Marriage Story Quotes

We've searched our database for all the quotes and captions related to Marriage Story. Here they are! All 100 of them:

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A short story is a love affair, a novel is a marriage. A short story is a photograph; a novel is a film.
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Lorrie Moore
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Someone told me the delightful story of the crusader who put a chastity belt on his wife and gave the key to his best friend for safekeeping, in case of his death. He had ridden only a few miles away when his friend, riding hard, caught up with him, saying 'You gave me the wrong key!
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AnaΓ―s Nin
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Rejection is an opportunity for your selection.
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Bernard Branson
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The world's most sensible person and the biggest idiot both stay within us. The worst part is, you can't even tell who is who.
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Chetan Bhagat (2 States: The Story of My Marriage)
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You know the reason The Beatles made it so big?...'I Wanna Hold Your Hand.' First single. Fucking brilliant. Perhaps the most fucking brilliant song ever written. Because they nailed it. That's what everyone wants. Not 24/7 hot wet sex. Not a marriage that lasts a hundred years. Not a Porsche...or a million-dollar crib. No. They wanna hold your hand. They have such a feeling that they can't hide. Every single successful song of the past fifty years can be traced back to 'I Wanna Hold Your Hand.' And every single successful love story has those unbearable and unbearably exciting moments of hand-holding.
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David Levithan (Nick & Norah's Infinite Playlist)
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Pretty girls behave best when you ignore them. Of course, they have to know you are ignoring them, for otherwise they may not even know you exist.
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Chetan Bhagat (2 States: The Story of My Marriage)
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Jealousy is a rather enjoyable emotion to watch.
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Chetan Bhagat (2 States: The Story of My Marriage)
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Love of music, of sunsets and sea; a liking for the same kind of people; political opinions that are not radically divergent; a similar stance as we look at the stars and think of the marvelous strangeness of the universe - these are what build a marriage. And it is never to be taken for granted.
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Madeleine L'Engle (Two-Part Invention: The Story of a Marriage (Crosswicks Journals, #4))
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Why should any guy want to be only friends with a girl? It’s like agreeing to be near a chocolate cake and never eat it. It’s like sitting in a racing car but not driving it.
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Chetan Bhagat (2 States: The Story of My Marriage)
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Someday, you may think of marrying. Pick someone who thinks you're the only person in the room.
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Gabrielle Zevin (The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry)
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All my life I thought that the story was over when the hero and heroine were safely engaged -- after all, what's good enough for Jane Austen ought to be good enough for anyone. But it's a lie. The story is about to begin, and every day will be a new piece of the plot.
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Mary Ann Shaffer (The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society)
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I feel good with my husband: I like his warmth and his bigness and his being-there and his making and his jokes and stories and what he reads and how he likes fishing and walks and pigs and foxes and little animals and is honest and not vain or fame-crazy and how he shows his gladness for what I cook him and joy for when I make him something, a poem or a cake, and how he is troubled when I am unhappy and wants to do anything so I can fight out my soul-battles and grow up with courage and a philosophical ease. I love his good smell and his body that fits with mine as if they were made in the same body-shop to do just that. What is only pieces, doled out here and there to this boy and that boy, that made me like pieces of them, is all jammed together in my husband. So I don't want to look around any more: I don't need to look around for anything.
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Sylvia Plath (The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath)
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How can such scary looking parents create something so cute?
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Chetan Bhagat (2 States: The Story of My Marriage)
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The word β€œfuture” and females is a dangerous combination.
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Chetan Bhagat (2 States: The Story of My Marriage)
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When a woman comes into your life, things organize themselves.
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Chetan Bhagat (2 States: The Story of My Marriage)
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I believe in love. I believe in hard times and love winning. I believe marriage is hard. I believe people make mistakes. I believe people can want two things at once. I believe people are selfish and generous at the same time. I believe very few people want to hurt others. I believe that you can be surprised by life. I believe in happy endings.
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Isabel Gillies (Happens Every Day: An All-Too-True Story)
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From biscuit to brides, if there is anything their children really want, parents have a problem.
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Chetan Bhagat (2 States: The Story of My Marriage)
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Sex isn't all that important, but it is when you love someone very much.
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Ava Gardner (Ava: My Story)
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We do learn and develop when we are exposed to those who are greater than we are. Perhaps this is the chief way we mature.
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Madeleine L'Engle (Two-Part Invention: The Story of a Marriage (Crosswicks Journals, #4))
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Death is a funny thing. Not funny haha, like a Woody Allen movie, but funny strange, like a Woody Allen marriage.
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Norm Macdonald (Based on a True Story)
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The pretty girl is always right.
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Chetan Bhagat (2 States: The Story of My Marriage)
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Rules, after all, are only made so you can work around them
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Chetan Bhagat (2 States: The Story of My Marriage)
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The way to love anything is to realize that it may be lost.
