Married Life Quotes

“I know enough to know that no woman should ever marry a man who hated his mother.”
― Martha Gellhorn, Selected Letters

“Marriage is not a process for prolonging the life of love, sir. It merely mummifies its corpse.”
― P.G. Wodehouse, The Small Bachelor

“They say all marriages are made in heaven, but so are thunder and lightning.”
― Clint Eastwood

“When you live with a woman you learn something every day. So far I have learned that long hair will clog up the shower drain befor you can say "Liquid-Plumr"; that it is not advisable to clip something out of the newspaper before your wife has read it, even if the newspaper in question is a week old; that I am the only person in our two-person household who can eat the same thing for dinner three nights in a row without pouting; and that headphones were invented to preserve spouses from each other's musical excesses.”
― Audrey Niffenegger, The Time Traveler's Wife

“How to find a good spouse?
-the best single way is to deserve a good spouse.”
― Charles T. Munger, Poor Charlie's Almanack: The Wit and Wisdom of Charles T. Munger

“[Marriage] happens as with cages: the birds without despair to get in, and those within despair of getting out.”
― Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays

“Your god, sir, is the World. In my eyes, you, too, if not an infidel, are an idolater. I conceive that you ignorantly worship: in all things you appear to me too superstitious. Sir, your god, your great Bel, your fish-tailed Dagon, rises before me as a demon. You, and such as you, have raised him to a throne, put on him a crown, given him a sceptre. Behold how hideously he governs! See him busied at the work he likes best -- making marriages. He binds the young to the old, the strong to the imbecile. He stretches out the arm of Mezentius and fetters the dead to the living. In his realm there is hatred -- secret hatred: there is disgust -- unspoken disgust: there is treachery -- family treachery: there is vice -- deep, deadly, domestic vice. In his dominions, children grow unloving between parents who have never loved: infants are nursed on deception from their very birth: they are reared in an atmosphere corrupt with lies ... All that surrounds him hastens to decay: all declines and degenerates under his sceptre. Your god is a masked Death.”
― Charlotte Brontë, Shirley

“It's weird, marriage. It's like this license that gives a person the legal right to control their spouse / their 'other half.”
― Jess C. Scott, Blind Leading Another

“My husband would do anything for me ...' It's degrading. No human being ought to have such power over another."

"It's a very real power, Harriet."

"Then ... we won't use it. If we disagree, we'll fight it out like gentlemen. We won't stand for matrimonial blackmail.”
― Dorothy L. Sayers, Busman's Honeymoon

“[I]t is not by being richer or more powerful that a man becomes better; one is a matter of fortune, the other of virtue. Nor should she deem herself other than venal who weds a rich man rather than a poor, and desires more things in her husband than himself. Assuredly, whomsoever this concupiscence leads into marriage deserves payment rather than affection.”
― Héloïse, The Letters of Abélard and Héloïse

“How many women are there ... who because of their husbands' harshness spend their weary lives in the bond of marriage in greater suffering than if they were slaves among the Saracens?”
― Christine de Pizan, The Book of the City of Ladies

“There must be some other possibility than death or lifelong penance ... some meeting, some intersection of lines; and some cowardly, hopeful geometer in my brain tells me it is the angle at which two lines prop each other up, the leaning-together from the vertical which produces the false arch. For lack of a keystone, the false arch may be as much as one can expect in this life. Only the very lucky discover the keystone.”
― Wallace Stegner, Angle of Repose

“What do you mean, 'Angle of Repose?' she asked me when I dreamed we were talking about Grandmother's life, and I said it was the angle at which a man or woman finally lies down. I suppose it is; and yet ... I thought when I began, and still think, that there was another angle in all those years when she was growing old and older and very old, and Grandfather was matching her year for year, a separate line that did not intersect with hers. They were vertical people, they lived by pride, and it is only by the ocular illusion of perspective that they can be said to have met. But he had not been dead two months when she lay down and died too, and that may indicate that at that absolute vanishing point they did intersect. They had intersected for years, for more than he especially would ever admit.”
― Wallace Stegner, Angle of Repose

