Quotes by British Authors - Page 590

Marriages last because the people in them want to be married
Linda Grant
The most successful relationships are ones with a really low negativity threshold. In those relationships, couples allow each other to complain, and work together to constantly repair the tiny issues between them. In such cases, couples don't bottle up their feelings, and little things don't end up being blown completely out of proportion.
Hannah Fry
It is described by some as a moment when the world stops moving...it did just that for me. I knew before she said one word or made a single movement, that our lives would begin to dissolve into each other...we would never part again. This was not love at first sight, but rather second. I had fallen in love at eleven; now I was twenty and now all things were possible.
Graham Kerr
I must go, uncertain of my fate; but I shall return hither, or follow your party, as soon as possible. A word, a look will be enough to decide whether I enter your father's house tonight or never.
Jane Austen
I’ve always thought that Binding was a bit like a war − both sides think they’re right, and neither wants to back down…the only difference is that you’re sleeping with the enemy.”-Evan
Suzanne Wright
Liza Hempstock, who had been Bod's friend for the last six years, was different in another way; she was less likely to be there for him when Bod went down to the nettle patch to see her, and on the rare occasions when she was, she would be short-tempered, argumentative and often downright rude.Bod talked to Mr Owens about this, and after a few moments' reflection, his father said, "It's just women, I reckon. She liked you as a boy, probably isn't sure who you are now you're a young man. I used to play with one little girl down by the duck pond every day until she turned about your age, and then she threw an apple at my head and did not say another word to me until I was seventeen."Mrs Owens stiffened. "It was a pear I threw," she said, tartly, "and I was talking to you again soon enough, for we danced a measure at your cousin Ned's wedding, and that was but two days after your sixteenth birthday."Mr Owens said, "Of course you are right, my dear." He winked at Bod, to tell him that it was none of it serious. And then mouthed "Seventeen" to show that, really, it was.
Neil Gaiman
When she had first crossed the dry and dusty world which his mind inhabited she had been like a spring shower; in opening himself to it he had not been mistaken. He had gone wrong only in assuming that marriage, by itself, gave him either power or title to appropriate that freshness. As he now saw, one might as well have thought one could buy a sunset by buying the field from which one had seen it.
C.S. Lewis
I know many a strong man undone by marriage.
Clive Barker
I don't think she can see her husband very often, for he teaches the university students during the day, and works at the telescope at night. I wonder if she hopes for cloudy nights and then feels guilty.
Pippa Goldschmidt
It is the most miserable thing to feel ashamed at home.
Charles Dickens
I assumed my first undivided responsibility.
Charles Dickens
Well I can tell you now that married life is not a plateau, not at all. There are ravines and great jagged peaks and hidden crevasses that send the both of you scrabbling into darkness. Then there are dull, parched stretches that you feel will never end, and much of the journey is in fraught silence, and sometimes you can't see the other person at all, sometimes they drift off very far away from you, quite out of sight, and the journey is hard. It is just very, very, very hard.
David Nicholls
Our biographies involve each other so intrinsically now that we're both on nearly every page. We know the answers because we were there, and so curiosity becomes hard to maintain; replaced, I suppose, by nostalgia.
David Nicholls
It was a dark story.
Joseph Conrad
When she found a place of her ownand packed her bags he asked her to marry him. She kissed him, and quoted in his ear,"He married a woman to stop her getting away, Now she’s there all day.
Ian McEwan
In the break-up of a marriage the world inclines to take the side of the partner with most vitality, rather than the one apparently least to blame.
Anthony Powell
I suppose one oughtn’t to marry anybody, unless one’s prepared to make him a full-time job.”“Probably not; though there are a few rare people, I believe, who don’t look on themselves as jobs but as fellow creatures.
Dorothy L. Sayers
For the crown of our life as it closesIs darkness, the fruit there of dust;No thorns go as deep as the rose's,And love is more cruel than lust.Time turns the old days to derision,Our loves into corpses or wives;And marriage and death and divisionMake barren our lives.
