#marriage

"It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife."

"I used to loathe ambivalence; now I adore it. Ambivalence is my new best friend."

"Happiness [is] only real when shared"

"Marriage is the union of two 'I's to form a 'V'. Both 'I's have to tilt equally to make a good 'V'. 'I's standing tall can never make a 'V'."

"So it's not gonna be easy. It's going to be really hard; we're gonna have to work at this everyday, but I want to do that because I want you. I want all of you, forever, everyday. You and me... everyday."

"And so must learn to love with our mouths and voices, as well as with our eyes, flesh, heart, brains, and with everything we have, right down to our toenails. There is not anything about us that cannot love, and that is not called to love, and that is not destined to be turned, conformed, and reduced to pure love. It ...is the priceless deposit left by the burning away of selfishness."

"To say that one waits a lifetime for his soulmate to come around is a paradox. People eventually get sick of waiting, take a chance on someone, and by the art of commitment become soulmates, which takes a lifetime to perfect."

"Before her marriage she had thought that she had love within her grasp; but since the happiness which she had expected this love to bring her hadn’t come, she supposed she must have been mistaken. And Emma tried to imagine just what was meant, in life, by the words “bliss,” “passion,” and “rapture” - words that had seemed so beautiful to her in books."

"Over time, any deception destroys intimacy, and without intimacy couples cannot have true and lasting love."

"The snag about marriage is, it isn´t worth the divorce."

"There might have been prettier women in the room but, when she turned those babies on, fluttered her eyelashes, I was hers. It had taken me nearly fifteen years to extinguish their light. Now, when she looks at me, it's a vacuum. I had drained so much from her over the course of our marriage that every glance rips a little bit of my soul away to fill the void I had whittled within her."

"The comfortable estate of widowhood is the only hope that keeps up a wife's spirits."

"In other words, it's one of those books you thrust on your partner with an incredulous cry of "This is me!"