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Amanda Lamb (Love Lies: A True Story of Marriage and Murder in the Suburbs)
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Just once in my life--oh, when have I ever wanted anything just once in my life?
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Amy Hempel (The Dog of the Marriage: Stories)
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The world’s most sensible person and the biggest idiot both stay within you. The worst part is you can’t even tell who is who.
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Chetan Bhagat (2 States: The Story of My Marriage)
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Forgiving doesn't make the person who hurt you feel better, it makes you feel better.
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Chetan Bhagat (2 States: The Story of My Marriage)
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I think people expect too much from marriage today,' he said. 'They expect perfection. Every moment should be bliss. That's TV or movies. But that is not the human experience. . . . twenty good minutes here, forty good minutes there, it adds up to something beautiful. The trick is when things aren't so great, you don't junk the whole thing. It's okay to have an argument. It's okay that the other one nudges you a little, bothers you a little. It's part of being close to someone. But the joy you get from that same closeness--when you watch your children, when you wake up and smile at each other--that . . . is a blessing. People forget that.
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Mitch Albom (Have a Little Faith: a True Story)
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Love is the bee that carries the pollen from one heart to another.
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Slash Coleman (Bohemian Love Diaries: A Memoir)
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Sometimes love does not have the most honorable beginnings, and the endings, the endings will break you in half. It’s everything in between we live for.
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Ann Patchett (This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage)
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A love story can never be about full possession. The happy marriage, the requited love, the desire that never dims--these are lucky eventualites but they aren't love stories. Love stories depend on disappointment, on unequal births and feuding families, on matrimonial boredom and at least one cold heart. Love stories, nearly without exception, give love a bad name. We value love not because it's stronger than death but because it's weaker. Say what you want about love: death will finish it. You will not go on loving in the grave, not in any physical way that will at all resemble love as we know it on earth. The perishable nature of love is what gives love its importance in our lives. If it were endless, if it were on tap, love wouldn't hit us the way it does. And we certainly wouldn't write about it.
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Jeffrey Eugenides (My Mistress's Sparrow Is Dead: Great Love Stories from Chekhov to Munro)
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If only I had known that it takes a lot more than love to make a marriage work, then maybe our story would be different.
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Mia Asher (Arsen: A Broken Love Story)
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The proper basis for marriage is a mutual misunderstanding.
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Oscar Wilde (Lord Arthur Savile's Crime and Other Stories)
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Nothing soothes an upset Punjabi like dairy products.
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Chetan Bhagat (2 States: The Story of My Marriage)
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Yes, I am finally a match for Amy. The other morning I woke up next to her, and I studied the back of her skull. I tried to read her thoughts. For once I didn't feel like I was staring into the sun. I'm rising to my wife's level of madness. Because I can feel her changing me again: I was a callow boy, and then a man, good and bad. Now at last I'm the hero. I am the one to root for in the never-ending war story of our marriage. It's a story I can live with. Hell, at this point, I can't imagine my story without Amy. She is my forever antagonist. We are one long frightening climax.
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Gillian Flynn (Gone Girl)
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I always knew there was no one who is going to accept my flaws and understand my brokenness.And i knew it very well that nobody would hold my hand when the wind of darkness overcome my life so i just pushed them,i pushed them all away.
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Carl W. Bazil
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Abel wanted a traditional marriage with a traditional wife. For a long time I wondered why he ever married a woman like my mom in the first place, as she was the opposite of that in every way. If he wanted a woman to bow to him, there were plenty of girls back in Tzaneen being raised solely for that purpose. The way my mother always explained it, the traditional man wants a woman to be subservient, but he never falls in love with subservient women. He’s attracted to independent women. β€œHe’s like an exotic bird collector,” she said. β€œHe only wants a woman who is free because his dream is to put her in a cage.
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Trevor Noah (Born a Crime: Stories From a South African Childhood)
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Often a Christian man or woman falls prey to that cruel and vexatious spirit, wondering how to find marriage, who, when, where? It is on God that we should wait, as a waiter waits--not for but on the customer--alert, watchful, attentive, with no agenda of his own, ready to do whatever is wanted. 'My soul, wait thou only upon God; for my expectation is from him.' (Ps. 62:5 KJV) In Him alone lie our security, our confidence, our trust. A spirit of restlessness and resistance can never wait, but one who believes he is loved with an everlasting love, and knows that underneath are the everlasting arms, will find strength and peace.
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Elisabeth Elliot (Quest for Love: True Stories of Passion and Purity)
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She had perfect features, with her eye, nose, lips, and ears the right size and in right places. That is all it takes to make people beautiful, normal body parts – yet why does nature mess it up so many times?
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Chetan Bhagat (2 States: The Story of My Marriage)
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There can be something cruel about people who have had good fortune. They equate it with personal goodness.
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Ann Patchett (This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage)
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I hope you outlive me so I never have to know what life is like without you.
