Our favorite love and marriage quotes from Why I'm Still Married

From The Rule of Four:

 P.1  "A son is the promise that time makes to a man.  The guarantee every father receives that whatever he holds dear will someday be considered foolish and that the person he loves best in the world will misunderstand him."

 P.48  "Never invest yourself in something else so deeply, that its failure could cost you your happiness."

 P.332  "God is the one whose center is everywhere and circumference is nowhere."

 P.315  "I think beginnings must have their own endings hidden inside them."

 P.150  "I finally figured out that what matters most is just giving over to what you love."

From The Mermaid Chair:

 P.115  "The Italians say...There's no worse thief than a bad book."

 P.219  "Everything means so much more here because there is so much less."

 P.64  "To truly hate is an art one learns with time."

 P.36  "Much like the arrival of Spanish trains, in those stolen years you never knew when the end of childhood was due."

 P.98  "Army, marriage, the church and banking: the four horsemen of the apocalypse."

 P.41  "Even a man with the strength of Ulysses must fasten himself to his mast when facing the artful woman!"

 P.15  "Theology tells us that spirits live beyond the body, but Poe believes it."

 P.145  "Newspapers are almost always quite mistaken about everything."

From A Little Love Story

P.102  "You couldn't always be sure where bad luck ended and good luck began.  You had to just endure certain things, and let time pass, and try to keep the gates open at the edges of your mind."

 

"For a long time it had seemed to me that life was about to begin - real life.  But there was always some obstacle in the way, something to be got through first, some unfinished business, time to be served, a debt to be paid.  Then life would begin.  At last it dawned on me that these obstacles were my life."

From Jane Eyre

From A Father's Affair

From Sam's Letters to Jennifer

From Beyond the Sky and the Earth:

From The Shadow of the Wind:

 P.407  "One loves truly only once in a lifetime, even if one isn't aware of it."

From The Poe Shadow:

 P.248  "It is not a question of what a man writes.  Especially a man who writes to earn his dollar, as Poe was beginning to do then.  It is a question of what a man does that says who he is." 

 P.220  "The most dangerous temptation in life is to forget to tend to your own business-you must learn to respect yourself enough to preserve your own interests.  If pursuing the causes of others-even in charity-prevents your own happiness, you will be left with nothing." 

 P.202  "I am afraid you witnessed facts...and may even possess them, but you fail to possess the truth."

From The Sparrow

 

P.204  "I've got the heartburn...."  "When their father had the heartburn, it was time to lay low."

From The Collected Stories of Katherine Anne Porter

P.180  "One should always have Latin, or at least a good classical poetry quotation to depend upon in great or desperate moments."

P. 11 "New life changes everything - even, and especially, the relationship between father and son."

P. 3 "The only thing more difficult than living without a future is living without a past."

P. 14  "For me, the watches of that long night passed in ghastly wakefulness; ear, eye, and mind were alike strained by dread:  such dread as children only can feel."

From A Little Love Story

P. 116  "The biggest popular lie of our day is that everything is in our dreams."

From Wide Sargasso Sea

P. 130  "You can pretend for a long time, but one day it all falls away and you are alone."

P. 103  "I felt like a kid who, after craving chocolate for months, was forced to eat it every day for breakfast, lunch, and dinner."

P. 68  "Funny.  If it was just one of us, this would be considered flaky.  Two and it's brotherly love."

P. 246  "Travel is the only investment with guaranteed returns. Count on it."

P. 3  "For the first time, I could see the relationship was over.  Like a balloon slipping through a child's hand.  Up, up, then it's gone.  Nothing to do but watch it vanish.  Still, I loved that balloon."

P. 29  "...you're--a precious gem in the stone quarry of life."

P. 67  "If all the world hated you, and believed you wicked, while your own conscience approved you, and absolved you from guilt, you would not be without friends."

P. 67  "If others don't love me, I would rather die than live --I cannot bear to be solitary and hated."

P. 252 "'Thank you, Mr. Rochester, for your great kindness.  I am strangely glad to get back again to you; and wherever you are is my home --my only home.'"

P. 235  "It is a happy thing that time quells the longings of vengeance, and hushes the promptings of rage and aversion: I had left this woman in bitterness and hate, and I came back to her now with no other emotion than a sort of Ruth for her great sufferings, and a strong yearning to forget and forgive all injuries --to be reconciled and clasp hands in amity."

P. 178  "He made me love him without looking at me."

P. 306  "My hopes were all dead --struck with a subtle doom, such as, in one night, fell on all the first-born in the land of Egypt."

