Quotes & Sayings About Arranged Marriage

My parents had an arranged marriage, as did so many other people when I was growing up. My father came and had a life in the United States one way and my mother had a different one, and I was very aware of those things. I continue to wonder about it, and I will continue to write about it. — Jhumpa Lahiri

My wife's name was Mala. The marriage had been arranged by my older brother and his wife. I regarded the proposition with neither objection nor enthusiasm. It was a duty expected of me, as it was expected of every man. She was the daughter of a schoolteacher in Beleghata. I was told that she could cook, knit, embroider, sketch landscapes, and recite poems by Tagore, but these talents could not make up for the fact that she did not possess a fair complexion, and so a string of men had rejected her to her face. She was twenty-seven, an age when her parents had begun to fear that she would never marry, and so they were willing to ship their only child halfway across the world in order to save her from spinsterhood. — Jhumpa Lahiri

It was an arranged marriage, put together by drugs and alcohol. — Tom Papa

We're supposed to be unable to keep our hands off of each other. We're supposed to tear each other's clothes off. I'm supposed to make you scream again and again all night long, Lila. — Stephanie Witter

In Song of Songs we are introduced to a new problem for Abishag: Solomon was choosing wives for political advantages, while she was wasting away in Zion
without children.
pg xxiv — Michael Ben Zehabe

Jemma, I know that we have known each other for only a few short weeks, but I feel as if I have known you all my life. This courtship may have been arranged at the beginning, but my love for you is truer than ever. So, I ask you, my love, as a man would rightly ask the woman he wishes to be his wife, if you will marry me. Don't say yes because of the original arrangement, say yes because you want to. I will love you forever Jemma Girard, and I would never force you to stay in an arrangement you did not want. If you wish it, we can eliminate the plans of marriage. I stood there in a breathless shock, staring at this wonderful and handsome young man who loved me enough to let me go. — Katlyn Charlesworth

Which brings me to you, Prince Boris. And I'm sorry, but here's the thing ... I think you're one of the nicest Russian aristocrats I've ever met and not been forced into an arranged marriage with,' [said the Doctor] — James Goss

Thanks to arranged marriages: There are countless women who have never been their husband's girlfriend. — Mokokoma Mokhonoana

Nafsha is so concerned with my virginity. I am beginning to think she would wed me herself. Alas, the only tool she might use to make me a woman is her tongue -- and it is far too sharp for me to allow it beneath my skirts. — Libbie Hawker

Gretta sits herself down at the table. Robert has arranged everything she needs: a plate, a knife, a bowl with a spoon, a pat of butter, a jar of jam. It is in such small acts of kindness that people know they are loved. — Maggie O'Farrell

What happened tonight won't change a thing."
"You're mistaken, Lila. Everything started changing the moment we met. — Stephanie Witter

I once asked her if she was happy. "That depends on what I am able to get done today," she said, laughing. She told me that the completion of her daily tasks was the only thing she felt she had control over. They were a form of meditation, of salve. Kept busy, she had no time to ruminate and no time for opinions, certainly not feminist ones. I pressed her: "I mean, are you happy with your life, Rajima?" "I don't know," she said uncomfortably, as if she'd never really considered such a question. "When there is little you can do, you do what you can." Happiness for my grandmother seemed to be a verb rather than a noun. She had so little control over her own life. Yet she took control, out of thin air for herself, when she could. — Padma Lakshmi

Mark my words, Lila. You'll be mine in all ways you can imagine. — Stephanie Witter

The usual marriage in traditional cultures was arranged for by the families. It wasn't a person-to-person decision at all ... In the Middle Ages, that was the kind of marriage that was sanctified by the Church. And so the troubadour idea of real person-to-person Amor was very dangerous ... It is in direct contradiction to the way of the Church. The word AMOR spelt backwards is ROMA, the Roman Catholic Church, which was justifying marriages that were simply political and social in their character. And so came this movement validating individual choice, what I call following your bliss. — Joseph Campbell

There is a big misconception about arranged marriage. Yes, it can mean that you meet someone and then have to marry them, but this was my mother saying, 'I'm going to introduce you to so-and-so - If you don't like them, fair enough.' — Archie Panjabi

