Always being there was the essential secret for a wife.

I know enough to know that no woman should ever marry a man who hated his mother.

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...

You don’t seem to realise, that in married life three is company and two is none.

[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...

[Marriage] happens as with cages: the birds without despair to get in, and those within despair of getting out.

The volume of your muscles doesn’t make you a good husband. The way you treat her does.

Many people engage in physical relationships without ever experiencing intimacy

Men marry. Women wed.

And when Mary nodded, Pauline said, “You’d better hurry then, you know how how is,” and laughed to show she would not be married to bald John Keane for all the tea in China. In...

Any marriage that exists without a sound level of unconditional love, shouldn’t be called a marriage in the first place.

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...

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...

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?

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....

[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...

Marriage is like a series of opposing reflections, inverse images getting ever smaller like nesting dolls, each one of your trying to squeeze yourself smaller to fit inside the hopes of the other, until one...

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...

Is this better or worse than being married and living in the suburbs? Better or worse? Who can tell?

It is lack of communication that leads to unhappy marriage.

[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...

They say all marriages are made in heaven, but so are thunder and lightning.

The days were sunny, the nights were star-studded. Indeed married life was strawberries for breakfast and loving all the time.

A successful marriage was a balancing act-that was a thing everyone knew. A successful marriage was also dependent on a high tolerance for irritation.

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’s weird, marriage. It’s like this license that gives a person the legal right to control their spouse / their ‘other half.

It is one of my decided opinions that married people ought to have no one, be the tie ever so close and dear, living permanently with them, to break the sacred duality — no, let...

Marriage is not a process for prolonging the life of love, sir. It merely mummifies its corpse.