Nuptial Quotes

Mara hurries over and takes my hands. "Er, congratulations on your pending nuptials?" I whisper, "He'll be so angry when he learns I have engaged us without his knowledge.

Lia let out a low growl and moved her arrow to the base of his fat throat. "What do you think, Gabi? Would you like to see these nuptials through?" "Not this day," I said "How about on the morrow?" Marcello asked, smiling and lifting my hand to his lips. "If I am your groom?" "Hold that eHarmony thought," Lia whispered in English. "We gotta get out of here.

There must be a glowing light above such houses. The joy they contain must escape in light through the stones of the walls and shine dimly into the darkness. It is impossible that this sacred festival of destiny should not send a celestial radiation to the infinite. Love is the sublime crucible in which is consummated the fusion of man and woman; the one being, the triple being, the final being-- the human trinity springs from it. This birth of two souls into one space must be an emotion for space. The lover is priest; the apprehensive maiden submits. Something of this joy goes to God. Where there really is marriage, that is to say, where there is love, the ideal is mingled with it. A nuptial bed makes a halo in the darkness. Were it given to the eye of the flesh to perceive the fearful and enchanting sights of the superior life, it is likely that we should see the forms of night, the winged stranger, the blue travelers of the invisible, bending, a throng of shadowy heads, over the luminous house, pleased, blessing, showing to one another the sweetly startled maiden bride and wearing the reflection of the human felicity on their divine countenances. If at that supreme hour, the wedded pair, bewildered with pleasure, and believing themselves alone, were to listen, they would hear in their room a rustling of confused wings. Perfect happiness implies the solidarity of the angels. That obscure little alcove has for its ceiling the whole heavens. When two mouths, made sacred by love, draw near to each other to create, it is impossible, that above that ineffable kiss there should not be a thrill in the immense mystery of the stars.

To be afraid is the condition of loving knowledge. Were I not dying of fear, I'd not know how to exist myself, I wouldn't get the notices of existence, I wouldn't record with delight the miniscule passage of a blue tit, its wing dipped in gold on the dusk. Were I not dying of sorrow I wouldn't with nostalgia be present at the creation of the world, the squirrel nuptials this morning I wouldn't care. Creatures are born to a backdrop of adieux.

The queen bee's life is totally overrated. All she does is lay eggs, lay eggs. She takes one nuptial flight. That one stuns her with enough fertile power to be trapped in the hive forever. The workers—the sexually undeveloped females—have the best life. They have fields of flowers to roll in. Imagine turning over and over inside a rose.

You've come to say good-bye,I take it?" He arched an eyebrow. "You'll miss me terribly,I know,but if you want to avoid all that,you can always come with me." "That's quite all right,thank you." "Really?" Loki wrinkled his nose. "You can't actually be excited about the upcoming nuptials." "What are you talking about?" I asked, tensing up. "I heard you're engaged to that stodgy Markis." Loki waved his hand vaguely and stood up. "Which I think is ridiculous. He's boring and bland and you don't love him at all." "How do you know about that?" I stood up straighter, preparing to defend myself. "The guards around here are horrible gossips, and I hear everything." He grinned and sauntered toward me. "And I have two eyes. I've seen that little melodrama play out between you and that other tracker. Fish? Flounder? What's his name?" "Finn," I said pointedly. "Yes,him." Loki rested his shoulder against the door. "Can I give you a piece of advice?" "By all means.I'd love to hear advice from a prisoner." "Excellent." Loki leaned forward, as close to me as he could before he'd be racked with pain from attempting to leave the room. "Don't marry someone you don't love.

Now, fair Hippolyta, our nuptial hour Draws on apace; four happy days bring in Another moon: but, O, methinks, how slow This old moon wanes! she lingers my desires, Like to a step-dame or a dowager Long withering out a young man revenue.

What does it mean to love somebody? It is always to seize that person in a mass, extract him or her from a group, however small, in which he or she participates, whether it be through the family only or through something else; then to find that person's own packs, the multiplicities he or she encloses within himself or herself which may be of an entirely different nature. To join them to mine, to make them penetrate mine, and for me to penetrate the other person's. Heavenly nuptials, multiplicities of multiplicities. Every love is an exercise in depersonalization on a body without organs yet to be formed, and it is at the highest point of this depersonalization that some- one can be named, receives his or her family name or first name, acquires the most intense discernibility in the instantaneous apprehension of the multiplicities belonging to him or her, and to which he or she belongs. A pack of freckles on a face, a pack of boys speaking through the voice of a woman, a clutch of girls in Charlus's voice, a horde of wolves in somebody's throat, a multiplicity of anuses in the anus, mouth, or eye one is intent upon. We each go through so many bodies in each other.

A few years later, Mendeleev, now famous, divorced his wife and wanted to remarry. Although the conservative local church said he had to wait seven years, he bribed a priest and got on with the nuptials. This technically made him a bigamist, but no one dared arrest him. When a local bureaucrat complained to the tsar about the double standard applied to the case- the priest was defrocked-the tsar primly replied, "I admit, Mendeleev has two wives, but I have only one Mendeleev.

You can be anywhere in the world ... under confetti, under bombs, in cellar or stratosphere, prison or embassy, on the equator in Trondhjem, you'll never go wrong, you'll get a direct response ... all they want of you is that famous Parisian vagina! la Parisienne! your man sees himself wedged between her thighs in epileptic bliss, full nuptial flight, inundating the barisienne with his enthusiasm ...

To the Nuptial Bowre I led her blushing like the Morn: all Heav’n, And happie Constellations on that houre.

Everything is made of words, and the words had done their job. I could even say they had done it well. They had risen in a confusing swarm and spun around in spirals, ever higher, colliding and separating, golden insects, messengers of friendship and knowledge, higher, higher, into that region of the sky where the day turns into night and reality into dreams, regal words on their nuptial flight, always higher, until their marriage is finally consummated at the summit of the world.

When I was born, the doctor slit my throat to see if I could talk.

It grieved him plaguily, he said, to see the nuptial couch defrauded of its dearest pledges: and to reflect upon so many agreeable females with rich jointures, a prey for the vilest bonzes, who hide their flambeau under a bushel in an uncongenial cloister or lose their womanly bloom in the embraces of some unaccountable muskin when they might multiply the inlets of happiness, sacrificing the inestimable jewel of their sex when a hundred pretty fellows were at hand to caress, this, he assured them, made his heart weep.

It's all a muddle in my head, graves and nuptials and the different varieties of motion.

Without mutual respect, there can be no true nuptial bond.

I hear congratulations are in order, Father, on your nuptials,” he says with a grim smile before turning his attention to Cress. “And you, Lady Crescentia, have my deepest condolences.

But when men have at hand a remedy more agreeable to their corrupt will, marriage is almost expulsed. And therefore there are with you seen infinite men that marry not, but chose rather a libertine and impure single life, than to be yoked in marriage; and many that do marry, marry late, when the prime and strength of their years is past. And when they do marry, what is marriage to them but a very bargain; wherein is sought alliance, or portion, or reputation, with some desire (almost indifferent) of issue; and not the faithful nuptial union of man and wife, that was first instituted.

