Quotes & Sayings About Marriage Later In Life

Ariadne made an impression on you, and that's great. But life is not literature. Sooner or later, the spell wears off, the romantic feelings disappear, and you're left watching somebody's body disintegrate. You start with a love story, you end up manacled to an hourglass, watching the sands run out. — Paul Murray

The novel had reached its apogee with the marriage plot and had never recovered from its disappearance. In the days when success in life had depended on marriage, and marriage had depended on money, novelists had had a subject to write about. The great epics sang of war, the novel of marriage. Sexual equality, good for women, had been bad for the novel. And divorce had undone it completely. What would it matter whom Emma married if she could file for separation later? How would Isabel Archer's marriage to Gilbert Osmond have been affected by the existence of a prenup? As far as Saunders was concerned, marriage didn't mean much anymore, and neither did the novel. Where could you find the marriage plot nowadays? You couldn't. You had to read historical fiction. You had to read non-Western novels involving traditional societies. Afghani novels, Indian novels. You had to go, literarily speaking, back in time. — Jeffrey Eugenides

Marriage is a long conversation, someone once said, and maybe so is a rock band's life. A few minutes later, both were done. — Kim Gordon

Oh just wait. It takes a lot of time, that's all ... You'll have come to a certain kind of appreciation that moves beyond all the definitions of love you've ever had. A certain richness happens only later in life. I guess its' a kind of mellowing. p 80
talking about marriage and husbands — Elizabeth Berg

soon he'll reach for her because she's beautiful, and she's his wife. If she cringes away from him because you've convinced her he isn't good enough for her, how will that make him feel? If she submits to him out of obligation, how will that make her feel?

What if she approaches him and later is ashamed of wanting her own husband because he isn't good enough for her? It'll be hard for a marriage to last under those conditions. This isn't what you want for Susan. Forgive him. Accept him. You'll be doing your daughter a favor. — Elaine Cantrell

To give up a marriage - someone unmarried might imagine it's like giving up a seat in a theater, or sacrificing a trick in bridge for the possibility of better, later. But it is harsher than anyone could realize: a hot invisible fire, burning pieces of hope and fantasy, and charred bits of the past. It had to go, however, if something were to be built in its place. So I stood there and gave Buzz advice, and all I could think of were the automatons we had seen at Playland, moving beautifully in the wind, and the children who were taken behind the scenes on a tour and shown, to their surprise, the vast tangle of wires and switches that would be so hard to undo, and even worse, once undone, to bring to life again. — Andrew Sean Greer

No matter how much I tried to justify the affair, the fact remained that I was a deceitful person. One moment I was making out with a man and an hour later I was in bed with another man. Who had I become? What had I lost in life that led me to do this? Did I not have a perfect life? Was I not happy? Of course, I was happy. I knew I was happy and content. Had I become greedy? I was in a maze and I could not find a way out. — Jagdish Joghee

We live in a society where we don't want to commit to another person for life. We do at the moment that we marry, but less and less people marry. We marry later, we marry less. On some level of the unconscious, we know there is less of a chance that a marriage will be life-long. — Marilyn Yalom

Tell him yes. Even if you are dying of fear, even if you are sorry later, because whatever you do, you will be sorry all the rest of your life if you say no. — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Those were the best days in the life of Tancredi and Angelica, lives later to be so variegated, so erring, against the inevitable background of sorrow. But that they did not know then; and they were pursuing a future which they deemed more concrete than it turned out to be, made of nothing but smoke and wind. When they were old and uselessly wise their thoughts would go back to those days with insistent regret; they had been days when desire was always present because it was always overcome, when many beds had been offered and refused, when the sensual urge, because restrained, had for one second been sublimated in renunciation, that is into real love. — Giuseppe Tomasi Di Lampedusa

This woman lawyer said the best men wanted to be pure for their wives, and even if they weren't pure, they wanted to be the ones to teach their wives about sex. Of course they would try to persuade a girl to have sex and say they would marry her later, but as
soon as she gave in, they would lose all respect for her and start saying that if she did that with them she would do that with other men and they would end up by making her life
miserable. — Sylvia Plath

It was, of course, a great failure in a woman's life - to never have achieved even a doomed and unsuccessful love. But she was not quite sure whether she had failed or not.
When she was young there had been moments, of course. But those moments had never amounted to much more than a little fever of admiration - a little flutter and agitation in a ballroom - so slight a feeling that the cautious Dido had never considered it a secure foundation for a lifetime of living together. And then, sooner or later, she had always made and odd remark, or laughed at the wrong moment, and the young men became alarmed or angry - and the flutter and the agitation all turned to irritation.
Dido could laugh and gossip about love as well as any woman but, deep down, she suspected that she had not the knack of falling into it. — Anna Dean

Marriage, at this point in my life? I'm not interested in it. Yet. Maybe later when I'm 35 or 40. — Amanda Seyfried

If you have ever belonged to such a community, however, you may have discovered that the trouble starts when darkness falls on your life, which can happen in any number of unsurprising ways: you lose your job, your marriage falls apart, your child acts out in some attention getting way, you pray hard for something that does not happen, you begin to doubt some of the things you have been taught about what the Bible says. The first time you speak of these things in a full solar church, you can usually get a hearing. Continue to speak of them and you may be reminded that God will not let you be tested beyond your strength. All that is required of you is to have faith. If you still do not get the message, sooner or later it will be made explicit for you: the darkness is your own fault, because you do not have enough faith. — Barbara Brown Taylor

I once held a belief that life made sense, that working toward a dream would birth substance. Nothing else mattered. I soon discovered that success is as long-lasting as any of life's novelties.
We've all been happy with new things, only to be disappointed later. Dolls and soldiers our parents toiled to give us found their way to pedestals, then to the back of closets.
I'd always dreamed of marrying a woman I loved and watching my children grow. I wonder if our lives should be filled with the pursuit of such dreams, those magical hopes interwoven into our story. Our stories are decorative shells for the crabs we really are, both protecting and exposing us to the manic outside. — Christopher Hawke

If I had a girl I should say to her, 'Marry for love if you can, it won't last, but it is a very interesting experience and makes a good beginning in life. Later on, when you marry for money, for heaven's sake let it be big money. There are no other possible reasons for marrying at all. — Nancy Mitford

In pre-colonial Africa, men who had sexual relationship with older men almost always married a woman later in life and had children. Exclusive homosexuality would not have been and is still not a viable option for Africans who value wealth and patronymic extension through marriage. — Chantal Zabus

I think of Jeremy telling me I had to be ruthless to be a writer. And I think how I did not go visit my brother and sister and my parents because I was always working on a story and there was never enough time. (But I didn't want to go either.) There never was enough time, and then later I knew if I stayed in my marriage I would not write another book, not the kind I wanted to, and there is that as well. But really, the ruthlessness, I think, comes in grabbing onto myself, in saying: This is me, and I will not go where I can't bear to go - to Amgash, Illinois - and I will not stay in a marriage when I don't want to, and I will grab myself and hurl onward through life, blind as a bat, but on I go! This is the ruthlessness, I think. — Elizabeth Strout