Quotes & Sayings About Unmarried Life

I demand for the unmarried mother, as a sacred channel of life, the same reverence and respect as for the married mother; for Maternity is a cosmic thing and once it has come to pass, our conversation must not be permitted to blaspheme it. — Ben Lindsey

Many a woman shudders ... at the terrible eclipse of those intellectual powers which in early life seemed prophetic of usefulness and happiness, hence the army of martyrs among our married and unmarried women who, not having cultivated a taste for science, art or literature, form a corps of nervous patients who make fortunes for agreeable physicians. — Sarah Moore Grimke

I know so well what becomes of unmarried women who aren't prepared to occupy a position. I've seen such pitiful cases in the South barely tolerated spinsters living upon the grudging patronage of sister's husband or brother's wife! stuck away in some little mouse-trap of a room encouraged by one in-law to visit another little birdlike women without any nest eating the crust of humility all their life! Is that the future that we've mapped out for ourselves? — Tennessee Williams

What a relief, Nadya thought; in that light he would not be able to tell that she had been crying.
"You mean if it weren't for the blackout you wouldn't have come?" Dasha took up Shchagov's tone, flirting unconsciously, as she did with every unmarried man she met.
"By no means, never. In bright light women's faces are deprived of all their charm; it reveals their spiteful expressions, their envious glances, their premature wrinkles, their heavy cosmetics."
Nadya shuddered at the words "envious glances" - it was as if he had overheard their argument.
Shchagov went on:" If I were a woman, I would make it a law that lights be kept low. Then everyone would soon have a husband."
Dasha looked disapprovingly at Shchagov. He always talked that way, and she didn't like it. All his phrases seemed memorized, insincere. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

I'm a licensed private investigator and have been for quite a while. I'm a lone wolf, unmarried, getting middle-aged, and not rich. I've been in jail more than once and I don't do divorce business. I like liquor and women and chess and a few other things. The cops don't like me too well, but I know a couple I get along with. I'm a native son, born in Santa Rosa, both parents dead, no brothers or sisters, and when I get knocked off in a dark alley sometime, if it happens, as it could to anyone in my business, nobody will feel that the bottom has dropped out of his or her life. — Raymond Chandler

If I were anyone else ... your opera singer ... the woman across the hall ... would you have apologized?"
He looked confused. "No ... but you are neither of those women. You deserve better."
"Better," she repeated, frustrated. "That's just my point! You and the rest of society believe that it's better for me to be set upon a pedestal of primness and propriety - which might have been fine if a decade on that pedestal hadn't simply landed me on the shelf. Perhaps unmarried young women like our sisters should be there. But what of me?" Her voice dropped as she looked down at the cards in her hands. "I'm never going to get a chance to experience life from up there. All that is up there is dust and unwanted apologies. The same cage as hers" - she indicated the woman outside - "merely a different gilt. — Sarah MacLean

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

This is Maximilien de Robespierre, barrister-at-law: unmarried, personable, a young man with all his life before him. Today against his most deeply held convictions he has followed the course of the law and sentenced a criminal to death. And now he is going to pay for it. — Hilary Mantel

Yes, many women who had pursued careers and not families experienced loneliness. But the question of whether that loneliness would be ameliorated by marriage
any marriage
was one that didn't get attention, even when another executive explained to the paper that some choices about remaining unmarried were made expressly to escape the unhappiness of an earlier generation of married women: When you think of your mother as helpless, unable to choose her own life, you become determined never to be vulnerable. — Rebecca Traister

The best man. You know? He hands you the ring and has to marry the bride if you ran away and so on. The Dean's been reading up on it, haven't you, Dean?"
"Oh, yes," said the Dean, who'd spent all the previous day with "Lady Deirdre Waggon's Book of Etiquette". "She's got to marry someone once she's turned up. You can't have unmarried brides flapping around the place, being a danger to society."
"I completely forgot about a best man!" said Vimes. — Terry Pratchett

When a woman does not want to have a child, she usually has good reason. She may be unmarried or in a bad marriage. She may consider herself too poor to raise a child. She may think her life is too unstable or unhappy, or she may think that her drinking or drug use will damage the baby's health. She may believe that she is too young or hasn't yet received enough education. She may want a child badly but in a few years, not now. For any of a hundred reasons, she may feel that she cannot provide a home environment that is conducive to raising a healthy and productive child. — Steven D. Levitt

The unmarried woman seldom escapes a widowhood of the spirit. There is sure to be some one, parent, brother, sister, friend, more comfortable to her than the day, with whom her life is so entwined that the wrench of parting leaves a torn void never entirely healed or filled ... — Charlotte Mary Yonge