I touched Loki's chest, running my fingers over the bumps of his scar. I didn't know why exactly, but I felt compelled to, as if the scar connected us somehow. "You just couldn't wait to get me naked, could you, Princess?" Loki asked tiredly. I started to pull my hand back, but he put his own hand over it, keeping it in pace. "No,I-I was checking for wounds," I stumbled. I wouldn't meet his gaze. "I'm sure." He moved his thumb, almost caressing my hand, until it hit my ring. "What's that?" He tried to sit up to see it, so I lifted my hand, showing him the emerald-encrusted oval on my finger. "Is that a wedding ring?" "No, engagement." I lowered my hand, resting it on the bed next to him. "I'm not married yet." "I'm not too late, then." He smiled and settled back in the bed. "Too late for what?" I asked. "To stop you, of course." Still smiling, he closed his eyes. "Is that why you're here?" I asked, failing to point out how near we were to my nuptials. "I told you why I'm here," Loki said. "What happened to you, Loki?" I asked, my voice growing thick when I thought about what he had to have gone through to get all those marks and bruises. "Are you crying?" Loki asked and opened his eyes. "No, I'm not crying." I wasn't, but my eyes were moist. "Don't cry." He tried to sit up, but he winced when he lifted his head, so I put my hand gently on his chest to keep him down. "You need to rest," I said. "I will be fine." He put his hand over mine again, and I let him. "Eventually." "Can you tell me what happened?" I asked. "Why do you need amnesty?" "Remember when we were in the garden?" Loki asked. Of course I remembered. Loki had snuck in over the wall and asked me to run away with him. I had declined, but he'd stolen a kiss before he left, a rather nice kiss. My cheeks reddened slightly at the memory, and that make Loki smile wider. "I see you do." He grinned. "What does that have to do with anything?" I asked. "That doesn't," Loki said, referring to the kiss. "I meant when I told you that the King hates me. He really does, Wendy." His eyes went dark for a minute. "The Vittra King did this to you?" I asked, and my stomach tightened. "You mean Oren? My father?" "Don't worry about it now," he said, trying to calm the anger burning in my eyes. "I'll be fine." "Why?" I asked. "Why does the King hate you? Why did he do this to you?" "Wendy, please." He closed his eyes. "I'm exhausted. I barely made it here. Can we have this conversation when I'm feeling a bit better? Say, in a month or two?" "Loki," I said with a sigh, but he had a point. "Rest. But we will talk tomorrow. All right?" "As you wish, Princess," he conceded, and he was already drifting back to sleep again. I sat beside him for a few minutes longer, my hand still on his chest so I could feel his heartbeat pounding underneath. When I was certain he was asleep, I slid my hand out from under his, and I stood up.

Now the road was crossing orange groves in flower, and the nuptial scent of the blossoms absorbed the rest as a full moon does a landscape; the smell of sweating horses, the smell of leather from the carriage upholstery, the smell of Prince and the smell of Jesuit, were all cancelled out by that Islamic perfume evoking houris and fleshly joys beyond the grave.

As regards structure, comedy has come a long way since Shakespeare, who in his festive conclusions could pair off any old shit and any old fudge-brained slag (see Claudio and Hero in Much Ado) and get away with it. But the final kiss no longer symbolizes anything and well-oiled nuptials have ceased to be a plausible image of desire. That kiss is now the beginning of the comic action, not the end that promises another beginning from which the audience is prepared to exclude itself. All right? We have got into the habit of going further and further beyond the happy-ever-more promise: relationships in decay, aftermaths, but with everyone being told a thing or two about themselves, busy learning from their mistakes. So, in the following phase, with the obstructive elements out of the way (DeForest, Gloria) and the consummation in sight, the comic action would have been due to end, happily. But who is going to believe that any more?

A gentle joyousness-a mighty mildness of repose in swiftness, invested the gliding whale. Not the white bull Jupiter swimming away with ravished Europa clinging to his graceful horns; his lovely, leering eyes sideways intent upon the maid; with smooth bewitching fleetness, rippling straight for the nuptial bower in Crete; not Jove, not that great majesty Supreme! did surpass the glorified White Whale as he so divinely swam.

The second most frequently asked question is, “What can we learn of moral value from the ants?” Here again I will answer definitively. Nothing. Nothing at all can be learned from ants that our species should even consider imitating. For one thing, all working ants are female. Males are bred and appear in the nest only once a year, and then only briefly. They are unappealing, pitiful creatures with wings, huge eyes, small brain, and genitalia that make up a large portion of their rear body segment. They do no work while in the nest and have only one function in life: to inseminate the virgin queens during the nuptial season when all fly out to mate. They are built for their one superorganismic role only: robot flying sexual missiles. Upon mating or doing their best to mate (it is often a big fight for a male just to get to a virgin queen), they are not admitted back home, but instead are programmed to die within hours, usually as victims of predators. Now for the moral lesson: although like almost all well-educated Americans I am a devoted promoter of gender equality, I consider sex practiced the ant way a bit extreme.

I'd rather be stung to death by a bunch of piss ants. ~Synola Harper, You're Busting My Nuptials

Nuptial love maketh mankind; friendly love perfecteth it; but wanton love corrupteth, and embaseth it.

These men had good cause to pursue nuptials; if there's one pattern that psychological studies have established, it's that the institution of marriage has an overwhelmingly salutary effect on men's mental health. "Being married," the prominent government demographer Paul Glick once estimated, "is about twice as advantageous to men as to women in terms of continued survival.

To love thus is to love according to the soul; and there is no soul that does not respond to this love. For the soul of man is a guest that has gone hungry these centuries back, and never has it to be summoned twice to the nuptial feast.

You and I have tied the nuptial knot that will never be broken. We will have many children, we will enjoy a quiet old age and we will die on the same day, at the same hour, in each other’s arms. We will love each other all our life." The

Wary of being caught unawares, we planned our parenthood, committed to trial marriages with pre-nuptials, and pre-arranged our parents’ funerals—convinced we could pre-feel the feelings that we have heard attend new life, true love, and death.

Strange to say, at that epoch, people still imagined that a wedding was a private and social festival, that a patriarchal banquet does not spoil a domestic solemnity, that gayety, even in excess, provided it be honest, and decent, does happiness no harm, and that, in short, it is a good and a venerable thing that the fusion of these two destinies whence a family is destined to spring, should begin at home, and that the household should thenceforth have its nuptial chamber as its witness. And

After all our time living together, my identity is not self-contained: I am the way I am because she is the way she is. This “marriage of true minds” Shakespeare spoke of does not occur at the wedding nuptials but after sixty-five years of wedlock we may be getting there.

One may, in a case of exigency, introduce the reader in to a nuptial chamber, not into a virginal chamber. Verse would hardly venture it, prose must not. It is the interior of a flower that is not yet unfolded, it is whiteness in the dark, it is the private cell of a closed lily, which must not be gazed upon by man so long as the sun has not gazed upon it. Woman in the bud is sacred. That innocent bud which opens, that adorable half-nudity which is afraid of itself, that white foot which takes refuge in a slipper, that throat which veils itself before a mirror as though a mirror were an eye, that chemise which makes haste to rise up and conceal the shoulder for a creaking bit of furniture or a passing vehicle, those cords tied, those clasps fastened, those laces drawn, those tremors, those shivers of cold and modesty, that exquisite affright in every movement, that almost winged uneasiness where there is no cause for alarm, the successive phases of dressing, as charming as the clouds of dawn,—it is not fitting at all that all this should be narrated, and it is too much to have even called attention to it.

A date was soon set for the wedding. He and Marie were married on Saturday, August 31, 1940, at the Church of Our Lady of Refuge on East 196th Street in the Bronx. The nuptial mass was performed by the Reverend Jeremiah F. Nemecek, a Fordham football fan who idolized the Seven Blocks of Granite

One also, in our milieu, simply didn't meet enough Americans to form an opinion. And when one did—this was in the days of crew-cuts and short-legged pants—they, too, often really did sport crew-cuts and trousers that mysteriously ended several inches short of the instep. Why was that? It obviously wasn't poverty. A colleague of my father's had a daughter who got herself married and found that an American friend she had met on holiday had offered to pay the whole cost of the nuptial feast. I forget the name of this paladin, but he had a crew-cut and amputated trouser-bottoms and a cigar stub and he came from a place called Yonkers, which seemed to me a ridiculous name to give to a suburb. (I, who had survived Crapstone… ) Anyway, once again one received a Henry Jamesian impression of brash generosity without overmuch refinement. There was a boy at my boarding school called Warren Powers Laird Myers, the son of an officer stationed at one of the many U.S. Air Force bases in Cambridgeshire. Trousers at The Leys School were uniform and regulation, but he still managed to show a bit of shin and to buzz-cut his hair. 'I am not a Yankee,' he informed me (he was from Norfolk, Virginia). 'I am a CON-federate.' From what I was then gleaning of the news from Dixie, this was unpromising. In our ranks we also had Jamie Auchincloss, a sprig of the Kennedy-Bouvier family that was then occupying the White House. His trousers managed to avoid covering his ankles also, though the fact that he shared a parent with Jackie Kennedy meant that anything he did was accepted as fashionable by definition. The pants of a man I'll call Mr. 'Miller,' a visiting American master who skillfully introduced me to J.D. Salinger, were also falling short of their mark. Mr. Miller's great teacher-feature was that he saw sexual imagery absolutely everywhere and was slightly too fond of pointing it out [...]. Meanwhile, and as I mentioned much earlier, the dominant images projected from the United States were of the attack-dog-and-firehose kind, with swag-bellied cops lying about themselves and the political succession changed as much by bullets as by ballots.