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C.J. English (Affairytale (Affairytale, #1))
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Perhaps love is a minor madness. And as with madness, it's unendurable alone. The one person who can relieve us is of course the sole person we cannot go to: the one we love. So instead we seek out allies, even among strangers and wives, fellow patients who, if they can't touch the edge of our particular sorrow, have felt something that cuts nearly as deep.
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Andrew Sean Greer (The Story of a Marriage)
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I didn't want to tell the story of what makes two people come together, although that's a theme of great power and universality. I wanted to find out what it takes for two people to stay together for fifty years -- or more. I wanted to tell not the story of courtship, but the story of marriage.
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Diana Gabaldon (The Outlandish Companion)
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Why does everyone think a guy who prefers love to people is missing something in his life?
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Slash Coleman (Bohemian Love Diaries: A Memoir)
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Ugh! How many stories about love, copulation, marriage and death already exist, not one of which tells the truth! How sick I am of well-constructed plots and brilliant writing!
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Sadegh Hedayat (The Blind Owl)
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I think the best vacation is the one that relieves me of my own life for a while and then makes me long for it again.
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Ann Patchett (This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage)
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This is what intimacy does to us over time. That's what a long marriage can do: It causes us to inherit and trade each other's stories. (p.237)
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Elizabeth Gilbert (Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage)
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Maybe, in the final analysis, they saw me as something I wasn't and I tried to turn them into something they could never be. I loved them all but maybe I never understood any of them. I don't think they understood me.
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Ava Gardner (Ava: My Story)
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For [erotically intelligent couples], love is a vessel that contains both security and adventure, and commitment offers one of the great luxuries of life: time. Marriage is not the end of romance, it is the beginning. They know that they have years in which to deepen their connection, to experiment, to regress, and even to fail. They see their relationship as something alive and ongoing, not a fait accompli. It’s a story that they are writing together, one with many chapters, and neither partner knows how it will end. There’s always a place they haven’t gone yet, always something about the other still to be discovered.
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Esther Perel (Mating in Captivity: Reconciling the Erotic and the Domestic)
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People seem able to love their dogs with an unabashed acceptance that they rarely demonstrate with family or friends. The dogs do not disappoint them, or if they do, the owners manage to forget about it quickly. I want to learn to love people like this, the way I love my dog, with pride and enthusiasm and a complete amnesia for faults. In short, to love others the way my dog loves me.
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Ann Patchett (This is the Story of a Happy Marriage)
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Certificates from top US universities adorned the walls like tiger head in a hunter’s home.
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Chetan Bhagat (2 States: The Story of My Marriage)
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A lover exists only in fragments, a dozen or so if the romance is new, a thousand if we're married to him, and out of those fragments our heart constructs an entire person. What we each create, since whatever is missing is filled by our imagination, is the person we wish him to be. The less we know him, of course, the more we love him. And that's why we always remember that first rapturous night when he was a stranger, and why this rapture returns only when he's dead.
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Andrew Sean Greer (The Story of a Marriage)
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Sometimes in your life you just meet someone or hear something that nudges you on the right path. And that becomes the best advice. It could just be a bit of commonsense said in a way that resonates with something in you. It's nothing new, but because it connects with you it holds meaning for you.
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Chetan Bhagat (2 States: The Story of My Marriage)
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They say being in love and loving someone are two different things, right? I mean, you love your best friend, but you love your husband, right? Falling in love with someone is easy. It's loving when the newness has worn off, when life gets tough, when things get in the way, when physical passion is gone, that true love remains. When love can conquer it all.
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Mia Asher (Arsen: A Broken Love Story)
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Listen she said, everything ends, every single relationship you will ever have in your lifetime is going to end.... I'll die, you'll die, you'll get tired of each other. You don't always know how it's going to happen, but it is always going to happen. So stop trying to make everything permanent, it doesn't work. I want you to go out there and find some nice man you have no intention of spending the rest of your life with. You can be very, very happy with people you aren't going to marry.
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Ann Patchett (This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage)
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If you want to write, practice writing. Practice it for hours a day, not to come up with a story you can publish, but because you long to learn how to write well, because there is something that you alone can say.
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Ann Patchett (This is the Story of a Happy Marriage)
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I had my own bed. I slept in it alone, except for those times when we neededβ€”not sexβ€”but sex was how we got there.
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Amy Hempel (The Collected Stories)
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The growth of love is not a straight line, but a series of hills and valleys.
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Madeleine L'Engle (Two-Part Invention: The Story of a Marriage (Crosswicks Journals, #4))
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And now such a warm commotion, such busy love.
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Alice Munro (Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage: Stories)
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Most wives fuck their husbands, just to ensure financial support. Marriage is just a form of legalized prostitution, when you really thought about it.
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K. Syrah (Sex and Stupidity: A collection of Short Stories)
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Is it possible that anxiety ends at the moment when we no longer have time for it?
