#vow

The forsaking of all others is a keeping of faith, not just with the chosen one, but with the ones forsaken. The marriage vow unites not just a woman and a man with each other; it unites each of them with the community in a vow of sexual responsibility toward all others. The whole community is married, realizes its essential unity, in each of its marriages... Marital fidelity, that is, involves the public or institutional as well as the private aspect of marriage. One is married to marriage as well as to one's spouse. But one is married also to something vital of one's own that does not exist before the marriage: one's given word. It now seems to me that the modern misunderstanding of marriage involves a gross misunderstanding and underestimation of the seriousness of giving one's word, and of the dangers of breaking it once it is given. Adultery and divorce now must be looked upon as instances of that disease of word-breaking, which our age justifies as "realistic" or "practical" or "necessary," but which is tattering the invariably single fabric of speech and trust. (pg.117, "The Body and the Earth") ↗

— Wendell Berry

#marriage #vows #words #age

Gabriel shuddered with obvious pleasure; Joey, half out of his body with the sensation, pumped in and out with terrible urgency. Forever wouldn’t have been long enough. When Gabriel seized, Joey left himself entirely, flesh overloaded with pleasure, spirit suspended between life and death. “Joey? Are you all right?” Drawing a deep breath, Joey opened his eyes. “Never better. You?” “’Twas sweet.” Gabriel smiled. “And I was thinking. Now that we’ve both had each other – that’s as good as taking vows, isn’t it? ↗

— S.A. Reid

#vows #death

I’m here for every bit of your life. The bad parts, the scary parts. And I vow to do all you ask of me that is fair … even at the end.” I knew I didn’t have to elaborate; I could see that he’d gotten it, and that it moved him. "I do. ↗

— Lia Habel

#nora #vows #life

Let us embrace, and from this very moment vow an eternal misery together. ↗

— Thomas Otway

#eternal #let us #misery #moment #together

You will reciprocally promise love, loyalty and matrimonial honesty. We only want for you this day that these words constitute the principle of your entire life and that with the help of divine grace you will observe these solemn vows that today, before God, you formulate. ↗

— Pope John Paul II

#before #constitute #day #divine #entire

Candidate Obama was either exceptionally naive or willfully disingenuous when he vowed to change the way Washington works. The very promise of Hope and Change was rooted in uprooting the Washington modus operandi. But instead of rejecting it, he embraced it all - the secrecy, the closed doors, the political favors, the near-criminal negligence. ↗

— Reince Priebus

#change #closed #disingenuous #doors #either

In the order I was in, each brother takes five vows, one of which is teaching the poor gratuitously. As a young person I was seized by this idea of social justice and I wanted very much to follow my vow of teaching the poor gratuitously. ↗

— Godfrey Reggio

#each #five #follow #i #idea

My father was a Presbyterian minister, working among the poor in West Virginia. He had taken what amounted to a vow of poverty when he accepted that call and so we never had much money. ↗

— James Green Somerville

#among #amounted #call #father #had

No nation now sets forth to despoil another upon the avowed ground that it desires the spoils. ↗

— Elihu Root

#avowed #desires #forth #ground #nation

The life of every man is a diary in which he means to write one story, and writes another; and his humblest hour is when he compares the volume as it is with what he vowed to make it. ↗

— James M. Barrie

#compares #diary #every #every man #his