Much as anticipated, three months after the nuptials, Polly was expecting the couple’s first child. On December 17, 1864, the cries of William Edward Walker Nichols filled the rooms of 17 Kirby Street.7 By the autumn of 1865, Mrs. Nichols was pregnant once more, and the need for larger accommodation grew as obvious as her maternal belly.

[Stice's] parents had met and fallen in love in a Country/Western bar in Partridge KS — just outside Liberal KS on the Oklahoma border — met and fallen in star-crossed love in a bar playing this popular Kansas C/W-bar-game where they put their bare forearms together and laid a lit cigarette in the little valley between the two forearms' flesh and kept it there till one of them finally jerked their arm away and reeled away holding their arm. Mr. and Mrs. Stice each discovered somebody else that wouldn't jerk away and reel away, Stice explained. Their forearms were still to this day covered with little white slugs of burn-scar. They'd toppled like pines for each other from the git-go, Stice explained. They'd been divorced and remarried four or five times, depending on how you defined certain jurisprudential precepts. When they were on good domestic terms they stayed in their bedroom for days of squeaking springs with the door locked except for brief sallies out for Beefeater gin and Chinese take-out in little white cardboard pails with wire handles, with the Stice children wandering ghostlike through the clapboard house in sagging diapers or woolen underwear subsisting on potato chips out of econobags bigger than most of them were, the Stice kids. The kids did somewhat physically better during periods of nuptial strife, when a stony-faced Mr. Stice slammed the kitchen door and went off daily to sell crop insurance while Mrs. Stice —whom both Mr. Stice and The Darkness called 'The Bride' —while The Bride spent all day and evening cooking intricate multicourse meals she'd feed bits of to The Brood (Stice refers to both himself and his six siblings as 'The Brood') and then keep warm in quietly rattling-lidded pots and then hurl at the kitchen walls when Mr. Stice came home smelling of gin and of cigarette-brands and toilet-eau not The Bride's own. Ortho Stice loves his folks to distraction, but not blindly, and every holiday home to Partridge KS he memorizes highlights of their connubial battles so he can regale the E.T.A. upperclass-men with them, mostly at meals, after the initial forkwork and gasping have died down and people have returned to sufficient levels of blood-sugar and awareness of their surroundings to be regaled.

Luck­ily for Georgie, Lady Finch, an old fam­ily friend, had writ­ten her de­tail­ing the wild ru­mors cir­cu­lat­ing the gos­sipy ton re­gard­ing her im­pend­ing be­trothal to Lord Har­ris. Know­ing Uncle Phineas, Georgie had lit­tle doubt that he prob­a­bly would have in­formed her of her nup­tials with just enough time to dress for the cer­e­mony. Es­pe­cially con­sid­er­ing that her in­tended bride­groom had al­ready buried nine wives. Georgie had no in­ten­tion of being the tenth. Why, even that hor­rid old sot Henry the Eighth had had the good sense to go and die after six.

The custom of eating the lover after consummination of the nuptials, of making a meal of the exhausted pigmy, who is henceforth good for nothing, is not so difficult to understand, since insects can hardly be accused of sentimentality; but to devour him during the act surpasses anything the most morbid mind could imagine. I have seen the thing with my own eyes, and I have not yet recovered from my surprise.

EPOPS But, after all, what sort of city would please you best? EUELPIDES A place where the following would be the most important business transacted.—Some friend would come knocking at the door quite early in the morning saying, "By Olympian Zeus, be at my house early, as soon as you have bathed, and bring your children too. I am giving a nuptial feast, so don't fail, or else don't cross my threshold when I am in distress.

Que vous vous trouviez n'importe où... sous les confettis, sous les bombes, dans les caves ou en stratosphère, en prison ou en ambassade, sous l'Equateur ou à Trondhjem, vous êtes certain de pas vous tromper, d'éveiller le direct intérêt, tout ce qu'on vous demande : "Le fameux vagin de Parisienne!" Votre homme se voit déjà dans les cuisses, en pleine épilepsie de bonheur, en plein vol nuptial, inondant la barisienne de son enthousiasme...

....It was to complete his marriage with Maimuna, the daughter of Al Hareth, the Helalite. He had become betrothed to her on his arrival at Mecca, but had post-poned the nuptials until after he had concluded the rites of pilgrimage. This was doubtless another marriage of policy, for Maimuna was fifty-one years of age, and a widow, but the connection gained him two powerful proselytes. One was Khaled Ibn al Waled, a nephew of the widow, an intrepid warrior who had come near destroy- ing Mahomet at the battle of Ohod. He now became one of the most victorious champions of Islamism, and by his prowess obtained the appellation of " The Sword of God." The other proselyte was Khaled's friend, Amru Ibn al Aass ; the same who assailed Mahomet with poetry and satire at the commencement of his prophetic career ; who had been an ambassador from the Koreishites to the king of Abyssinia, to obtain the surrender of the fugitive Moslems, and who was henceforth destined with his sword to carry victoriously into foreign lands the faith he had once so strenuously opposed. Note.— Maimuna was the last spouse of the prophet, and, old as she was at her marriage, survived all his other wives. She died many years after him, in a pavilion at Serif, under the same tree in the shade of which her nuptial tent had been pitched, and was there interred. The pious historian, Al Jannabi, who styles himself "a poor servant of Allah, hoping for the pardon of his sins through the mercy of God," visited her tomb on returning from a pilgrimage to Mecca, in the year of the Hegira 963, a.d. 1555. "I saw there," said he, "a dome of black marble erected in memory of Maimuna, on the very spot on which the apostle of God had reposed with her. God knows the truth ! and also the reason of the black color of the stone. There is a place of ablution, and an oratory ; but the building has fallen to decay.

A Gy wears wings habitually when yet a virgin—she joins the Ana in their aerial sports—she adventures alone and afar into the wilder regions of the sunless world: in the boldness and height of her soarings, not less than in the grace of her movements, she excels the opposite sex. But, from the day of her marriage she wears wings no more, she suspends them with her own willing hand over the nuptial couch, never to be resumed unless the marriage tie be severed by divorce or death.