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Ann Patchett (This is the Story of a Happy Marriage)
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If we are not willing to fail we will never accomplish anything. All creative acts involve the risk of failure.
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Madeleine L'Engle (Two-Part Invention: The Story of a Marriage (Crosswicks Journals, #4))
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When you have to face up to the fact that marriage to the man you love is really over, that's very tough, sheer agony. In that kind of harrowing situation, I always go away and cut myself off from the world. Also, I sober up immediately when there is genuine bad news in my life; I never face it with alcohol in my brain. I just rented a house in Palm Springs and sat there and just suffered for a couple of weeks. I suffered there until I was strong enough to face it.
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Ava Gardner (Ava: My Story)
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I wanted to know what it felt like to be loved by the man of my dreams.
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C.J. English (Affairytale (Affairytale, #1))
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Corporate types love to pretend their life is exciting. The whispers, fist-pumping and animated hand gestures are all designed to lift our job description from what it really is - that of an overpaid clerk
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Chetan Bhagat (2 States: The Story of My Marriage)
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Like the muscles knew from the beginning that it would end with this, this inevitable falling apart... It's sad, but a relief as well to know that two things so closely bound together can separate with so little violence, leaving smooth surfaces instead of bloody shreds.
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Julie Powell (Cleaving: A Story of Marriage, Meat, and Obsession)
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Some people majored in English to prepare for law school. Others became journalists. The smartest guy in the honors program, Adam Vogel, a child of academics, was planning on getting a Ph.D. and becoming an academic himself. That left a large contingent of people majoring in English by default. Because they weren't left-brained enough for science, because history was too try, philosophy too difficult, geology too petroleum-oriented, and math too mathematical - because they weren't musical, artistic, financially motivated, or really all that smart, these people were pursuing university degrees doing something no different from what they'd done in first grade: reading stories. English was what people who didn't know what to major in majored in.
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Jeffrey Eugenides (The Marriage Plot)
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A good marriage is, at least, one part conspiracy.
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Gabrielle Zevin (The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry)
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This is intimacy: the trading of stories in the dark.
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Elizabeth Gilbert (Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage)
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What I must learn is to love with all of me, giving all of me, and yet remain whole in myself. Any other kind of love is too demanding of the other; it takes, rather than gives. To love so completely that you lose yourself in another person is not good. You are giving a weight, not the sense of lightness and light that loving someone should give.
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Madeleine L'Engle (Two-Part Invention: The Story of a Marriage (Crosswicks Journals, #4))
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I imagine there are people out there who got a dog when what they wanted was a baby, but I wonder if there aren't other people who had a baby when all they really needed was a dog.
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Ann Patchett (This is the Story of a Happy Marriage)
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Soon after the completion of his college course, his whole nature was kindled into one intense and passionate effervescence of romantic passion. His hour came,β€”the hour that comes only once; his star rose in the horizon,β€”that star that rises so often in vain, to be remembered only as a thing of dreams; and it rose for him in vain. To drop the figure,β€”he saw and won the love of a high-minded and beautiful woman, in one of the northern states, and they were affianced. He returned south to make arrangements for their marriage, when, most unexpectedly, his letters were returned to him by mail, with a short note from her guardian, stating to him that ere this reached him the lady would be the wife of another. Stung to madness, he vainly hoped, as many another has done, to fling the whole thing from his heart by one desperate effort. Too proud to supplicate or seek explanation, he threw himself at once into a whirl of fashionable society, and in a fortnight from the time of the fatal letter was the accepted lover of the reigning belle of the season; and as soon as arrangements could be made, he became the husband of a fine figure, a pair of bright dark eyes, and a hundred thousand dollars; and, of course, everybody thought him a happy fellow. The married couple were enjoying their honeymoon, and entertaining a brilliant circle of friends in their splendid villa, near Lake Pontchartrain, when, one day, a letter was brought to him in that well-remembered writing. It was handed to him while he was in full tide of gay and successful conversation, in a whole room-full of company. He turned deadly pale when he saw the writing, but still preserved his composure, and finished the playful warfare of badinage which he was at the moment carrying on with a lady opposite; and, a short time after, was missed from the circle. In his room,alone, he opened and read the letter, now worse than idle and useless to be read. It was from her, giving a long account of a persecution to which she had been exposed by her guardian's family, to lead her to unite herself with their son: and she related how, for a long time, his letters had ceased to arrive; how she had written time and again, till she became weary and doubtful; how her health had failed under her anxieties, and how, at last, she had discovered the whole fraud which had been practised on them both. The letter ended with expressions of hope and thankfulness, and professions of undying affection, which were more bitter than death to the unhappy young man. He wrote to her immediately: I have received yours,β€”but too late. I believed all I heard. I was desperate. I am married, and all is over. Only forget,β€”it is all that remains for either of us." And thus ended the whole romance and ideal of life for Augustine St. Clare. But the real remained,β€”the real, like the flat, bare, oozy tide-mud, when the blue sparkling wave, with all its company of gliding boats and white-winged ships, its music of oars and chiming waters, has gone down, and there it lies, flat, slimy, bare,β€”exceedingly real. Of course, in a novel, people's hearts break, and they die, and that is the end of it; and in a story this is very convenient. But in real life we do not die when all that makes life bright dies to us.