The virtues about marriage were mostly negative virtues. Being unmarried in a man's world was such a hassle that anything had to be better. Marriage was better. But not much. Damned clever, I thought, how men had made life so intolerable for single women that most would gladly embrace even bad marriages instead. — Erica Jong

[F]rom my years of understanding ... I happily chose this kind of life in which I yet live [i.e., unmarried], which I assure you for my own part hath hitherto best contented myself and I trust hath been most acceptable to God. From the which if either ambition of high estate offered to me in marriage by the pleasure and appointment of my prince ... or if the eschewing of the danger of my enemies or the avoiding of the peril of death ... could have drawn or dissuaded me from this kind of life, I had not now remained in this estate wherein you see me. But so constant have I always continued in this determination ... yet is it most true that at this day I stand free from any other meaning that either I have had in times past or have at this present. — Elizabeth I

The word "autistic" is accurate. But so are other words that we no longer use to describe people: spinster (unmarried woman), hobo (migrant worker), cripple (person with a physical handicap), and so on. The fact that a person is unmarried or has sustained a mobility-reducing injury or birth defect certainly figures into their life experiences, but it does not define their character - unless they or we let it. — Ellen Notbohm

By half-past one the last drop of pleasure had evaporated, leaving nothing but headaches. We perceived that we were not splendid inhabitants of a splendid world, but a crew of underpaid workmen grown squalidly and dismally drunk. We went on swallowing the wine, but it was only from habit, and the stuff seemed suddenly nauseating ...
Most of my Saturday nights went in this way. On the whole, the two hours when one was perfectly and wildly happy seemed worth the subsequent headache. For many men in the quarter, unmarried and with no future to think of, the weekly drinking-bout was the one thing that made life worth living. — George Orwell

Remember this in choosing a husband or wife, if you are unmarried. It is not enough that your eye is pleased, that your tastes are met, that your mind finds congeniality, that there is amiability and affection, that there is a comfortable home for life. There needs something more than this. There is a life yet to come. Think of your soul, your immortal soul. Will it be helped upwards or dragged downwards by the union you are planning? Will it be made more heavenly, or more earthly, drawn nearer to Christ, or to the world? Will its religion grow in vigour, or will it decay? I pray you, by all your hopes of glory, allow this to enter into your calculations. 'Think,' as old Baxter said, and 'think, and think again,' before you commit yourself. 'Be not unequally yoked' (2 Corinthians 6:14). Matrimony is nowhere named among the means of conversion. — J.C. Ryle

Are you unmarried? Do not bewail yourself, as if your life must be incomplete. Yours is not a higher state, as celibacy has falsely taught, but it is neither a failure nor a shame. Cease to measure yourself by human standards. Find rest in being just what your heavenly Father wills you to be. It may be that you have been kept free from the limited circle of a home, in order to pour your love on those who have no one else to love them. — F.B. Meyer

As the second decade of the twenty-first century has worn on, politicians of all stripes, aware of the political power of the unmarried woman yet seemingly incapable of understanding female life outside of a marital context, have come to rely on a metaphor in which American women, no longer bound to men, are binding themselves to government. — Rebecca Traister

There is something so INEVITABLE about seven-and-twenty; it is decidedly on the wrong side of the decade for a lady, particularly an unmarried one. — Stephanie Barron

I knew the legends of the birds. Seagulls were the souls of dead soldiers. Owls were the souls of women. Doves were the recently departed souls of unmarried girls.
Was there a bird for the souls of people like me? — Ruta Sepetys

Joel Kotkin, a professor of urban development, argued in the daily beast that the power of the single voter is destined to fade, since single people "Have no heirs," while their religious, conservative, counterparts will repopulate the nation with children who will replicate their parents politics, ensuring that "conservative, more familial-oriented values inevitably prevail." Kotkin's error, of course, is both in assuming that unmarried people do not reproduce
in fact, they are doing so in ever greater numbers
but also in failing to consider whence the gravitation away from married norms derived. A move toward independent life did not simply emerge from the clamshell: it was born of generations of dissatisfaction with the inequalities of religious, conservative, social practice. — Rebecca Traister

A lady, that is an enlightened, cultivated, liberal lady - the only kind to be in a time of increasing classlessness - could espouse any cause: wayward girls, social diseases, unmarried mothers, and/or birth control with impunity. But never by so much as the shadow of a look should she acknowledge her own experience with the Facts of Life. — Virgilia Peterson

My mind is pretty made up that life for Cathy Freeman will be as an unmarried woman from now on. — Cathy Freeman

Married or unmarried, young or old, poet or worker, you are still a dreamer, and will one time know, and feel, that your life is but a dream. — Donald G. Mitchell