P. 265  "It seemed no attire had ever so well become me; because none had I ever worn in so blissful a mood."

P. 466  "'Mr. Rochester, if ever I did a good deed in my life--if ever I thought a good thought--if ever I prayed a sincere and blameless prayer--if ever I wished a righteous wish,--I am rewarded now.  To be your wife is, for me, to be as happy as I can be on earth.'"

P. 439  "Where there is energy to command well enough, obedience never fails."

P. 354  "Prejudices, it is well known, are most difficult to eradicate from the heart whose soil has never been loosened or fertilized by education: they grow there, firm as weeds among stones."

P. 337  "We know that God is everywhere; but certainly we feel His presence most when His works are on the grandest scale spread before us: and it is in the unclouded night-sky, where His worlds wheel their silent course, that we read clearest His infinitude, His omnipotence, His omnipresence."

P. 308  "Friends always forget those whom fortune forsakes."

P. 81  "That's when I found out there was a very fine line from a human being to an animal."

P. 323  "The show zipped along, one of those rare nearly perfect performances that made you so high it was hard to scrape yourself off the ceiling."

P. 48  "'Lads don't ever get married', he counseled.  'My wife was thirty pounds lighter and a hundred times nicer before we tied the knot.'"

From Gentleman And Players

P. 397  "...to be a teacher is principally to hide rage when it is truly felt, and to feign it when it is not..."

P. 387  "Hindsight is a deceitful tool, turning angels into villains, tigers into clowns.  Over the years, past certainties melt like ripe cheese; no memory is safe."

P. 343  "It’s funny how our colleagues, those not-quite-friends who populate our lives more closely than our closest relatives, remain so hidden to us in the essential.  When we think of them, we see them not as people with families and private lives, but as we see them every day; dressed for work; businesslike (or not); efficient (or not); all of us satellites in the same lumbering moon."

P. 305  "There is something ultimately magical in the sharing of secrets."

 P. 266  "People, I find, are for the most part very unobservant, especially of the things that are going on right beneath their noses.."

 P. 266  "I've discovered that as long you don't behave like a murderer, no one will assumer you are a murderer, whatever evidence exists to the contrary."

  P. 223  "Most adults assume that the feelings of adolescence don't count, somehow, and that those searing passions of rage and hate and embarrassment and horror and hopeless, abject love are something you grow out of, something hormonal, a practice run for the Real Thing.  It wasn't.  At thirteen, everything counts."

 P. 192  "A good teacher knows that there is fake anger and real anger – the fake is fair game, part of the good teacher’s armory of bluff; but the real must be hidden at all costs, lest the boys – those master manipulators – understand that they have scored a point."

 P. 90 "… for although listening to boys is bad enough, to listen to their parents is fatal…"

 P. 85  "I have never actually been burgled.  I don’t suppose I have anything really worth stealing, unless you count books, which are generally held to be worthless by the criminal fraternity."

P. 45  "Already, you see, secrets fascinated me.  A bottle of sherry at the back of a stock cupboard, a packet of letters in a tin box behind a panel, some magazines in a locked filing cabinet, a list of names in an old accounts book.  For me, no secret was mundane; no tidbit too small to escape my interest.  I knew who who cheating on his wife; who suffered from nerves; who was ambitious; who read romantic novels; who used the photocopier illicitly.  If knowledge is power, I owned the place."

   P. 40  "...escape from Alcatraz looks positively childish in comparison with escape from teaching."

P. 28  "...as I grew older I became more and more conscious of my inadequacy in his eyes, and of his silent - but increasingly bitter - disappointment."

P. 23  (Referring to email)  "Thus, anyone in any office may contact anyone else in any other office without all that unfortunate business of standing up, opening the door, walking down the corridor, and actually talking to somebody (such a perverse notion, with all the nasty human contact that implies)."

P.201  "The Newfoundlanders had provided a caring haven for hundreds of people at a moment when they were scared and far from home.  They were made to feel safe and secure when the world around them seemed anything but."

P.196  "Looking around the school, they could see a large number of young people from the town working as volunteers alongside their parents.  This was the very definition of community..."

P.140  "'When a Newfie meets a Newfie,' Lenny explained to Maria, 'they have lots to talk about.'"

P. 71 "Wiping away the tears, he was filled with another emotion.  Pride.  At that moment he had never been more proud to be an American."