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Harriet Beecher Stowe (Uncle Tom’s Cabin)
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People keep on getting married. Evidently hope is eternal in the human breast.
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Sherwood Anderson (Death in the Woods and Other Stories)
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Writing is a miserable, awful business. Stay with it. It is better than anything in the world
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Ann Patchett (This is the Story of a Happy Marriage)
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believe that this way of living, this focus on the present, the daily, the tangible, this intense concentration not on the news headlines but on the flowers growing in your own garden, the children growing in your own home, this way of living has the potential to open up the heavens, to yield a glittering handful of diamonds where a second ago there was coal. This way of living and noticing and building and crafting can crack through the movie sets and soundtracks that keep us waiting for our own life stories to begin, and set us free to observe the lives we have been creating all along without ever realizing it. I don’t want to wait anymore. I choose to believe that there is nothing more sacred or profound than this day. I choose to believe that there may be a thousand big moments embedded in this day, waiting to be discovered like tiny shards of gold. The big moments are the daily, tiny moments of courage and forgiveness and hope that we grab on to and extend to one another. That’s the drama of life, swirling all around us, and generally I don’t even see it, because I’m too busy waiting to become whatever it is I think I am about to become. The big moments are in every hour, every conversation, every meal, every meeting. The Heisman Trophy winner knows this. He knows that his big moment was not when they gave him the trophy. It was the thousand times he went to practice instead of going back to bed. It was the miles run on rainy days, the healthy meals when a burger sounded like heaven. That big moment represented and rested on a foundation of moments that had come before it. I believe that if we cultivate a true attention, a deep ability to see what has been there all along, we will find worlds within us and between us, dreams and stories and memories spilling over. The nuances and shades and secrets and intimations of love and friendship and marriage an parenting are action-packed and multicolored, if you know where to look. Today is your big moment. Moments, really. The life you’ve been waiting for is happening all around you. The scene unfolding right outside your window is worth more than the most beautiful painting, and the crackers and peanut butter that you’re having for lunch on the coffee table are as profound, in their own way, as the Last Supper. This is it. This is life in all its glory, swirling and unfolding around us, disguised as pedantic, pedestrian non-events. But pull of the mask and you will find your life, waiting to be made, chosen, woven, crafted. Your life, right now, today, is exploding with energy and power and detail and dimension, better than the best movie you have ever seen. You and your family and your friends and your house and your dinner table and your garage have all the makings of a life of epic proportions, a story for the ages. Because they all are. Every life is. You have stories worth telling, memories worth remembering, dreams worth working toward, a body worth feeding, a soul worth tending, and beyond that, the God of the universe dwells within you, the true culmination of super and natural. You are more than dust and bones. You are spirit and power and image of God. And you have been given Today.
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Shauna Niequist (Cold Tangerines: Celebrating the Extraordinary Nature of Everyday Life)
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I am part of everyone I ever dated on OK Cupid.
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Slash Coleman (Bohemian Love Diaries: A Memoir)
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If we don't pray according to the needs of the heart, we repress our deepest longings. Our prayers may not be rational, and we may be quite aware of that, but if we repress our needs, then those unsaid prayers will fester.
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Madeleine L'Engle (Two-Part Invention: The Story of a Marriage (Crosswicks Journals, #4))
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...I don't know what marriages are like on your plane. I know Fae marriages can be all about respect and treating your wife like a lady. That's crap, love. You're my wife. I'm going to do all sorts of filthy things to you because you belong to me. You're my little toy. I'm going to fuck you as often as I can and in as many ways as my filthy mind can come up with. That's a strong marriage.
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Sophie Oak (Beast (A Faery Story, #2))
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But grief still has to be worked through. It is like walking through water. Sometimes there are little waves lapping about my feet. Sometimes there is an enormous breaker that knocks me down. Sometimes there is a sudden and fierce squall. But I know that many waters cannot quench love, neither can the floods drown it.
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Madeleine L'Engle (Two-Part Invention: The Story of a Marriage (Crosswicks Journals, #4))
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The people at the center of these stories of power couples mostly choose to see their own motives as selfless. In Elizabeth Edwards’ autobiography Resilience, she wrote of her marriage to John, U.S. senator from North Carolina, β€˜We were lovers, life companions, crusaders, side by side, for a vision of what the country could be.’ When she found out he was cheating on her, the crusading together became β€˜the glue’ that kept them together. β€˜I grabbed hold of it. I needed to,’ Edwards wrote. β€˜Although I no longer knew what I could trust between the two of us, I knew I could trust in our work together.’ She wanted β€˜an intact family fighting for causes more important than any one of us.