Only the middle distance and what may be called the remoter foreground are strictly human. When we look very near or very far, man either vanishes altogether or loses his primacy. The astronomer looks even further afield than the Sung painter and sees even less of human life. At the other end of the scale the physicist, the chemist, the physiologist pursue the close-up – the cellular close-up, the molecular, the atomic and subatomic. Of that which, at twenty feet, even at arm’s length, looked and sounded like a human being no trace remains. Something analogous happens to the myopic artist and the happy lover. In the nuptial embrace personality is melted down; the individual (it is the recurrent theme of Lawrence’s poems and novels) ceases to be himself and becomes a part of the vast impersonal universe. And so it is with the artist who chooses to use his eyes at the near point. In his work humanity loses its importance, even disappears completely. Instead of men and women playing their fantastic tricks before high heaven, we are asked to consider the lilies, to meditate on the unearthly beauty of ‘mere things,’ when isolated from their utilitarian context and rendered as they are, in and for themselves. Alternatively (or, at an earlier stage of artistic development, exclusively), the nonhuman world of the near-point is rendered in patterns. These patterns are abstracted for the most part from leaves and flowers – the rose, the lotus, the acanthus, palm, papyrus – and are elaborated, with recurrences and variations, into something transportingly reminisce

May these nuptials be blessed for us, may this marriage be blessed for us, May it be ever like milk and sugar, this marriage like wine and halvah. May this marriage be blessed with leaves and fruits like the date tree; May this marriage be laughing forever, today,tomorrow, like the houris of paradise. May this marriage be the sign of compassion and the approval of happiness here and hereafter; May this marriage be fair of fame, fair of face and fair of omen as the moon in the azure sky. I have fallen silent for words cannot describe how the spirit has mingled with this marriage

We cannot take leave of the aquatic plants without briefly mentioning the life of the most romantic of them all: the legendary Val­lisneria, an Hydrocharad whose nuptials form the most tragic episode in the love-history of the flowers. The Vallisneria is a rather insignificant herb, possess­ing none of the strange grace of the Water-lily or of certain submersed comas. But it seems as though nature had delighted in giving it a beautiful idea. The whole existence of the little plant is spent at the bottom of the water, in a sort of half-slumber, until the moment of the wedding-hour in which it aspires to a new life. Then the female flower slowly uncoils the long spiral of its peduncle, rises, emerges and floats and blossoms on the sur­face of the pond. From a neighbouring stem, the male flowers, which see it through the sunlit water, soar in their turn, full of hope, towards the one that rocks, that awaits them, that calls them to a magic world. But, when they have come half-way, they feel themselves suddenly held back: their stalk, the very source of their life, is too short; they will never reach the abode of light, the only spot in which the union of the stamens and the pistil can be achieved! .

Lela’s love affair with nuptials was born at the age of eleven, when she watched two epic weddings on TV. In July of 1981, Lady Diana Spencer and Prince Charles of Wales were wed in London. Back home in Wisconsin, Lela watched every minute of it with her mom, perched on the edge of their brown pleather sectional. Then, in November, fictional couple Luke and Laura tied the knot on every teenage girl’s favorite soap opera, General Hospital. Actress Genie Francis wore a bizarre head-hugging veil and a dress that looked like a marshmallow. Her groom, Anthony Geary, rocked his deceptively fluffy ‘80s hair. Lela couldn’t help but be transfixed. It all felt larger than life. And her little eleven year-old heart gave into it lock, stock and barrel.

She might come in to bride-bed: and he laughed, As one that wist not well of wise love's craft, And bade all bridal things be as she would. Yet of his gentleness he gat not good; For clothed and covered with the nuptial dark Soft like a bride came Brangwain to King Mark, And to the queen came Tristram; and the night Fled, and ere danger of detective light From the king sleeping Brangwain slid away, And where had lain her handmaid Iseult lay. And the king waking saw beside his head That face yet passion-coloured, amorous red From lips not his, and all that strange hair shed Across the tissued pillows, fold on fold, Innumerable, incomparable, all gold, To fire men's eyes with wonder, and with love Men's hearts; so shone its flowering crown above The brows enwound with that imperial wreath, And framed with fragrant radiance round the face beneath. And the king marvelled, seeing with sudden start Her very glory, and said out of his heart; "What have I done of good for God to bless That all this he should give me, tress on tress, All this great wealth and wondrous? Was it this That in mine arms I had all night to kiss, And mix with me this beauty? this that seems More fair than heaven doth in some tired saint's dreams, Being part of that same heaven? yea, more, for he, Though loved of God so, yet but seems to see, But to me sinful such great grace is given That in mine hands I hold this part of heaven, Not to mine eyes lent merely. Doth God make Such things so godlike for man's mortal sake? Have I not sinned, that in this fleshly life Have made of her a mere man's very wife?

The city does not consist of this, but of relationships between the measurements of its space and the events of its past: the height of a lamppost and the distance from the ground of a hanged usurper’s swaying feet; the line strung from the lamppost to the railing opposite and the festoons that decorate the course of the queen’s nuptial procession; the height of that railing and the leap of the adulterer who climbed over it at dawn; the tilt of a guttering and a cat’s progress along it as he slips into the same window; the firing range of a gunboat which has suddenly appeared beyond the cape and the bomb that destroys the guttering; the rips in the fish net and the three old men seated on the dock mending nets and telling each other for the hundredth time the story of the gunboat of the usurper, who some say was the queen’s illegitimate son, abandoned in his swaddling clothes there on the dock.

According to the man, who identified himself as Morton Thornton, the night got real long and by midnight, he was darn well wed to one of the lovelier inhabitants of the dish, a comely middle-aged amoeba of unknown parentage named Rita. When he was rescued on the morning of the following day, Morton plumb forgot about his single-celled nuptials and went back to his daytime job tasting the contents of open pop bottles for backwash and cigarette butts. Only sixteen years later, when a brilliant Sacajawea Junior High roving reporter—who shall remain nameless—discovered the product of this union lurking among us right here at Sac Junior High, was Morton’s long-held secret discovered. “This intrepid reporter was present three weeks into Dale Thornton’s third try at seventh grade, when the young Einstein bet this reporter and several other members of the class that he could keep a wad of chewing tobacco in his mouth from the beginning of fifth period Social Studies until the bell. The dumb jerk only lasted twenty minutes, after which he sprinted from the room, not to be seen for the rest of the day. When he returned on the following morning, he told Mr. Getz he had suddenly become ill and had to go home, but without a written excuse (he probably didn’t have a rock big enough for his dad to chisel it on) he was sent to the office. The principal, whose intellectual capacities lie only fractions of an IQ point above Dale’s, believed his lame story, and Dale was readmitted to class. Our dauntless reporter, however, smelled a larger story, recognizing that for a person to attempt this in the first place, even his genes would have to be dumber than dirt. With a zeal rivaled only by Alex Haley’s relentless search for Kunta Kinte, he dived into Dale’s seamy background, where he discovered the above story to be absolutely true and correct. Further developments will appear in this newspaper as they unfold.

here was Dorothy, always knotted to the point of strangulation, aspiring to be what she was not, because of that parvenu prince. Mrs Hunter saw him: the groove in the lower lip, above the cleft chin, beneath the pink-shaded restaurant lights. She had ordered tournedos Lulu Watier. After the first shock of mutual disapproval, she felt that she and Hubert were enjoying each other. Alfred said, ‘Out with us, the food is plainer. We don’t feel the need to titillate our palates by dolling it up with a lot of seasoning and fancy sauces.’ He might have worsened the situation if she hadn’t kicked him under the table. They had gone over for the wedding because the old princess insisted she could not travel out to ce pays si lointain et inconnu. It was the first occasion the mountain hadn’t come to Elizabeth Hunter: she couldn’t very well believe it; nor that she would overlook the fact that her little Dorothy was being received into the Roman Catholic Church. But you did: at the nuptial mass there was your plain little girl in the dress by Lanvin tissé expres à la main à Lyon, and none of it could disguise the fact that you were prostituting your daughter to a prince, however desirably suave and hung with decorations. For one instant, out of the chanting and the incense, Elizabeth Hunter experienced a kind of spiritual gooseflesh.

The expressive individual is now the sexually expressive individual. And education and socialization are to be marked not by the cultivation of traditional sexual interdicts and taboos but rather by the abolition of such and the enabling of pansexual expression even among children. One might regard this change as obnoxious, but it reflects the logic of expressive individualism in the sexualized world that is the progeny of the consummation of the Marx-Freud nuptials. . . . At the same time, the psychologizing of oppression by the New Left massively expanded the potential number of victims. One did not need to be in a concentration camp or a gulag or to be subject to segregation or even to have experience of serious poverty to claim such status. Now one could point to other forms of nonrecognition as constituting victimization - not having one's sexual preferences positively affirmed by wider society, for example, or not being allowed to marry a same-sex partner. And merely tolerating certain sexual proclivities and activities would not be enough, for tolerance is not the same as recognition. Indeed, it actually implies a degree of disapproval, or nonrecognition by society. Only full equality before the law and in the culture at large can provide that. When the political struggle became a psychological struggle, it also became a therapeutic struggle.