Algernon Charles Swinburne
And so, standing before the aforesaid officiator, the two swore that at every other time of their lives till death took them, they would assuredly believe, feel, and desire precisely as they had believed, felt, and desired during the few preceding weeks. What was as remarkable as the undertaking itself was the fact that nobody seemed at all surprised at what they swore.
Thomas Hardy
Young men ... learn practical skills that set is in good stead for lives as the husbands of wealthy and educated women: Strong Handshakes, Silence, Rudimentary Car Mechanics, How to Mow the Lawn, Explosive Displays of Authority, Sport and Nutrition Against Impotance.
Helen Oyeyemi
... You are ignorant of the duties you undertake in marrying...
Emily Brontë
His friend laughed. 'You missed your calling, Freddie,' he said. 'You should have been one of the aforementioned clergy. Is this what marriage does to you? One shudders at the very idea.
Mary Balogh
... He spoke in the deep tenderness of one about to leave his treasure amid perils and foes, where his remembered words would be the only aid he could bequeath to guide her.
Emily Brontë
They sat a moment in embrace of silent mutual comfort, which was, she often thought, the reward of those long married.
Helen Simonson
Marriage: a hopeful, generous, infinitely kind gamble taken by two people who don't know yet who they are or who the other might be, binding themselves to a future they cannot conceive of and have carefully omitted to investigate.
Alain de Botton
I was relying on youth be loyal to the specific variety of compromise and unhappiness, which our hard-won marriage represents.
Alain de Botton
It was the ring on the left hand that people at the Old Girls' Reunion looked for. Often, in fact nearly always, it was an uninteresting ring, sometimes no more than the plain gold band or the very smallest and dimmest of diamonds. Perhaps the husband was also of this variety, but as he was not seen at this female gathering he could only be imagined, and somehow I do not think we ever imagined the husbands to be quite so uninteresting as they probably were.
Barbara Pym
Their making of love ... had even been something like this, when it became a kind of harmony, enveloping them together and together and for ever into that crescendo. And, yes, now really, really she knew the multitudinous singing of the stars and she wanted everything to stay where it was, now and forever with him ...
Bryan Islip
As Liljana sat stitching a sampler or darning a sock, she dreamed her way into life as a grown woman with her own household to run, her own home to tidy, her own children to mind, and her own husband to cheer after a long day's work as they sat together by the fire. The life that future generations would dismiss as dull and degrading offered Liljana the liberating prospect of being mistress in her own home rather than living to serve others.
Fiorella De Maria
They disagreed always about this, but it did not matter. She liked him to believe in scholarships, and he liked her to be proud of Andrew whatever he did.
Virginia Woolf
Women's work, married or unmarried, is menial and low paid. Women's right to possess property is curtailed, more if they are married. How can marriage provide security? In any case a husband is a possession which can be lost or stolen and the abandoned wife of thirty odd with a couple of children is far more desolate and insecure in her responsibility than an unmarried woman with or without children ever could be.
Germaine Greer
The second class status of marriage became one of the principal issues in the Reformation. Martin Luther, the Augustinian friar, had barely posted his ninety-five theses on the door of the church in Wittenberg when he took himself a wife.
Germaine Greer
My mother could see that as far as my father's relationship with the Party was concerned, she was an outsider. One day, when she ventured some critical comments about the situation and got no response from him, she said bitterly, "You are a good Communist, but a rotten husband!" My father nodded. He said he knew.
Jung Chang
Whatever else remained the same, the light had changed, and you cannot find the pearly dawn at noonday. 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
I'm square. My sense of right and wrong makes it very difficult for me to have an affair. I have to be really in love in order to sleep with a man and when I'm really in love I want to be married.
Elizabeth Rosemond Taylor
During, he looked away from all the strain, all the scratchiness, all the fights that never got going, he closed his eyes and waited until her smile came back. He allowed himself to believe in that smile, that brilliant counterfeit of joy
Salman Rushdie
Perhaps she would never really know him. A year and a half ago that though would have been unbearable to her, but now she had learnt to live with uncertainty, even to love it.