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Anne Michaud (Why They Stay: Sex Scandals, Deals, and Hidden Agendas of Eight Political Wives)
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These stupid biases and discrimination are the reason our country is so screwed up. It's Tamil first, Indian later. Punjabi first, Indian later. It has to end. National anthem, national currency, national teams - still, we won't marry our children outside our state. How can this intolerance be good for our country?
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Chetan Bhagat (2 States: The Story of My Marriage)
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By the end of the four-year term, Americans hold a bifurcated view of Mrs. Trump. Many Republicans, especially women, revere her as elegant, graceful, beautiful and wronged by the press. A pastor in Missouri held up Melania as a wifely model to which other women should aspire β€” or risk losing their men. At the same time some southern preachers referred to then-Senator and presidential candidate Kamala Harris as Jezebel, the Bible’s most nefarious woman and archetype of female cunning. There could be no surer sign that the life stories of prominent women affect the lives of private women than when pastors hold them up as positive or negative role models.
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Anne Michaud (Why They Stay: Sex Scandals, Deals, and Hidden Agendas of Eight Political Wives)
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There are always those perfect times with the people we love, those moments of joy and equality that sustain us later on...These moments are the foundation upon which we build the house that will shelter us into our final years, so that when love calls out, "How far would you go for me?" you can look it in the eye and say truthfully, "Farther than you would ever have thought was possible.
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Ann Patchett (This is the Story of a Happy Marriage)
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If we accept that we have at least an iota of free will, we cannot throw it back the moment things go wrong. Like a human parent, God will help us when we ask for help, but in a way that will make us more mature, more real, not in a way that will diminish us.
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Madeleine L'Engle (Two-Part Invention: The Story of a Marriage (Crosswicks Journals, #4))
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When I reach out, you take my hand.Β  When I smile, you mirror the expression. When I triumph, you glory as if it were your own. When I fail, you point to the light at the end. When I need, you tenderly provide. When I cry, you kiss away my tears. When I suffer, Β you bleed. And you wonder why I love you?
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Richelle E. Goodrich (Smile Anyway: Quotes, Verse, and Grumblings for Every Day of the Year)
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My father had told me that no matter how comfortable we might feel, we must live like fish, unattached to any land. Wherever there was water, we would survive. Some fish could stay in the mud for months, even years, and when at last there was a high flooding tide, they would swim away, a dark flash, remembered only by their own kind. So perhaps the stories they told of our people were true: no net could hold us.
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Alice Hoffman (The Marriage of Opposites)
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Forgiveness. The ability to forgive oneself. Stop here for a few breaths and think about this because it is the key to making art, and very possibly the key to finding any semblance of happiness in life. Every time I have set out to translate the book (or story, or hopelessly long essay) that exists in such brilliant detail on the big screen of my limbic system onto a piece of paper (which, let’s face it, was once a towering tree crowned with leaves and a home to birds). I grieve for my own lack of talent and intelligence. Every. Single. Time. Were I smarter, more gifted, I could pin down a closer facsimile of the wonders I see. I believe, more than anything, that this grief of constantly having to face down our own inadequacies is what keeps people from being writers. Forgiveness, therefore, is key. I can’t write the book I want to write, but I can and will write the book I am capable of writing. Again and again throughout the course of my life I will forgive myself.
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Ann Patchett (This is the Story of a Happy Marriage)
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Dear reader, you have to understand the point of all these stories. What they add up to. Schererazade was trying to make the king human again. She made him love life by showing him all of it, the funny parts about poop, the dangerous parts with demons, even the boring parts about what makes marriages last. Little by little, he began to feel the joy and sadness of others. He became less immune, less numb, because of the stories.
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Daniel Nayeri (Everything Sad Is Untrue)
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It's the same thing with faith, by the way." We don't want to get stuck having to go to services all the time, or having to follow all the rules. We don't want to commit to God. We'll take Him when we need Him, or when things are going good. But real commitment? That requires staying powerβ€Ž-β€Ž-β€Ž-in faith and in marriage." And if you don't commit? I asked. "Your choice. But you miss what's on the other side." What's on the other side? "Ah." He smiled, "A happiness you cannot find alone.
