sympathetic. What man thinks of changing himself so as to suit his wife? And yet men expect that women shall put on altogether new characters when they are married, and girls think that they can do so.

He is one of those men who, on marrying, assume that they have at last got a person to do a duty which has always hitherto been neglected.

Of all hatreds that the world produces, a wife’s hatred for her husband, when she does hate him, is the strongest.

That ghostly figure, the ideal union of what is best in both personalities, should be constantly regarded as the ruler of the marriage—and, indeed, as something as close to divine as might be practically approached by fallible individuals.

“My experience teaches me, Lady Dedlock, that most of the people I know would do far better to leave marriage alone. It is at the bottom of three fourths of their troubles.”

Having engaged in vigorous and passionate debate while on their honeymoon trip from New York, they had arrived at the startling—and rather liberating—conclusion that the marriage itself was not at all necessary. Stanton no longer had a name to give, and taking Emily’s would have involved all the tedium of authority and nonsense they’d hoped to avoid. So, in the end, he had returned to her the simple gold band she had worn for so long, sliding it onto the ring finger of her new right hand. And she had given him a soft slow kiss. They were the only vows required.

Marriage for love is the beautifulest external symbol of the union of souls, marriage without it is the uncleanliest traffic that defiles the world.

'I could always walk out on a husband. But I could never turn my back on a friend.'