top of page
.png){kind=small}
"Marriage, in what is evidently its most popular version, is now on the one hand an intimate "relationship involving (ideally) two successful careerists in the same bed, and on the other hand a sort of private political system in which rights and interests must be constantly asserted and defended. Marriage, in other words, has now taken the form of divorce: a prolonged and impassioned negotiation as to how things shall be divided. During their understandably temporary association, the "married couple will typically consume a large quantity of merchandise and a large portion of each other."
Standard
Customized
Exlpore more Marriage quotes
"It won't take 40 years for opposition to same-sex marriage to dissipate."
"To a man who was required to marry before he was allowed to have sex with his lover, marriage is a 'righteous' form of prostitution."
"12% of people marry because they are completely in love. 88% of people marry just so they are then liable for only half of their rent."
"In this regard, Daisy reflected, her marriage to Matthew would not be unlike Lillian's with Westcliff. As two strong-willed people with very different sensibilities, Lillian and Westcliff often argued and negotiated... and yet this didn't seem to weaken their marriage. Quite the opposite, in fact- their union seemed all the better for it.She considered her friends' marriages... Annabelle and Mr. Hunt as a harmony of similar dispositions... Evie and Lord St. Vincent with their opposite natures, as necessary to each other's existence as day and night. It was impossible to say that any of these pairings was superior to the others.Perhaps, in spite of all she had heard about the ideal of a perfect marriage, there was no such thing. Perhaps every marriage was a unique creation."
"Love of music, of sunsets and sea; a liking for the same kind of people; political opinions that are not radically divergent; a similar stance as we look at the stars and think of the marvelous strangeness of the universe - these are what build a marriage. And it is never to be taken for granted."
"Beauvoir left their home wanting to call his wife and tell her how much he loved her, and then tell her what he believed in, and his fears and hopes and disappointments. To talk about something real and meaningful. He dialed his cell phone and got her. But the words got caught somewhere south of his throat. Instead he told her the weather had cleared, and she told him about the movie she'd rented. Then they both hung up."
"I have married thriteen couples. I'm about to do a marriage next month."
Explore more quotes by Wendell Berry
"In time, against conscience and even will, my grief for him began to include grief for myself. Sometimes I would get the feeling that I was going to waste. It was my life calling me to itself. It was the light that shines in darkness calling me back into time."
"Rats and roaches live by competition under the law of supply and demand; it is the privilege of human beings to live under the laws of justice and mercy. It is impossible not to notice how little the proponents of the ideal of competition have to say about honesty, which is the fundamental economic virtue, and how very little they have to say about community, compassion, and mutual help."
"The complexity of our present trouble suggests as never before that we need to change our present concept of education. Education is not properly an industry, and its proper use is not to serve industries, either by job-training or by industry-subsidized research. It's proper use is to enable citizens to live lives that are economically, politically, socially, and culturally responsible. This cannot be done by gathering or "accessing" what we now call "information" - which is to say facts without context and therefore without priority. A proper education enables young people to put their lives in order, which means knowing what things are more important than other things; it means putting first things first."
"The care of the Earth is our most ancient and most worthy, and after all our most pleasing responsibility. To cherish what remains of it and to foster its renewal is our only hope."
"I began to know my story then. Like everybody's, it was going to be the story of living in the absence of the dead. What is the thread that holds it all together? Grief, I thought for a while. And grief is there sure enough, just about all the way through. From the time I was a girl I have never been far from it. But grief is not a force that has not power to hold. You only bear it. Love is what carries you, for it is always there, even in the dark, or most in the dark, but shining out at times like gold stitches in a piece of embroidery."
"Eating with the fullest pleasure - pleasure, that is, that does not depend on ignorance - is perhaps the profoundest enactment of our connection with the world. In this pleasure we experience our dependence and our gratitude, for we are living in a mystery, from creatures we did not make and powers we cannot comprehend."
"He was lonely because he could imagine himself as anything but himself and as anywhere but where he was. His competitiveness and self-centeredness cut him off from any thought of shared life. He wanted to have more because he thought that having more would make him able to live more, and he was lonely because he never thought of the sources, the places, where he was going to get what he wanted to have, or of what his having it might cost others. It was loneliness that sometimes even he felt; you could see it. A self-praiser has got to accept a big loneliness in order to accept a little credit."
"The fertility cycle is a cycle entirely of living creatures passing again and again through birth, growth, maturity, death, and decay."
"I understood him. He wanted to die at home. He didn't want to be going someplace all the time for the sake of a hopeless hope. He wanted to die as himself out of his life. He didn't want his death to be the end of a technological process."
bottom of page