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Mitch Albom (Have a Little Faith: a True Story)
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First single. Fucking brilliant. Perhaps the most fucking brilliant song ever written. Because they nailed it. That’s what everyone wants. Not 24-7 hot wet sex. Not a marriage that lasts a hundred years. Not a Porsche or a blow job or a million-dollar crib. No. They wanna hold your hand. They have such a feeling that they can’t hide. Every single successful love song of the past fifty years can be traced back to β€˜I Wanna Hold Your Hand.’ And every single successful love story has those unbearable and unbearably exciting moments of hand-holding. Trust me. I’ve thought a lot about this. About "I wanna hold your hand" by The Beatles
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David Levithan
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Real life is all beginnings. Days, weeks, children, journeys, marriages, inventions. Even a murder is the beginning of a criminal. Perhaps even a spree. Everything is prologue. Every story has a stutter. It just keeps starting and starting until you decide to shut the camera off. Half the time you don’t even realise that what you’re choosing for breakfast is the beginning of a story that won’t pan out till you’re sixty and staring at the pastry that made you a widower. No, love, in real life you can get all the way to death and never have finished one single story. Or never even get one so much as half-begun.
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Catherynne M. Valente
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What is the world? What is it for? It is an art. It is the best of all possible art, a finite picture of the infinite. Assess it like prose, like poetry, like architecture, sculpture, painting, dance, delta blues, opera, tragedy, comedy, romance, epic. Assess it like you would a Faberge egg, like a gunfight, like a musical, like a snowflake, like a death, a birth, a triumph, a love story, a tornado, a smile, a heartbreak, a sweater, a hunger pain, a desire, a fufillment, a desert, a waterfall, a song, a race, a frog, a play, a song, a marriage, a consummation, a thirst quenched. Assess it like that. And when you're done, find an ant and have him assess the cathedrals of Europe.
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N.D. Wilson
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He told me how he had first met her during the war and then lost her and won her back, and about their marriage and then about something tragic that had happened to them at St-Raphael about a year ago. This first version that he told me of Zelda . and a French naval aviator falling in love was truly a sad story and I believe it was a true story. Later he told me other versions of it as though trying them for use in a novel, but none was as sad as this first one and I always believed the first one, although any of them might have been true. They were better told each time; but they never hurt you the same way the first one did.
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Ernest Hemingway (A Moveable Feast)
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A fight like this was stunning, revealing not just how much he was on the lookout for enemies, but how she too was unable to abandon argument which escalated into rage. Neither of them would back off, they held bitterly to principles. Can't you tolerate people being different, why is this so important? If this isn't important, nothing is. The air seemed to grow thick with loathing. All over a matter that could never be resolved. They went to bed speechless, parted speechless the next morning, and during the day were overtaken by fear - hers that he would never come home, his that when he did she would not be there. Their luck held, however. They came together in the late afternoon pale with contrition, shaking with love, like people who had narrowly escaped an earthquake and had been walking around in naked desolation.
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Alice Munro (Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage: Stories)
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I think people expect too much from marriage today" he said. "They expect perfection. Every moment should be a bliss. ThatΒ΄s TV or movies. But that is not the human experience. Like Sarah says, twenty good minutes here, forty good minutes there, it adds up to something beautiful. The trick is when things arenΒ΄t so great, you donΒ΄t junk the whole thing. ItΒ΄s okay to have an argument. ItΒ΄s okay that the other one nudges you a little, bothers you a little. ItΒ΄s part of being close to someone. But the joy you get from the sam closeness - when you watch your children, whan you wake up and smile at each other - that, as our tradition teaches us, is a blessing. People forget that. Why do they forget it? Because the word "commitment" has lost its meaning. IΒ΄m old enough to remember when it used to be positive. A committed person was someone to be admired. He was loyal and steady. Now a commitment is something you avoid. You donΒ΄t want to tie yourself down
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Mitch Albom (Have a Little Faith: a True Story)
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received a giftβ€”it was the first decent piece of instruction about marriage I had ever been given in my twenty-five years of life. β€œDoes your husband make you a better person?” Edra asked. There I was in that sky-blue pool beneath a bright blue sky, my fingers breaking apart the light on the water, and I had no idea what she was talking about. β€œAre you smarter, kinder, more generous, more compassionate, a better writer?” she said, running down her list. β€œDoes he make you better?” β€œThat’s not the question,” I said. β€œIt’s so much more complicated than that.” β€œIt’s not more complicated than that,
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Ann Patchett (This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage)
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How do you make someone love you? For the very young, there can be nothing harder in the world. You may try as hard as you like: place yourself beside them, cook their favourite food, bring them wine or sing the love songs that you know will move them. They will not move them. Nothing will move them. You will waste days interpreting the simple banalities of a phone call; months staring at their soft lips as they talk; you will waste years watching a body sitting in a chair and willing every muscle to take you across the room and do a simple thing, say a simple word, make them love you and you will not do it; you will waste long nights wondering how they cannot feel this - the urge to embrace, the snow melt in the heart when you are near them - how they can sit in that chair, or speak with those lips, or make a call and mean nothing by it, hide nothing in their hearts. Or perhaps what they hide is not what you want to see. Because surely they love someone. It simply isn’t you.