Many opponents of same-sex pseudogamy argue that the pretense that a man can marry another man will involve restrictions on the religious freedom of those who disagree. I don’t believe there’s much to dispute here. One side says that same sex-marriage will restrict religious liberty, and believes that that would be disgraceful and unjust; the other side says the same, and believes it is high time, and that the restrictions should have been laid down long ago. So when Fred Henry, the moderate liberal Catholic bishop of Edmonton, says that there is something intrinsically disordered about same-sex pseudogamous relations, he is dragged before a Canadian human rights tribunal, without anyone sensing the irony (one suspects that the leaders of George Orwell’s Oceania at least indulged in a little mordant irony when they named their center of torment the Ministry of Love). Or when the Knights of Columbus find out that a gay couple has signed a lease for their hall to celebrate their pseudo-nuptials, and the chief retracts the invitation and offers to help the couple find another acceptable hall, the Knights are dragged into court. The same with the widow who ekes out her living by baking wedding cakes. And the parents in Massachusetts who don’t want their children to be exposed to homosexual propaganda in the schools. And the Catholic adoption agency in Massachusetts that had to shut down rather than violate their morals, as the state demanded they do, placing children in pseudogamous households.

But the crown jewel was the columned Greek Revival mansion, which dated from the mid-1800s, along with the manicured boxwood gardens that would serve as the backdrop for the couple's ceremony. Of course, everything was not only very traditional but also a standard to what one might imagine an over-the-top Southern wedding to be. As I said, "Steel Magnolias on steroids." The ceremony would take place outdoors in the garden, but large custom peach-and-white scalloped umbrellas were placed throughout the rows of bamboo folding chairs to shade the guests. Magnolia blossoms and vintage lace adorned the ends of the aisles. White, trellis-covered bars flanked the entrance to the gardens where guests could select from a cucumber cooler or spiked sweet tea to keep cool during the thirty-minute nuptials. It was still considered spring, but like Dallas, Nashville could heat up early in the year, and we were glad to be prepared. By the time we arrived the tent was well on its way to completion, and rental deliveries were rolling in. The reception structure was located past the gardens near the enormous whitewashed former stable, and inside the ceiling was draped in countless yards of peach fabric with crystal chandeliers hanging above every dining table. Custom napkins with embroidered magnolias on them complemented the centerpieces' peach garden roses, lush greenery, and dried cotton stems. Cedric's carpentry department created floor-to-ceiling lattice walls covered in faux greenery and white wisteria blooms, a dreamy backdrop for the band.

His Sons, the fairest of her Daughters Eve. Under a tuft of shade that on a green Stood whispering soft, by a fresh Fountain side They sat them down, and after no more toil Of thir sweet Gardning labour then suffic’d To recommend coole Zephyr, and made ease More easie, wholsom thirst and appetite More grateful, to thir Supper Fruits they fell, Nectarine Fruits which the compliant boughes Yeilded them, side-long as they sat recline On the soft downie Bank damaskt with flours: The savourie pulp they chew, and in the rinde Still as they thirsted scoop the brimming stream; Nor gentle purpose, nor endearing smiles Wanted, nor youthful dalliance as beseems Fair couple, linkt in happie nuptial League, Alone as they. About them frisking playd All Beasts of th’ Earth, since wilde, and of all chase In Wood or Wilderness, Forrest or Den; Sporting the Lion rampd, and in his paw Dandl’d the Kid; Bears, Tygers, Ounces, Pards Gambold before them, th’ unwieldy Elephant To make them mirth us’d all his might, & wreathd His Lithe Proboscis; close the Serpent sly Insinuating, wove with Gordian twine His breaded train, and of his fatal guile Gave proof unheeded; others on the grass Coucht, and now fild with pasture gazing sat, Or Bedward ruminating: for the Sun Declin’d was hasting now with prone carreer To th’ Ocean Iles, and in th’ ascending Scale Of Heav’n the Starrs that usher Evening rose: When Satan still in gaze, as first he stood, Scarce thus at length faild speech recoverd sad. O Hell! what doe mine eyes with grief behold, Into our room of bliss thus high advanc’t Creatures of other mould, earth-born perhaps, Not

Like noiseless nautilus shells, their light prows sped through the sea; but only slowly they neared the foe. As they neared him, the ocean grew still more smooth; seemed drawing a carpet over its waves; seemed a noon-meadow, so serenely it spread. At length the breathless hunter came so nigh his seemingly unsuspecting prey, that his entire dazzling hump was distinctly visible, sliding along the sea as if an isolated thing, and continually set in a revolving ring of finest, fleecy, greenish foam. He saw the vast, involved wrinkles of the slightly projecting head beyond. Before it, far out on the soft Turkish-rugged waters, went the glistening white shadow from his broad, milky forehead, a musical rippling playfully accompanying the shade; and behind, the blue waters interchangeably flowed over into the moving valley of his steady wake; and on either hand bright bubbles arose and danced by his side. But these were broken again by the light toes of hundreds of gay fowl softly feathering the sea, alternate with their fitful flight; and like to some flag-staff rising from the painted hull of an argosy, the tall but shattered pole of a recent lance projected from the white whale's back; and at intervals one of the cloud of soft-toed fowls hovering, and to and fro skimming like a canopy over the fish, silently perched and rocked on this pole, the long tail feathers streaming like pennons. A gentle joyousness—a mighty mildness of repose in swiftness, invested the gliding whale. Not the white bull Jupiter swimming away with ravished Europa clinging to his graceful horns; his lovely, leering eyes sideways intent upon the maid; with smooth bewitching fleetness, rippling straight for the nuptial bower in Crete; not Jove, not that great majesty Supreme! did surpass the glorified White Whale as he so divinely swam.

HIPP. Ah me! I perceive indeed the power that hath destroyed me. DI. She thought her honor aggrieved, and hated thee for being chaste. HIPP. One Venus hath destroyed us three. DI. Thy father, and thee, and his wife the third. HIPP. I mourn therefore also my father's misery. DI. He was deceived by the devices of the Goddess. HIPP. Oh! unhappy thou, because of this calamity, my father! THES. I perish, my son, nor have I delight in life. HIPP. I lament thee rather than myself on account of thy error. THES. My son, would that I could die in thy stead! HIPP. Oh! the bitter gifts of thy father Neptune! THES. Would that the prayer had never come into my mouth. HIPP. Wherefore this wish? thou wouldst have slain me, so enraged wert thou then. THES. For I was deceived in my notions by the Gods. HIPP. Alas! would that the race of mortals could curse the Gods! DI. Let be; for not even when thou art under the darkness of the earth shall the rage arising from the bent of the Goddess Venus descend upon thy body unrevenged: by reason of thy piety and thy excellent mind. For with these inevitable weapons from mine own hand will I revenge me on another, [52] whoever to her be the dearest of mortals. But to thee, O unhappy one, in recompense for these evils, will I give the greatest honors in the land of Trœzene; for the unwedded virgins before their nuptials shall shear their locks to thee for many an age, owning the greatest sorrow tears can give; but ever among the virgins shall there be a remembrance of thee that shall awake the song, nor dying away without a name shall Phædra's love toward thee pass unrecorded:—But thou, O son of the aged Ægeus, take thy son in thine arms and clasp him to thee; for unwillingly thou didst destroy him, but that men should err, when the Gods dispose events, is but to be expected!—and thee, Hippolytus, I exhort not to remain at enmity with thy father; for thou perceivest the fate, whereby thou wert destroyed. And farewell! for it is not lawful for me to behold the dead, nor to pollute mine eye with the gasps of the dying; but I see that thou art now near this calamity.