Everett Walsh!" Chloe exclaimed. I fell off the bed laughing.
Liz folded her arms and tried to scowl at us, but I could tell she was having a hard time keeping a straight face. "What's wrong with Everett Walsh?" she sputtered."I didn't know when she wrote this in seventh grade that Hayden would hook up with him later.I saw him first."
"He's so straitlaced," Chloe said. "Not exactly the ideal hero of a romance."
"Watch out for his mama," I advised Liz.
"I was answering the question you asked," Liz told Chloe self-righteously. "If your family threatened you with an arranged marriage in the 1800s,you'd want someone on your side who was very mature and organized,who could approach the situation logically and help you out of it.In the 1800s, Everett Walsh would have been a barrister.He'd be perfect for the job."
"I'd rather have the evil viscount," I said. — Jennifer Echols

Nina could defend arranged marriages in her sleep, she had been asked about them so often. To her horror, she had even begun to sound like her mother. — Manju Kapur

Arranged Marriages don't always have to be risky. Get to know your future in-laws. She's bound to be like one of them. — Siddharth Katragadda

It's time to undo Rahim. — Nadia Hashimi

I was neglected by my family because I had disappointed them - I'd run away from being forced into an arranged marriage, which was a big blow to them. — Nelson Mandela

That single moment's intensity hasn't been matched in my life before or since. A woman I didn't know had chosen to accept me, in body and mind. Perhaps it is this instant that forms the basis of traditional marriage - a complete stranger is suddenly mine. And then, I am hers, too; I must offer her my all. I want her to wield her power over me as an acknowledgment of my love. The rush of those feelings all at once is too much to describe. Language communicates in terms of what is already known; it chokes up when asked to deal with the entirely unprecedented. — Vivek Shanbhag

Love and passion begat marriage in my world. Yet in my grandparents' world, marriage began with practicality. My grandfather told me proudly of that day he first met my grandmother. He interviewed her, posing little riddles to test her common sense. "Supposing you have to take the children to school and you're late and it's supposed to rain," he said. "Would you take a taxi or a bus?" My grandmother said, "Well, first I'd take an umbrella." Ice cream in Central Park, this was not. — Padma Lakshmi

Had my father loved my mother? He never spoke of her. I always imagined a traditional marriage between them--one built with the strong bones of respect, but stripped of the soft skin of love. — Kay Honeyman

Every author should have fallen in love at least once...and I am not talking about arranged marriage love — Shikha Kaul

There is silence and then the familiar smack of Beatrice Muriel's palm against her forehead. "A love marriage," she says. In her opinion, love marriages border on the indecent. They signify a breakdown of propriety, a giving in to the base instincts exhibited by the lower castes and foreigners. — Nayomi Munaweera

Rayna beamed as she hugged everyone good-bye and accepted their wishes for a long and happy relationship. Sage looked dazed.
"How did it go?" I asked.
"I think your mother just arranged peace in the Middle East while brokering a marriage deal for Rayna and me."
"I'm not surprised. How many kids are you having?"
"Four. But we can't start until she's twenty-six, three years after the wedding. Oh, and we're honeymooning at the minister's beach house in Tel Aviv."
"That's nice. I'll have to pop in for a visit."
Sage just shook his head, still shell-shocked.
"Piri forgive you yet?" Ben grinned.
"I don't think so. She put an inch of garlic on everything she served me."
"Don't take it personally. There's lots of garlic in Hungarian food," I assured him.
"Including my chocolate torte," Sage added.
"Okay, you can take that personally," I admitted. — Hilary Duff

I don't think I will go for an arranged marriage, but I am not against arranged marriages. — Ranbir Kapoor

There's a word for the first blush of youthful love free of desire. For longing to be with someone so much you would rather throw yourself to the tides than be without them. For the stale but steady relationship between faithful members of an arranged marriage. For how to feel about someone you thought was everything but ended up never feeling the same way about you. For the poison left over when you love someone and it ends so badly you cannot release the feelings. For the love between a mother and her children, a father and his children, a grandmother and her progeny, the love between two dear friends, the love that is the first building block of a lifelong affair. There's even a word for a love so devastating nothing before or after is ever seen the same. — Kiersten White