P. 304  "...another path might have been easier for him to travel but it couldn't possibly have offered a more satisfying conclusion."

P. 288  "The human language, as precise as it is with its thousands of words, can still be so wonderfully vague."

P. 277  "'There is no dishonor in losing the race,' Don said.  'There is only dishonor in not racing because you are afraid to lose.'"

P. 246  "Many of us have convinced ourselves that compromise is necessary to achieve our goals, that all of our goals are not attainable so we should eliminate the extraneous, prioritize our desires, and accept less than the moon."

P. 135  "The true hero is flawed.  The true test of a champion is not whether he can triumph, but whether he can overcome obstacles - preferably of his own making - in order to triumph.  A hero without a flaw is of no interest to an audience or to the universe, which, after all, is based on conflict and opposition, the irresistible force meeting the unmovable object."

P. 101  "Here's why I will be a good person.  Because I listen.  I cannot speak, so I listen very well.  I never interrupt, I never deflect the course of the conversation with a comment of my own.  People, if you pay attention to them, change the direction of one another's conversations constantly.  It's like having a passenger in your car who suddenly grabs the steering wheel and turns you down a side street."

P. 103  "...waiting was as much a part of their makeup as breathing the thin air at ten thousand feet.  They waited half of each year, in rooms choked with smoke from yak dung fires, for the weather to become hospitable enough for them to return outdoors.  A Balti hunter would stalk a single ibex for days,  maneuvering hour by hour to get close enough to risk a shot with the single expensive bullet he could afford to spend.  A Balti groom might wait years for his marriage, until the twelve-year-old girl his parents had selected for him grew old enough to leave her family.  The people of the Braldu had been promised schools by the distant Pakistani government for decades, and they were waiting still.  Patience was their greatest skill."

P. 59  "For me, a good story is all about setting up expectations and delivering on them in an exciting and surprising way."

P. 512  "Now and then there are readings that make the hairs on the neck, the non-existent pelt, stand on end and tremble, when every word burns and shines hard and clear and infinite and exact, like stones of fire, like points of stars in the dark..."

P. 7  "They placed their lives on hold for a group of strangers and asked for nothing in return."

From My Life in France

From The Red House Mystery

From The Book Thief

From Three Cups of Tea

From The Art of Racing in the Rain

From Stealing Buddha's Dinner

From Possession

From The Day the World Came to Town

P. 3 "I remember bare feet on old wood floors; shivering after a bath."

P. 10 "I came of age in the 1980's, before diversity and multicultural awareness trickled into western Michigan.  Before ethnic was cool.  Before Thai restaurants became staples in every town."

P. 35  "In our new household, ice cream had clear purposes:  to appease, to distract, to mark happiness."

P. 120  "Isn't is a mother's job to teach lessons on good manners?  How am I supposed to know how to be a decent girl unless my mother shows me?"

P. 125  "To me, life lived in commercials was real life.  Commercials were instructions; they were news.  They showed me what perfection could be:  in the right woman's hands, the layers of a cake would always be exactly the same size.  In the right woman's kitchen, a cartoon rabbit would visit the children and show them how to slurp down a tall glass of Nestle Quik with a straw.  A shaken cruet would spill a stream of Good Seasons over hills of lettuce leaves.  Commercials were a firm definition of motherhood, which almost all of my friends' mothers had no trouble fulfilling.  They swept floors and scrubbed bathtubs.  They cooked casseroles and washed dishes.  They had smooth, sensible, pageboy hairstyles and serene smiles.  They set the dinner tables every night and sang Cinderella songs and taught their children where to sit."

P. 457  "Vocabularies are crossing circles and hoops.  We are defined by the lines we choose to cross or be confined by."

P. 56  "It seemed that in Paris you could discuss classic literature or architecture or great music with everyone from the garbage collector to the mayor."

P. 297  "And the great lesson embedded in the book is that no one is born a great cook, one learns by doing.  This is my invariable advice to people:  Learn how to cook - try new recipes, learn from your mistakes, be fearless and above all have fun."

P. 266  "A house without a cat is like life without sunshine."

P. 108  "My sievelike mind didn't want to lock away dates and details; it wanted to float and meander.  If I  mixed all those facts and theses up with a little gelatine and egg white, I wondered, would they stick together better?"

P. 76  "In a way, I felt that I understood England intuitively, because it reminded me of visiting my relatives in Massachusetts, who were much more formal and conformist than I was."

P. 63  "I had never taken anything so seriously in my life - husband and cat excepted - and I could hardly bear to be away from the kitchen."