Daisy Goodwin
That's what marriage is, isn't it? Taking the rough with the smooth. At least, that's what it should be.
Laura Barnett
But even as she was going through with it she knew it was useless, just as it was useless to save a single earring when the other half of the pair was lost
Jhumpa Lahiri
My parents told me to marry for money,' said her husband. 'But I chose the love of a strong woman.''And look what trouble I turned out to be,' she said.
Helen Simonson
They have been together for so many years that they are no longer like two people but one strange four-legged creature. For her, so much of their marriage is about talk: she likes to talk, he likes to listen. Without him, she has no one to whom she can address her remarks, her observations, her running commentary about life in general.
Maggie O'Farrell
I am not only not going to be married, at present, but have very little intention of ever marrying at all.
Jane Austen
mong the hundred thousand mysterious influences which a man exercises over a woman who loves him, I doubt if there is any more irresistible to her than the influence of his voice. I am not one of those women who shed tears on the smallest provocation: it is not in my temperament, I suppose. But when I heard that little natural change in his tone my mind went back (I can't say why) to the happy day when I first owned that I loved him. I burst out crying.
Wilkie Collins
Among the hundred thousand mysterious influences which a man exercises over a woman who loves him, I doubt if there is any more irresistible to her than the influence of his voice. I am not one of those women who shed tears on the smallest provocation: it is not in my temperament, I suppose. But when I heard that little natural change in his tone my mind went back (I can't say why) to the happy day when I first owned that I loved him. I burst out crying.
Wilkie Collins
To a shameful extent, the charm of marriage boils down to how unpleasant it is to be alone. This isn’t necessarily our fault as individuals. Society as a whole appears determined to render the single state as nettlesome and depressing as possible: once the freewheeling days of school and university are over, company and warmth become dispiritingly hard to find; social life starts to revolve oppressively around couples; there’s no one left to call or hang out with. It’s hardly surprising, then, if when we find someone halfway decent, we might cling.
Alain de Botton
By contrast, my wife at fifty-two yeas old seems to me just as attractive as the day I first met her. If I were to say this out loud, she would say, 'Douglas, that's just a line. No one prefers wrinkles, no one prefers grey.' To which I'd reply, 'But none of this is a surprise. I've been expecting to watch you grow older ever since we met. Why should it trouble me? It's the face itself that I love, not that face at twenty-eight or thirty-four or fourty-three. It's that face.'Perhaps she would have liked to hear this but I had never got around to saying it out loud. I had always presumed there would be time and now, sitting on the edge of the bed at four a.m., no longer listening out for burglars, it seemed that it might be too late.
David Nicholls
When love dies and marriage lies in ruins, the first casualty is honest memory, decent, impartial recall of the past. Too inconvenient, too damning of the present. It's the spectre of old happiness at the feast of failure and desolation. So, against that headwind of forgetfulness I want to place my little candle of truth and see how far it throws its light.
Ian McEwan
She wondered how she would feel to be a married woman. It would be the end of her life, she decided, if life was a time of choices.
Neil Gaiman
You want someone in the ballpark and then you grow together. Thats what a relashionship's about: changing each other.
Grayson Perry
But marriage is forever.''Oh, not really,' he assured her. 'Only until one of us dies.'Her eyes widened. 'I do not want you to die,' she said.'Perhaps you will go first,' he said, though I rather think I hope not. I would probably have grown accustomed to you by then and would miss you.