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Andrew Sean Greer (The Story of a Marriage)
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German is a much more precise language than English. Americans throw the word love around for everything: I love my wife! I love all my friends! I love rock music! I love the rain! I love comic books! I love peanut butter! The word you use to describe your feelings for your wife should not be the same word you use to describe your feelings for peanut butter. In German, there are a dozen different words that describe varying degrees of liking something a lot. Germans almost never use the word love, unless they mean a deep romantic love. I have never told my parents I love them, because it would sound melodramatic, inappropriate, and almost incestuous. In German, you tell your mother that you hold her very dear, not that you are in love with her.
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Oliver Markus Malloy (Bad Choices Make Good Stories - The Heroin Scene in Fort Myers (How the Great American Opioid Epidemic of The 21st Century Began #2))
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When I was a child, an angel came to say, A true friend is coming my warrior to sweep you away, It won’t be easy the path because it leads through hell, But if you’re faithful, it will be the greatest story to tell, You will move God’s daughters to a place of hope, Your story will teach everyone there is nothing they can’t cope, You will suffer a lot, but not one tear will you waste, Because for all that you do for me, you will be graced, For I am bringing you someone that wants to travel your trail, Someone you already met when you passed through heaven’s veil, A warrior, a friend that whispers your heart’s song, Someone that will run with you and pull your spirit along, Don’t you see the timing was love's fated throw, Because I put you both there to help one another grow, I am the writer of all great stories your chapters were written by me, You suffered, you cried because I needed you to see, That your faith in my ending goes far beyond two, It was going to change more hearts than both of you knew, So hush my child and wait for my loving hand, The last chapter is not written and still in the sand, It is up to you to finish, before the tide washes it away, All that is in your heart, I’ve put there for you to say, This is not about winning, loss or pain, I made you the way you are because true love stories are insane, I wrote you in heaven as I sat on its sandy shore, You know with all of my heart I loved you both more, There is no better ending two people seeing each other's heart, Together your spirits will never drift apart, Because two kindred spirits is what I made you to be, The waves and beach crashing together because of-- ME.
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Shannon L. Alder
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Something that’s bothered me for a while now is the current profligacy in YA culture of Team Boy 1 vs Team Boy 2 fangirling. [...] Despite the fact that I have no objection to shipping, this particular species of team-choosing troubled me, though I had difficulty understanding why. Then I saw it applied to Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Games trilogy – Team Peeta vs Team Gale – and all of a sudden it hit me that anyone who thought romance and love-triangles were the main event in that series had utterly missed the point. Sure, those elements are present in the story, but they aren’t anywhere near being the bones of it, because The Hunger Games, more than anything else, is about war, survival, politics, propaganda and power. Seeing such a strong, raw narrative reduced to a single vapid argument – which boy is cuter? – made me physically angry. So, look. People read different books for different reasons. The thing I love about a story are not necessarily the things you love, and vice versa. But riddle me this: are the readers of these series really so excited, so thrilled by the prospect of choosing! between! two! different! boys! that they have to boil entire narratives down to a binary equation based on male physical perfection and, if we’re very lucky, chivalrous behaviour? While feminism most certainly champions the right of women to chose their own partners, it also supports them to choose things besides men, or to postpone the question of partnership in favour of other pursuits – knowledge, for instance. Adventure. Careers. Wild dancing. Fun. Friendship. Travel. Glorious mayhem. And while, as a woman now happily entering her fourth year of marriage, I’d be the last person on Earth to suggest that male companionship is inimical to any of those things, what’s starting to bother me is the comparative dearth of YA stories which aren’t, in some way, shape or form, focussed on Girls Getting Boyfriends, and particularly Hot Immortal Or Magical Boyfriends Whom They Will Love For All Eternity. Blog post: Love Team Freezer
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Foz Meadows
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But, if you've decided to go out on a limb and kill one, for goodness' sake, be prepared. We all read, with dismay, the sad story of a good woman wronged in south Mississippi who took that option and made a complete mess of the entire thing. See, first she shot him. Well, she saw right off the bat that that was a mistake because then she had this enormous dead body to deal with. He was every bit as much trouble to her dead as he ever had been alive, and was getting more so all the time. So then, she made another snap decision to cut him up in pieces and dispose of him a hunk at a time. More poor planning. First, she didn't have the proper carving utensils on hand and hacking him up proved to be just a major chore, plus it made just this colossal mess on her off-white shag living room carpet. It's getting to be like the Cat in the Hat now, only Thing Two ain't showing up to help with the clean-up. She finally gets him into portable-size portions, and wouldn't you know it? Cheap trash bags. Can anything else possible go wrong for this poor woman? So, the lesson here is obvious--for want of a small chain saw, a roll of Visqueen and some genuine Hefty bags, she is in Parchman Penitentiary today instead of New Orleans, where she'd planned to go with her new boyfriend. Preparation is everything.
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Jill Conner Browne (The Sweet Potato Queens' Book of Love: A Fallen Southern Belle's Look at Love, Life, Men, Marriage, and Being Prepared)