Honeymoon, a term we are all familiar with, is a specific reference to mead. The term comes from an old English tradition that dates from the Middles Ages. Mead was drunk in great quantities at weddings, and after the ceremony nuptial couples were given a month's supply of mead--sufficient for one full cycle of the moon.

the term honeymoon comes from the old tradition of a bride and groom drinking honeyed mead for one month after the nuptials to ensure good fortune.

After all, when you come across the word prothalamium and find it means a preliminary nuptial song and a yaffle is a green woodpecker-well, I ask you! You cannot let matters rest there-or can you? Peradventure you will develop into lexicomaniacs.

The brother kings: I saw th’ unhappy queen, The hundred wives, and where old Priam stood, To stain his hallow’d altar with his brood. The fifty nuptial beds (such hopes had he, So large a promise, of a progeny),

As Eden was the Paradise of Creation, Mary is the Paradise of the Incarnation, and in her as a Garden were celebrated the first nuptials of God and man.

Hear me! in Nature are two hostile Gods, “Makers and Masters of existing things, “Equal in power:... nay hear me patiently!... “Equal ... for look around thee! the same Earth “Bears fruit and poison; where the Camel finds “His fragrant [145] food, the horned Viper there “Sucks in the juice of death; the Elements “Now serve the use of man, and now assert “Dominion o’er his weakness; dost thou hear “The sound of merriment and nuptial song? “From the next house proceeds the mourner’s cry “Lamenting o’er the dead. Sayest thou that Sin “Entered the world of Allah? that the Fiend “Permitted for a season, prowls for prey? “When to thy tent the venomous serpent creeps “Dost thou not crush the reptile? even so, “Besure, had Allah crushed his Enemy, “But that the power was wanting. From the first, “Eternal as themselves their warfare is, “To the end it must endure. Evil and Good.... “What are they Thalaba but words? in the strife “Of Angels, as of men, the weak are guilty; “Power must decide. The Spirits of the Dead “Quitting their mortal mansion, enter not, “As falsely ye are preached, their final seat “Of bliss, or bale; nor in the sepulchre “Sleep they the long long sleep: each joins the host “Of his great Leader, aiding in the war “Whose fate involves his own. “Woe to the vanquished then! “Woe to the sons of man who followed him! “They with their Leader, thro’ eternity, “Must howl in central fires. “Thou Thalaba hast chosen ill thy part, “If choice it may be called, where will was not, “Nor searching doubt, nor judgement wise to weigh. “Hard is the service of the Power beneath “Whose banners thou wert born; his discipline “Severe, yea cruel; and his wages, rich “Only in promise; who has seen the pay? “For us ... the pleasures of the world are ours, “Riches and rule, the kingdoms of the Earth. “We met in Babylon adventurers both, “Each zealous for the hostile Power he served: “We meet again; thou feelest what thou art, “Thou seest what I am, the Sultan here, “The Lord of Life and Death. “Abandon him who has abandoned thee, “And be as I am, great among mankind!

Women have long been subjugated to live a life of sacrificing their dreams. From time immemorial, women have been led to believe that their life is meant to serve others. That they should not have dreams of their own. That they should give up their careers for the sake of their families. You, the woman, are the captain of your ship and master of your soul. Let no one decide for you what is good or bad for you. Whether you should get married or not. At what age you should tie the nuptial knot. And most importantly whether you would become a career oriented woman or a home maker. The decision to all the above choices in life must be made by you and you must never let society make you change your mind!

Above the fire place hung an enlargement of the nuptials of Mr Fairfax, in which the gentleman himself looked cowed, his bride frightened, and the mother of the bride sternly triumphant.

May these nuptials be blessed for us, May it be ever like milk and sugar, may it taste always like wine and halvah.

The soul cannot progress except with the light which God has given it as a nuptial gift; love works the likeness of God into the soul.

Everything here leaves me intact, I surrender nothing of myself, and don no mask: learning patiently and arduously how to live is enough for me.

Ode to Bees Multitude of bees! in and out of the crimson, the blue, the yellow, of the softest softness in the world; you tumble headlong into a corolla to conduct your business, and emerge wearing a golden suit and quantities of yellow boots. The waist, perfect, the abdomen striped with dark bars, the tiny, ever-busy head, the wings, newly made of water; you enter every sweet-scented window, open silken doors, penetrate the bridal chamber of the most fragrant love, discover a drop of diamond dew, and from every house you visit you remove honey, mysterious, rich and heavy honey, thick aroma, liquid, guttering light, until you return to your communal palace and on its gothic parapets deposit the product of flower and flight, the seraphic and secret nuptial sun! Multitude of bees! Sacred elevation of unity, seething schoolhouse. Buzzing, noisy workers process the nectar, swiftly exchanging drops of ambrosia; it is summer siesta in the green solitudes of Osorno. High above, the sun casts its spears into the snow, volcanoes glisten, land stretches endless as the sea, space is blue, but something trembles, it is the fiery, heart of summer, the honeyed heart multiplied, the buzzing bee, the crackling honeycomb of flight and gold! Bees, purest laborers, ogival workers fine, flashing proletariat, perfect, daring militia that in combat attack with suicidal sting; buzz, buzz above the earth's endowments, family of gold, multitude of the wind, shake the fire from the flowers, thirst from the stamens, the sharp, aromatic thread that stitches together the days, and propagate honey, passing over humid continents, the most distant islands of the western sky. Yes: let the wax erect green statues, let honey spill in infinite tongues, let the ocean be a beehive, the earth tower and tunic of flowers, and the world a waterfall, a comet's tail, a never-ending wealth of honeycombs! Pablo Neruda, Odes to Common Things. (Bulfinch; Illustrated edition, May 1, 1994)

energy so abundantly that be could talk with a voice sounding as a large bell. Being asked by Wang the secret of longevity, the man replied: "There is no secret in it; I merely kept my mind calm and peaceful." Further, he explained the method of Meditation according to Taoism and Buddhism. Thereupon Wang sat face to face with the old man and began to practise Meditation, utterly forgetful of his bride and nuptial ceremony. The sun began to cast his slanting rays on the wall of the temple, and they sat motionless; twilight came over them, and night wrapped them with her sable shroud, and they sat as still as two marble statues; midnight, dawn, at last the morning sun rose to find them still in their reverie. The father of the bride, who had started a search during the night, found to his surprise the bridegroom absorbed in Meditation on the following day.[FN#265]

What I couldn’t make sense of, what I couldn’t figure out in any way, shape, or form, was why Lucy Cutting had found nothing in the neat-to-the-point-of-anal records on Natalie and Todd’s nuptials. And why the hell had no one heard of the Creative Recharge retreat? I couldn’t get that to mesh. So now what? I had come here in hopes of . . . of what? Of learning Todd’s last name for one thing. That could end this pretty quickly. If not, perhaps someone here still kept in touch with Natalie. That could end this all pretty quickly too. “Promise