P. 12  "Travel, we agreed, was a litmus test:  If we could make the best of the chaos and serendipity that we'd inevitably meet in transit, then we'd surely be able to sail through the rest of life together just fine."

P. 257  I see their marriage as something like a double helix, two souls coiling round a common axis, joined yet never touching.  Our lives, Clem's and mine, made that shape too, for a time."

P. 211  "We've reached this place where we understand why it's all different from what we expected and that's just the way it's going to be."

P. 206  "Games are about forgetting all the political and personal crap that builds up between us.  They're good that way."

P. 142  "Other than this hint of vampire, he is Ken-doll handsome, down to his patent-leather hair."

P. 86  "Marriage, he says, is like an old carpet.  No matter how beautiful or priceless, no matter how familiar, it needs airing out, needs to rest from being trampled on."

P. 33  "Many a hope chest contains a suit of rattling bones."

P. 14  "Sometimes I worry that artistic grandiosity runs in our blood."

P.8  "Louisa thinks this makes my life easy - being the favorite.  She doesn't realize that once you're the disappointment, or once you've chosen a path seen as odd or unchoosable, your struggle is over, right?  On the other side of the fence - mine - every expectation you fulfill (or look like you might, on purpose or not) puts you one step higher and closer to that Grand Canyon rim from which you could one day rule the world - or plummet in very grand style."

P. 69   "People who haven't tried to explode their creativity might not understand the high that comes through stretching your imagination..."

P. 126   "If you do something too good, then, after a while, if you don't watch it, you start showing off."

P. 124   "The funny part is, I felt like marrying her the minute I saw her.  I'm crazy.  I didn't even like her much, and yet all of a sudden I felt like I was in love with her and wanted to marry her. I swear to God I'm crazy.  I admit it."

P. 227   "...I found restaurant work deeply satisfying.  I loved the hard physical labor.  I loved working with food, feeling peaches slip from their skins to reveal the fruit's hidden color, sniffing the air as onions carmelized.  But what I liked best was watching people eat the food I  had cooked, leaning in to listen to one another.  Good food, I saw, was about more than merely eating."

P. 116   "The scent of steak was like the sound of a trumpet cutting through the air, so high and clear that it triumphed over every other sense."

P. 82   "...we all become actors, to some extent, when we go out to eat.  Every restaurant is a theater, and the truly great ones allow us to indulge in the fantasy that we are rich and powerful.  When restaurants hold up their end of the bargain, they give us the illusion of being surrounded by servants intent on ensuring our happiness and offering extraordinary food."

P. 129   "Remember, he's four.  And a Christian."

P. 59    "'You can be anything you want to be', his parents told him, but they lied.  Truth was, an enormous breach existed between one's ambitions and one's reality."

P. 59    "He was also a bit stunned, during the months of divorcing, by the speed with which one could go from being part of a unit to being an individual human quite insistently separate."

P. 1    "When he was tiny, on a frenzied night like this, he would have snuggled with her in this very bed, bare toes pressing against her leg.  Now he extended over six feet, and though he hugged, he didn't snuggle."

P. 114   "The best hosts on this planet are the ones with the least."

P. 18   "...powerful people are accustomed to being sucked up to.  When you don't, it makes you more desirable.  The less you want them, the more they want you..."

P. 453   "Katie heard the story.  'It's come at last,' she thought, 'the time when you can no longer stand between your children and heartache.  When there wasn't enough food in the house you pretended you weren't hungry so they could have more.  In the cold of a winter's night you got up and put your blanket on their bed so they wouldn't be cold.  You'd kill anyone who tried to harm them - I tried my best to kill that man in the hallway.  Then one sunny day, they walk right into the grief that you'd give your life to spare them.'"

P. 388   "'The difference between rich and poor,' said Francie , 'is that the poor do everything with their own hands and the rich hire hands to do things.'"

P. 375   "Francie's conception of a mistress broke and scattered.  She had believed that men never married  their mistresses - that they cast them aside like worn-out gloves.  So Miss Armstrong was to become a wife instead of a worn-out glove.  Well!"

P. 374   "'The day will come, Francie,' she said, 'when you're forty-five and have a shape like a bag of horses' oats tied in the middle.  Then you'll look back and long for the old days when men wanted to pinch you.'"

P. 163   "There had to be the dark and muddy waters so that the sun could have something to background its flashing glory."

P. 147   "The cloth smelled of Johnny, warm and cigarish.  But it was a comforting thing to the child.  It smelled of protection and love."

