#marriage

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

#marriage #relationships #imagination

I mean, imagine for a second Olivero Barretto, some nice Italian kid from down the block in Cranston, Rhode Island. He comes to see Mr. Cavilleri, a wage-earning pastry chef of that city, and says, "I would like to marry your only daughter, Jennifer." What would the old man's first question be? (He would not question Barretto's love, since to know Jenny is to love Jenny; it's a universal truth). No, Mr. Cavilleri would say something like, "Barretto, how are you going to support her? ↗

— Erich Segal

#marriage-proposal #imagination

Margarita was never short of money. She could buy whatever she liked. Her husband had plenty of interesting friends. Margarita never had to cook. Margarita knew nothing of the horrors of living in a shared flat. In short... was she happy? Not for a moment. ↗

— Mikhail Bulgakov

#friends #happiness #husband #inspirational #life

For him the universe did not extend beyond the circumference of her petticoat. ↗

— Gustave Flaubert

#love #marriage #life

Compromise, if not the spice of life, is its solidity. It is what makes nations great and marriages happy ↗

— Phyllis McGinley

#ignorance #knowledge #marriage #wisdom #life

Ah, God, Lys" he breathed, and she opened her eyes to look up at him. She was the love of his heart, his true partner in both work and life, and the idea of losing her to the violence of the world they lived in scared the living shit out of him. But her smile lit her eyes, her face, and he pushed the darkness away and let himself grin back at her like the damn fool that he was. This moment-now-was perfect, and he wasn't going to let his fears interfere. ↗

— Suzanne Brockmann

#happy-ever-after #love #marriage #romance #sam

[The book, Anna Karenina, is] a mirror held up to the real, grimy, quotidian interactions of married life, of which romance is little more than a passing mood: marriage, that slippery social contract that, if it works at all, depends more on indulgent disconnection than on some kind of sacred accord. ↗

— Kate Moses

#life

You don't get married for yourself, you get married because you're better together than separate. ↗

— Dirk Hayhurst

#marriage #life

When that bastard calls back, you tell him he’s won this round. I’ll marry him. But I don’t take well to being blackmailed, and tell him I intend to spend the rest of my life making him miserable, got that? ↗

— Susan Elizabeth Phillips

#life #marriage #misery #life

[In 16th century European society] Marriage was the triumphal arch through which women, almost without exception, had to pass in order to reach the public eye. And after marriage followed, in theory, the total self-abnegation of the woman. ↗

— Antonia Fraser

#empowerment #feminism #gender #history #independence