Mary Balogh
In an ideal world, marriage vows would be entirely rewritten. At the alter, a couple would speak thus: "We accept not to panic when, some years from now, what we are doing today will seem like the worst decision of our lives. Yet we promise not to look around, either, for we accept that there cannot be better options out there. Everyone is always impossible. We are a demented species."After the solemn repetition of the last sentence by the congregation, the couple would continue: "We will endeavor to be faithful. At the same time, we are certain that never being allowed to sleep with anyone else is one of the tragedies of existence. We apologize that our jealousies have made this peculiar but sound and non-negotiable restriction very necessary. We promise to make each other the sole repository of our regrets rather than distribute them through a life of sexual Don Juanism. We have surveyed the different options for unhappiness, and it is to each other we have chosen to bind ourselves."Spouses who had been cheated upon would no longer be at liberty furiously to complain that they had expected their partner to be content with them alone. Instead they could more poignantly and justly cry, "I was relying on you to be loyal to the specific variety of compromise and unhappiness which our hard-won marriage represents."Thereafter, an affair would be a betrayal not of intimate joy but of a reciprocal pledge to endure the disappointments of marriage with bravery and stoic reserve.
Alain de Botton
There was a certain usefulness in having a husband whom most people could barely tolerate: it deflected envy, for one thing.
Amanda Craig
It’s all biology. If it weren’t for two thousand years of the Christian tradition we wouldn’t think of pretending otherwise…Romance is the true opiate of the masses.
Amanda Craig
I had been much more in love with my wife than she with me, that was all. Somehow, you were supposed to be ashamed of this, as though love were a perpetual jostling for the roles of pursuer and pursued. As if it didn’t take more courage to admit that someone held your hopes of happiness in their hands. As if it were a choice.
Amanda Craig
She had gambled with marriage, just like most people, but she had gambled unluckily and had lost.
Buchi Emecheta
Myrtle shook her head. "I told myself that I was lucky," she said. "Your father never struck me, never drank and if he had mistresses he had the good grace to be discreet. He provided for me and my children, and yet I tried, year after year, to make myself his companion. The doors never opened, Faith. In the end I lost hope. Ah, but I cannot complain!" Myrtle swatted away the past with one delicate little hand. "It has made me what I am. When every door is closed, one learns to climb through windows. Human nature, I suppose.
Frances Hardinge
Mostly, what people mean by love is laziness.
Amanda Craig
There are no whores in Scaithe’s Ebb, or none that consider themselves as such, although there have always been many women who, if pressed, would describe themselves as much-married, with one husband on this ship here every six months, and another husband on that ship, back in port for a month or so every nine months.The mathematics of the thing have always kept most folk satisfied; and if ever it disappoints and a man returns to his wife while one of her other husbands is still in occupancy, why, then there is a fight—and the grog shops to comfort the loser. The sailors do not mind the arrangement, for they know that this way there will, at the least, be one person who, at the last, will notice when they do not come back from the sea, and will mourn their loss; and their wives content themselves with the certain knowledge that their husbands are also unfaithful, for there is no competing with the sea in a man’s affections, since she is both mother and mistress, and she will wash his corpse also, in time to come, wash it to coral and ivory and pearls.
Neil Gaiman
The truth is that wherever a man lies with a woman, there, whether they like it or not, a transcendental relation is set up between them which must be eternally enjoyed or eternally endured.
C.S. Lewis
[The Devil and his angels] have... persuad[ed]... humans that a curious, and usually short-lived, experience which they call "being in love" is the only respectable ground for marriage; that marriage can, and ought to, render this excitement permanent; and that a marriage which does not do so is no longer binding. This idea [comes from their] parody of an idea that came from [God]... Things are to be many, yet somehow also one. The good of one self is to be the good of another. This... He calls Love, and this... can be detected under all He does and even all He is... He introduces into matter... the organism, in which the parts are [set at odds with] their natural destiny of competition and made to cooperate... In... humans [God] has... associated affection between the parties with sexual desire. He has also made the offspring dependent on the parents and given the parents an impulse to support it-thus producing the Family, which is like the organism, [but] the members are more distinct, yet also united in a more conscious and responsible way... [Heavenly Father] described a married couple as "one flesh." He did not say "a happily married couple" or "a couple who married because they were in love"...
C.S. Lewis