“[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, The Wives of Henry VIII

“[I]f the name of wife appears more sacred and more valid, sweeter to me is ever the word friend, or, if thou be not ashamed, concubine ... And thou thyself wert not wholly unmindful of that ... [as in the narrative of thy misfortunes] thou hast not disdained to set forth sundry reasons by which I tried to dissuade thee from our marriage, from an ill-starred bed; but wert silent as to many, in which I preferred love to wedlock, freedom to a bond. I call God to witness, if Augustus, ruling over the whole world, were to deem me worthy of the honour of marriage, and to confirm the whole world to me, to be ruled by me forever, dearer to me and of greater dignity would it seem to be called thy concubine than his empress.”
― Héloïse, The Letters of Abélard and Héloïse

“Wives?" she asked, interrupting him. For a moment, he had assumed she was tuning to the novel. Then he saw her waiting, suspicious eyes, so he replied cautiously, "None active," as if wives were volcanoes.”
― John le Carré, The Honourable Schoolboy

“Marriage is not kick-boxing, it's salsa dancing.”
― Amit Kalantri

“It was a fact generally acknowledged by all but the most contumacious spirits at the beginning of the seventeenth century that woman was the weaker vessel; weaker than man, that is. ... That was the way God had arranged Creation, sanctified in the words of the Apostle. ... Under the common law of England at the accession of King James I, no female had any rights at all (if some were allowed by custom). As an unmarried woman her rights were swallowed up in her father's, and she was his to dispose of in marriage at will. Once she was married her property became absolutely that of her husband. What of those who did not marry? Common law met that problem blandly by not recognizing it. In the words of The Lawes Resolutions [the leading 17th century compendium on women's legal status]: 'All of them are understood either married or to be married.' In 1603 England, in short, still lived in a world governed by feudal law, where a wife passed from the guardianship of her father to her husband; her husband also stood in relation to her as a feudal lord.”
― Antonia Fraser, The Weaker Vessel

“There was altogether too much candor in married life; it was an indelicate modern idea, and frequently led to upsets in a household, if not divorce...”
― Muriel Spark, Memento Mori

“Marriage can bore you but there is a fortitude that comes from it, too. When you need to lean on it, you are so thankful that you can.”
― Ellen Tien

“The debris of her married life was enough to sever the tie between reality and dreams, the fine line between desire and temptation. Where did she draw the line? When did she admit defeat and surrender?”
― Callie Hunter, Still Searching: Lost and Found

“Marriage is when women finally get what they want, and men wave the white flag, unaware of the firing squad that awaits them.”
― Jack Freestone

“Fall in love as many times as you want, as young as you want, but never marry young, only to take the easy way out.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Insan Himalayanoğlu: It's Time to Defect

“a bitter-sweet pain remains within my heart; I will start a new chapter of my life but leave the life I so dearly love behind.”
― Samama Reza, Anti-Romantic

“Love, much like a flower seed; if looked after and delicately tendered, it flourishes, but dwindles, withers, and dies if neglected.”
― Dr. Lucas D. Shallua

“She didn't always like Jones. Sometimes she ached to punch him in the jaw really hard, so hard she could split her own knuckles with the force of it. But she loved him no less totally than she did her own son. It was that complete, that much a part of her. He was half of her, for better or worse.”
― Lisa Unger, Fragile

“Menurutmu, berapa persen perempuan yang harus melepaskan pekerjaannya karena pernikahan?”
― Windry Ramadhina, Last Forever

“A marriage doesn't mean that the husband will be married to his wife.”
― Tamerlan Kuzgov

“A wedding doesn't always mean that the husband will be married to his wife.”
― Tamerlan Kuzgov

“Even in pain, Nellie understood her role - the wife who bowed to her husband, who apologized for things out of her control, who made his life easier even if it made hers harder. The perfect wife.”
― Karma Brown, Recipe for a Perfect Wife