The media's weird obsession with billing immigrant terrorists as apple-pie Americans leads to comical results, such as the panelists on MSNBC's The Cycle puzzling over how Aafia Siddiqui, a "U.S.-trained scientist" could have become radicalized.56 Here's a tip for MSNBC: When you can't pronounce the terrorist's name, the rest of America isn't sitting in slack-jawed amazement. Siddiqui wasn't an American by any definition. She wasn't even an anchor baby. Rather, Siddiqui was born and raised in Pakistan and came to the United States as an adult via our seditious universities. After an arranged marriage over the phone with another Pakistani, who - luckily for America! - joined her here, she divorced and married the nephew of 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. Who could have seen Siddiqui's radicalism coming? — Ann Coulter

Fine. Sit around being inconsiderate asses ... and you wonder why none of you are married. (Zarina)
(Sway cleared his throat meaningfully.)
Oh, shush. You don't count. You had an arranged marriage. These losers can't get a girl for more than three and half minutes it takes them to embarrass themselves with their feeble gropings that always disappoint. (Zarina) — Sherrilyn Kenyon

Bhutto acknowledged the difficulties faced by women who were breaking with tradition and taking leading roles in public life. She deftly managed to refer both to the challenges I had encountered during my White House tenure and to her own situation. "Women who take on tough issues and stake out new territory are often on the receiving end of ignorance," she concluded. In a private meeting with the Prime Minister, we talked about her upcoming visit to Washington in April, and I spent time with her husband and their children. Because I had heard that their marriage was arranged, I found their interaction particularly interesting. — Hillary Rodham Clinton

Marriage, as practised by high society, is arranged indecency. — Nicolas Chamfort

Okay, okay. I can do this, I can do this just breathe. Mentally I prepared myself but it didn't help with the feeling of jumping off a cliff deep in my belly. — A.J. Young

In Ugandan society a girl who had reached puberty was eligible for a family-arranged marriage. The groom would bring wealth to the bride's family in the form of cattle, goats, or land. My experience at the hands of Joseph Kony's murderers and rapists had made a mockery of this custom. I hated the idea, and my father understood. — Nick Hahn

If nature had arranged that husbands and wives should have children alternatively, there would never be more than three in a family. — Laurence Housman

I do not care about power and wealth, father. I want to marry for love."

"You want to marry for love?" The elder Valentino scoffed. "Que mierda. Marrying for love is like adding extra picante to your meal. It may seem like a good idea at the time, but your stomach will curse you for it with ulcers in the end. — Felix Alexander

You get to decide how you're going to look and what you're going to be when you grow up and when people learned that my parents actually had an arranged marriage people thought that was the most horrific thing on earth. I mean how could anybody allow their marriage of all things to be prescribed by somebody else? — Sheena Iyengar

Her voice was erudite, interesting; the voice of someone who straddled two cultures with a surety and style that I wished my boyfriend could find. She was smart, funny, and, above all, completely capable of controlling her life and what happened to it. — Ruth Ahmed

Then he just blurted it out, with no preparation. 'The truth of it is that whether your mother arranged our marriage, or whether it was all an illusion, I must be horribly obtuse, because I can't talk myself out of being in love with you. — Eloisa James

Mr Hawkins said nothing; the Hawkins' domestic affairs were arranged upon the principle that Fanny supplied the talk and he the silence. — Susanna Clarke

But I am all for love, and I am against marriage, particularly the arranged kind, because the arranged marriage gives you satisfaction. And love? - love can never satisfy you. It gives you more and more thirst for a better and better love, it makes you more and more long for it, it gives you tremendous discontentment. And that discontent is the beginning of the search for God. When love fails many times, you start looking for a new kind of lover, a new kind of love, a new quality of love. That love affair is prayer, meditation, sannyas. — Rajneesh

What you discover on your own is always more exciting than what someone else discovers for you - it's like the marriage between romantic love and an arranged marriage. — Terrence Rafferty