Even annoyed, as she was now, she vibrated the kind of barely restrained energy that made every part of him spark to life. Some parts more enthusiastically than others. He shifted his weight and sidestepped slightly in an effort to keep that reality as unnoticeable as possible. He’d become a master of that particular skill during the last few months she’d been on the station. He needn’t have worried. She didn’t so much as glance at him. Her irritation was focused solely on her big brother. “Did you really just perp walk Cooper down the harbor?” Logan’s eyebrows lifted along with his hands, which he held up at his sides, palms out. “Hold up, I didn’t--” “Save it,” Kerry said. She turned to Cooper. “I apologize. He forgets I’m an adult woman who can handle her own affairs.” She glared at her brother during that last part. “She’s right, you know.” This came from a little spitfire brunette who, given Kerry’s descriptions of her family, must be the middle McCrae sister, Fiona. Fists planted on her hips, managing to somehow look down her cute little nose at her much taller and much bigger brother, she added, “We’re trying to plan my wedding and grill her about Mr. Hot and Aussie here. I’d think by now you’d know that we’ve got this covered.” She made a brief gesture to the other women standing alongside her. “If we thought he was a danger to society, we would have called.” Cooper watched the ricocheting dialogue like a spectator at a cricket match, unable to squelch a grin. It was like watching his own sister, all grown up and in triplicate. As Kerry and Fiona closed in on a somehow now hapless-looking lumberjack of a police chief, Cooper stepped forward and stuck out his hand toward the taller, willowy young woman who stood just behind Fiona. Where Kerry was Amazonian and Fiona a little firebrand, their oldest sister was the epitome of cool, calm, and collected. “Hannah Blue, I presume? I’m Cooper Jax. Sorry for the disruption of your sister’s wedding plans. I didn’t know.” This had Fiona turning his way. “And how could you, given Kerry couldn’t be bothered to so much as send you a postcard?” “Hey,” Kerry said, looking at her sister now. “Whose side are you on?” Fiona looked back at her. “The side that keeps this guy here and you looking all pent up and googly-eyed.” “Googly-eyed?” Kerry shot back. Cooper, grinning unrepentantly now, turned his attention back to Hannah and continued, as if her sisters weren’t getting all up in each other’s personal space. “I understand congratulations are in order on your recent nuptials as well.” Hannah gave him a swift, all-encompassing once-over as only a former defense attorney could. Then, in the face of his unrelenting goodwill, she took his hand, her mouth curving up in the barest hint of a smile as she gave it a firm, quick shake. “You’re a charmer, Mr. Jax, I’ll give you that.” “Go with your strength,” he replied.

Marriage was a Sacrament, yet these festivities more often resembled pagan rites than Christian nuptials.

I have wed twice, sir, and been widowed twice. No man survives his nuptial night with me, it appears, and you, sir, have been too kind to deserve such a fate.

Just when I thought to move forward And accept where I’m in life Just when I thought to forget what’s gone And appreciate what still remains Just when I was about to take the first step towards you, You retreated in a shell of silence, rupturing and axing The root sheath of our nuptial sapling

IT HAD BEEN ONLY a little more than a year since the world pulled out to celebrate the nuptials of the future king and his strikingly beautiful wife—eventually to become England’s first working-class, university-educated queen. Now, in 2012, Great Britain

Each night I read you stories— Sinbad, Aladdin, Periebanou, Periezade— in that strange exotic language you cannot possibly understand: countenance, repast, bequeathed, nuptial, what can these words be telling you? What can they signify? That I love you? It’s time to sleep? Keep safe throughout this night? And yet you will not let me simplify, get angry if I explain, and hang on every word as if our lives depended on it. Perhaps they do. One day the stories will fail us, there will be nothing left to tell, another hand will rub your back, another genie will rise. But for now, sleep tight, sleep tight, and dream of the singing tree, the speaking bird, the golden water, the stone that was your father, restored by morning light.

When authentic friends of God, such as Meister Eckhart in my opinion, repeat words they heard in secret amidst the silence during union with God, and are in disagreement with the teachings of the Church, it is simply that the language of the marketplace is not that of the nuptial chamber.

Throughout any language, words of all kinds are always going personal to a certain extent: the subjective exerts a gravity-style pull on words’ meanings. Example: must started out in the objective command sense: You must stand still. Later came an alternate meaning of must, as in (doorbell rings) That must be the Indian food. In saying that, we don’t mean “I demand that that be the Indian food,” but a more personal, subjective sense of mustness. You mean that within your mind and your sense of what is likely, logic requires that you must suppose that it’s the Indian food, rather than the mail or a neighbor. First was the command meaning, objective and focused outward. But over time words often turn inward and become more about you. “That” (in my mind) “must be the Indian food”: here is psychology. Must got personal. Other times, things get so personal that the original meaning vanishes entirely. Here’s some Tennyson (sorry): Lancelot’s admirer Elaine is asleep “Till rathe she rose, half-cheated in the thought.” Rathe? Angry, as in “wrathed,” maybe? No, actually: the word meant “quick” or, in this passage, “early.” Elaine is up early with things on her mind. Rathe meant “early,” so rath-er, in Old and into Middle English, meant “earlier.” But a meaning like that was ripe for going personal, as must did. It happens via what we could call meaning creep, by analogy with the term mission creep—bit by bit, new shades creep into what we consider the meaning of something to be, until one day the meaning has moved so far from the original one that it seems almost astounding. What happened with rather is that something you’ve got going earlier or sooner is often something you like better. As such, if rather means “earlier,” then there’s an air about rather not only of sunrise, but of preferability. That is, to earlier English speakers, rather was as much about what you like better (something personal) as about the more concrete issue of what you do before you do something else. Today the relationship between the two meanings is clearer in sooner. In saying, “I’d sooner die than marry him,” you mean not that you’d prefer your death to precede your nuptials, but that you don’t want to marry the man in question.

Keiko leans forward and says, “Coraline informed me of your visceral relationship and pending nuptials. I would be remiss if I didn’t say I predicted your coupling, but my projection was off. I assumed you would be joined in a committed union a few months ago and would be feverously having coitus by now.

I am come—I am come! once again from the tomb, In return for the ring which you gave; That I am thine, and that thou art mine, This nuptial pledge receive.’ He lay like a corse ‘neath the Demon's force, And she wrapp'd him in a shround; And she fixed her teeth his heart beneath, And she drank of the warm life-blood! And ever and anon murmur'd the lips of stone, ‘Soft and warm is this couch of thine, Thou'lt to-morrow be laid on a colder bed— Albert! that bed will be mine!

KEN FOUND A QUIET BOOTH toward the back of La Crème, one that gave him a pretty poor view of the dancers but a great view of the older barmaid who’d brought Detective Broome to this den of sin. Earlier Ken had managed to get close enough to hear snippets of the conversation between Detective Broome and the barmaid he called Lorraine. She clearly knew a lot. She was clearly emotional about it. And, he thought, she clearly was not telling all. Ken was so happy, nearly giddy with joy over his upcoming nuptials. He considered various ways to pop the question. This job would pay well, and he’d use the money to buy her the biggest diamond he could find. But the big question was: How should he pop the question? He didn’t want anything cheesy like those men who propose on stadium scoreboards. He wanted something grand yet simple, meaningful yet fun. She was so wonderful, so special, and if any place could hammer that fact home, it was here at this alleged gentlemen’s club. The women here were grotesque. He didn’t understand why any man would want any of them. They looked dirty and diseased and fake, and part of Ken wondered whether men came here for other reasons, not sexual, to feel something different

Well, no boy loves his chum, or no boy says he does. But he answered, I do. I do, he answered as in some preposterous dissenting nuptial. And MacMurrough remembered how touching it was that a young fellow in a stranger's bed should say that he loved his friend.

Pullulating in the dim woods—and gently trembling—and dilating in the light, the water ripples; and just now she veils her rite, just now through all her pale veins she shivers in discovering a little valley of nuptials where there are yet in sight the vestiges of corpses that in the delight of love had entwined under Selene’s scrutiny. Selene is dead; the Argives are dead; their wedding beds—abandoned; in the sovereign stand of the night’s silence the water’s tumults cease; but still from time to time I think I hear ahead the gurgling of an urn that a hand pours invisibly in that peace. (Trans. Michael Shindler)

Belatedly, his nuptial radar detected a certain chilliness from the far side of the cruet.