P. 93   "Everyone struggles to live.  Look at that tree growing up there out of that grating.  It gets no sun, and water only when it rains.  Its growing out of sour earth.  And it's strong because its hard struggle to live is making it strong.  My children will be strong that way."

P. 18   "What I like best is a book that's at least funny once in a while."

P. 15   "I will, forever, be only six exits away from Ikea.  A shame I don't need any furniture, because I have plenty of time to decipher the directions."

P. 335   "Desire.  And what a queer thing that was, desire.  You could choose what you took and what you bought, and what you kept and what you gave away.  But not what you wanted."

P. 405  "A man's heart was a queer, stubborn thing, thought Sheamus McKenna.  It just went on loving a woman long after it should have stopped."

P. 400  "But there was an ocean to cross between knowing where you belonged and having the fire in your heart to go there.  And Emma Tremayne had lost her courage to set sail."

P. 7  "Ever notice how sisters, when they aren't the best of friends, make particularly vicious enemies?"

P. 370  "The Chicago Times-Herald took the broad view and said of Holmes:  'He is a prodigy of wickedness, a human demon, a being so unthinkable that no novelist would dare to invent such a character.  The story, too, tends to illustrate the end of the century'."

P. 315  "The exposition by day might wear a chaste gown of white staff, but at night it danced barefoot and guzzled champagne."

From 31 Hours

From How The World Makes Love

From Garlic and Sapphires:  The Secret Life of a Critic in Disguise

From A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

From The Catcher in the Rye

From The Late, Lamented Molly Marx

From The Passions of Emma

P. 82    "So when their conversation had dried up a few months ago, she'd felt her own loneliness like a lumpy, dust-filled couch she'd owned so long that she'd almost stopped seeing it, only now there it was, an eyesore in the middle of the room, too cumbersome to move."

P. 503  "They were frightened, no question, but they were not afraid of me.  It was a fear of messing up and having to face themselves again, and facing the world, and the likes of you."

P. 356  "The science of Papa's trade brought him an even greater level of respect.  It was well and good to share bread and music, but it was nice for Liesel to know that he was also more than capable in his occupation.  Competence was attractive."

P. 307  "I do not carry a sickle or scythe.  I only wear a hooded black robe when it's cold.  And I don't have those skull-like facial features you seem to enjoy pinning on me from a distance.  You want to know what I truly look like?  I'll help you out.  Find yourself a mirror while I continue."

P. 189  "Where's the fight? he wondered.  Where's the will to hold on?  Of course, at thirteen, he was a little excessive in his harshness.  He had not looked something like ME in the face.  Not yet.  WIth the rest of them, he stood around the bed and watched the man die - a safe merge, from life to death.  The light in the window was gray and orange, the color of summer's skin, and his uncle appeared relieved when his breathing disappeared completely.  'When death captures me,' the boy vowed, 'he will feel my fist on his face.'  Personally, I quite like that.  Such stupid gallantry.  Yes.  I like that a lot."

P. 126  "Like most humans in the grip of revelation, Hans Hubermann stood with a certain numbness.  The next words would either be shouted or would not make it past his teeth.  Also, they would most likely be a repetition of the last thing he'd said, only moments earlier."

P. 105  "One should  modulate the voice, my dear William, while breathing gently from the hips.  Thus one avoids those chest-notes which have betrayed many a secret.  In other words, pass the toast."

P. 97  "Bill was a great conspirator - worth a hundred Watsons."

P. 109  "I guess humans like to watch a little destruction.  Sand castles, houses of cards, that's where they begin.  Their great skill is their capacity to escalate."

P. 209  "'Once you educate the boys, they tend to leave the villages and go search for work in the cities,' Mortenson explains.  'But the girls stay home, become leaders in the community, and pass on what they've learned.  If you really want to change a culture, to empower women, improve basic hygiene and health care, and fight high rates of infant mortality, the answer is to educate girls'."

P. 150  "We Americans think you have to accomplish everything quickly.  We're the country of thirty-minute power lunches and two-minute football drills."   "Haji Ali taught me to share three cups of tea, to slow down and make building relationships as important as building projects.  He taught me that I had more to learn from the people I work with than I could ever hope to teach them."

P. 95  "Could it be that a partially employed American who lived out of a storage locker could seem like little more than a flashing neon dollar sign to people in the poorest region of one of the world's poorest countries?"

From I See You Everywhere

From The Devil in the White City