This is surely the most significant of the elements that Tolkien brought to fantasy ... his arranged marriage between the Elder Edda and "The Wind in the Willows"
big Icelandic romance and small-scale, cozy English children's book. The story told by "The Lord of the Rings" is essentially what would happen if Mole and Ratty got drafted into the Nibelungenlied. — Adam Gopnik

In the summer of 1705, an unusually extravagant rumor horrified the citizenry. The Tsar, it was said, had forbidden Russian men to marry for seven years so that Russian women might be married to foreigners being imported by the shipload. To preserve their young women, Astrachaners arranged a mass marriage before the foreigners could arrive, and on a single day, July 30, 1705, a hundred women were married. — Robert K. Massie

Ask any woman in an arranged marriage. Love is the least stressful way out. — Fay Weldon

I would separate marriages into rational and irrational and I would included both love and arranged marriages as irrational marriage.
Rational marriage for me is when you can really understand by mind not by heart. — M.F. Moonzajer

I always thought that what Rajima did with those cast-off peels was a metaphor for how she dealt with her arranged marriage. She transformed those peels, with palm sugar for sweetness and tamarind for tang, into something precious. — Padma Lakshmi

A film is like a mad arranged marriage, with all these people who don't necessarily want to be with each other forced into this intimate, exhausting process. — Jason Flemyng

I thought about my [Punjabi] family. The only nakshatram we think about is the division of petrol pumps when we have to see the girl. — Chetan Bhagat

I couldn't help but think of Al's pre-ordained betrothal to Billo and of how hard the match-makers had worked to find the girl beautiful enough to match this extraordinary man - this extraordinary man of mine. — Ruth Ahmed

My grandmother was energetic and fearless - a talented poet and songwriter. She was also interested in chemistry and history and medicine, taking care of the people in her hacienda in Mexico, delivering babies. She could have become anything, but this was the 1930s, and she was forced into an arranged marriage. — Salma Hayek

Then a far more grotesque and insulting marriage was arranged between the twenty-year-old John Woodville and Katherine Neville, Warwick's aunt and the dowager duchess of Norfolk. Katherine was not only a four-time widow but also about sixty-five years old. — Dan Jones

At least if it is an arranged marriage, you can fault your parents, otherwise you will have only yourself to blame. And, believe me, it is always harder to bear something if you cannot blame somebody else for it. -Mr. Ali- — Farahad Zama

I dislike arranged marriages. There are some mistakes for which one should not be able to blame one's poor parents. — Salman Rushdie

Mohandas's marriage, which was arranged when he was thirteen, lasted for the next sixty-two years. Despite his enduring reputation for living a life of simplicity and self-denial, he did not come to this easily and struggled in his youth with uncontrolled appetites, both sexual and gastronomic. In violation of his family's religious code, he experimented with meat eating, hoping it would make him large and strong like the carnivorous English. — Mark Kurlansky

It was against all scientific reason for two people who hardly knew each other, with no ties at all between them, with different characters, different upbringings, and even different genders, to suddenly find themselves committed to living together, to sleeping in the same bed, to sharing two destinies that perhaps were fated to go in opposite directions. — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Sometimes a kiss was just a kiss.
Sometimes a kiss announced changes.
That time the kiss was my downfall. — Stephanie Witter

It took me a good thirty minutes to find Cal. That was actually a good thing, because it gave me plenty of time to come up with something to say to him that wasn't just a string of four-letter words.
There are a lot of freaky things witches and warlocks do, obviously, but the arranged marriage thing was one of the grossest. When a witch is thirteen, her parents hook her up with an available warlock, based on things like compatible powers and family alliances. The entire thing is so eighteenth century.
As I stomped across school grounds, all I could see was Cal sitting with my dad in some manly room with leather chairs and dead animals on the wall, chomping on cigars as Dad formally signed me away to him.They probably even high-fived.
Okay,so it's not like either of them are exactly the cigar-and-high-fives type, but still. — Rachel Hawkins

In fact the marriage has been arranged by heaven and Hercule Poirot. All I have to do is to compound a felony. — Agatha Christie

I was to be a bride, but whose? Councilor Branwick had assured me that the Council of Citizens would let me know the moment they decided. — Lea Carter