Volumnia, who is attempting to infuse some of her own stalwart qualities into her daughter-in-law: If my son were my husband, I should freelier rejoice in that absence wherein he won honor than in the embracements of his bed where he would show most love. (1.3.2–5) Is it possible to imagine anything more perverse? Not only is Volumnia declaring that she prefers a warrior who is absent (and in mortal danger on the battlefield) to a husband who is present in her bed—this much could be chalked up to Roman heroic virtue—but the whole assertion rests on the premise of herself as her son’s husband. And this, let’s not forget, spoken to the individual who actually does share “his bed where he would show most love.” It renders by comparison rather colorless the son-husband comparison with which All’s Well begins. With the fate of Rome hanging in the balance, the husbandless mother of the hero/savior edges toward absurdity, as when Menenius, trying vainly to stage manage the hero’s role in making peace with the plebeians, is forced to say to him, “is this the promise you made your mother?” (3.3.87), which sounds to me like a laugh line delivered on the playground or something I heard in my head at a prepubescent age, not an exhortation to decisive political action in the Roman forum. But Shakespeare has woven, ominously (or so it appears to me), another thread into the fabric of Coriolanus’s Rome. With the ferocious mother-fatherlover rolled into one at the center of this particular Roman world, it seems as though perversity is on the loose everywhere. Nothing in the rulebook of epic heroism accords with Coriolanus’s rapturous reception of his ally Cominius, O, let me clip ye In arms as sound as when I wooed, in heart As merry as when our nuptial day was done. … (1.7.29–31)

And in an instant, he drifted to the dream state of a sacred and preserved nuptial that stood on the precipice of the fractured relationship that presently marred his perceptions.

Twenty-six months ago, Lunar Industries had fired Spencer. He had discovered a new principle of physics that could lead to a new type of communicator. It didn’t have many of the limitations of using radio waves at long distances, such as for space travel, and could make it much more efficient to remain in touch with spacecraft in deep space. But the communicator’s usefulness had made no difference to Lunar Industries. Spencer had been fired nonetheless. He had had the nerve to go against Mr. Andrei Lunar’s expressed wishes.

The table itself was sacred, like the nuptial bed (lectus genialis) set up in line with the entrance door. The walls, the furniture, the dishes used for daily food as well as for honouring the gods were equally hallowed. Even workaday tools - broom, pestle, axe - had their own familiar demon: Deverra, Pilumnus, Intercidona.

I lifted the lid of the trunk that smelled of lavender, where poor Mamma over time had added item upon item to my wedding dowry.  I hunted beneath linen sheets which had been waiting to be embroidered with nuptial initials and pillowcases, and towels and pot holders all edged with fine crochet,

AN EAGLE, overwhelmed with sorrow, sat upon the branches of a tree, in company with a Kite. Why, said the Kite: do I see you with such a rueful look? I seek, she replied: for a mate suitable for me, and am not able to find one. Take me, returned the Kite: I am much stronger than you are. Why, are you able to secure the means of living by your plunder? Well, I have often caught and carried away an ostrich in my talons. The Eagle, persuaded by these words, accepted him as her mate. Shortly after the nuptials, the Eagle said: Fly off and bring me back the ostrich you promised me. The Kite, soaring aloft into the air, brought back the shabbiest possible mouse. Is this, said the Eagle: the faithful fulfillment of your promise to me? The Kite replied: That I might attain your royal hand, there is nothing that I would not have promised, however much I knew that I must fail in the performance.

In the end, Penny and Leonard decided to put the incident behind them and go through with their Vegas nuptials, but there’s one major reason Cuoco says she’ll never forget the episode: her wig. By that point, Cuoco’s pixie cut had started to grow out, but in four months’ time when season nine would begin filming, she knew it would be a lot longer, and therefore wouldn’t match how it looked in the finale. Kaley Cuoco: I said to the producers, “Please tell me you’re not going to write a ‘To Be Continued…’ episode for the season eight finale.” And sure enough, they said, “We are.” I was so angry I had brought it up because that meant we had to get a fucking wig, and I was livid! [Laughs] I didn’t want to wear a wig. And bless my hairdresser Faye Woods’s heart, because she knows how much I hate wigs, but the wig that was made was exceptional. Still, I was so hateful toward this wig and everyone knew it. I was just being bratty. But I had to wear that wig in the season nine premiere. Then in the next episode we cheated a bit and it was back in a little bun so you couldn’t see the length. Then slowly over the next few episodes we started to let it down. Oh, and I still have that fucking wig. Faye gave it to me! It’s a joke now, just to sit there and remind me not to make bad choices with hair again. [Laughs] There were very few moments of anger for me on Big Bang, but that wig, to this day, creams my corn, as Penny would say. I hated it! I was so mad!

I love this life with abandon and wish to speak of it boldly: it makes me proud of my human condition. Yet people have often told me: there’s nothing to be proud of. Yes, there is: this sun, this sea, my heart leaping with youth, the salt taste of my body and this vast landscape in which tenderness and glory merge in blue and yellow. It is to conquer this that I need my strength and my resources. Everything here leaves me intact, I surrender nothing of myself, and don no mask: learning patiently and arduously how to live is enough for me, well worth all their arts of living.

Displayed on top of a chest of drawers were several wedding gifts received twenty-five years earlier by Francesco’s parents: an engraved wooden box; an open case containing six crystal glasses, each in its own faded velvet-lined niche; a collection of small plaster figurines; and other such objects. The only use for these things was to be shown off, and they never moved from their place on the dresser except to be delicately cleaned and dusted. Gathered in what could be described as an altar, the great value of these precious things had been impressed on Francesco from a very young age, so that the objects would not fall victim to the violence of his curious little hands. And so acquiring, because inviolable, increased power and mystery, these nuptial gifts inhabited his childhood like people of a strange and noble lineage.

Sometimes male competition includes offering gifts to the female. Given that reproduction in females consumes calories as well as time and attention, male courtship in many species involves a “nuptial offering” rich in nutrients. In dung-rolling beetles, the gift is a massive ball of elephant dung.

A young man and woman were leaving the small porch, calling their good-byes. Betrotheds, perhaps, making arrangements for their nuptials. Dirk stood aside, glancing at the ground, as they came through the gate. Certain sorts of happiness made him feel aloof if not skeptical. They were too young to know how love went. They were too young, and he was too old. Or too—something.

With the nuptial ceremonies concluded, Juana became Archduchess of Burgundy through her marriage to Phillip, who was Archduke of Burgundy. He ruled the land essentially as king, but his title was archduke because of a historical anomaly in how the confederation of states it represented had come together-as a duchy designated by a French king for rule by his son, as duke. This realm was composed of a crescent-shaped set of provinces that included Holland, Belgium, and areas of Northern France, particularly the Burgundy region. To the east was the Holy Roman Empire, which was rules by Phillip’s father and grandfather, but to the west and soutth was France, which was a powerful and dangerous ally.

And might I add, sir, I have been an integral part of your journeys and alongside you since Tatooine. I was shocked to hear the news of your nuptials secondhand.

Let us here lay to rest the myth that birds’ innards will burst if they scavenge the rice thrown at weddings. Over the years, this enduring bit of misinformation migrated as far as Ann Landers’s column and the Connecticut state legislature. In 1985, Representative Mae Schmidle proposed “An Act Prohibiting the Use of Uncooked Rice at Nuptial Affairs.” The Audubon Society called hooey, pointing out that migrating birds feed on fields of rice. Some churches ban the practice anyway, not because it’s perilous for birds but because it’s perilous for guests, who could slip on the hard, round grains and fall and then fly off to a personal injury lawyer.

Despite her pending nuptials, she found herself walking toward him, hoping to be introduced. Then the man chuckled at something Alastair said, and Hettie froze. She knew that cheeky smile. She’d seen that exact expression too many times to count. “Your Grace!” Lady Lindsey exclaimed before rushing forward to greet him. Finn?

Christ's sacred face was spat upon to cleanse our soul which was blacker than coal. His precious flesh was covered with a robe that the veil of ignorance we had incurred by sin might be lifted and our spiritual blindness cured: he was presented before the judges that we might appear fearlessly before the Judge of all men. He kept silence to make satisfaction for Eve's speech with the serpent, and that our much and evil speaking might be chastised in his divine Person. He was left naked that we might be stripped of the old man and adorn ourselves with virtuous habits in readiness for the eternal nuptials, Christ was scourged to screen us from the scourge of justice we so well deserved; mock honors were paid to him on earth to win true honor for us in heaven. He wore a crown of thorns to crown us with glory; bore a reed in his hand that we might be given the scepter of the kingdom and was crucified between thieves to deliver us from the infernal companions with whom we had made friends and to make us companions of the holy angels.