In the marriage ceremony, that moment when falling in love is replaced by the arduous drama of staying in love, the words "for ric...her, for poorer, in sickness and in health,' til death us do part" set love in the temporal context in which it achieves its meaning. As time begins to elapse, one begins to love the other because they have shared the same experience, the same moments of duration. Selves may not intertwine but lives do, and shared memory becomes as much of a bond as the bond of the flesh. One might say shared memory is not love itself but a consequence of being in love; but in what people commonly say about long-lasting love, it is the attitudes toward time implied in such words such as constancy and fidelity that recur.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
What is any respectable girl brought up to do but to catch some rich man's fancy and get the benefit of his money by marrying him?...--as if a marriage ceremony could make any difference in the right or wrong of the thing!LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Those who marry God can become domesticated too--it's just as hum-drum a marriage as all the others. The word "Love" means a forma...l touch of the lips as in the ceremony of the Mass, and "Ave Maria" like "dearest" is a phrase to open a letter. This marriage like the world's marriages was held together by habits and tastes shared in common between God and themselves--it was God's taste to be worshipped and their taste to worship, but only at stated hours like a suburban embrace on a Saturday night.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Like everything which is not the involuntary result of fleeting emotion but the creation of time and will, any marriage, happy or ...unhappy, is infinitely more interesting than any romance, however passionate.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Marriage is a fierce battle before which the two partners ask heaven for its blessing, because loving each other is the most audac...ious of enterprises; the battle is not slow to start, and victory, that is to say freedom, goes to the cleverest.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I had reconciled myself to a life without marriage or children for the sake of my career. And then my brothers got married. I real...ized I didn't even have a home, that in the future I couldn't do politics when I had to ask permission from their wives as to whether I could use the dining room or the telephone. I couldn't rent a home because a woman living on her own can be suspected of all kinds of scandalous associations. So keeping in mind that many people in Pakistan looked to me, I decided to make a personal sacrifice in what I thought would be, more or less, a loveless marriage, a marriage of convenience.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Love and marriage, love and marriage Go together like a horse and carriage... Dad was told by mother You can't have one without the other.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
We lov'd, and we lov'd, as long as we could, Till our love was lov'd out in us both;... But our marriage is dead, when the pleasure is fled: 'Twas pleasure first made it an oath.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Love, the strongest and deepest element in all life, the harbinger of hope, of joy, of ecstasy; love, the defier of all laws, of a...ll conventions; love, the freest, the most powerful moulder of human destiny; how can such an all-compelling force be synonymous with that poor little State and Church-begotten weed, marriage?LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »