matrimony

(Response to King Erik XIV of Sweden's proposal of marriage:)"[W]hile we perceive ... the zeal and love of your mind towards us is not diminished, yet in part we are grieved that we cannot gratify your Serene Highness with the same kind of affection. And that indeed does not happen because we doubt in any way of your love and honour, but, as often we have testified both in words and writing, that we have never yet conceived a feeling of that kind of affection towards anyone.We therefore beg your Serene Highness again and again that you be pleased to set a limit to your love, that it advance not beyond the laws of friendship for the present nor disregard them in the future. ... We certainly think that if God ever direct our hearts to consideration of marriage we shall never accept or choose any absent husband how powerful and wealthy a Prince soever. But that we are not to give you an answer until we have seen your person is so far from the thing itself that we never even considered such a thing. I have always given both to your brother ... and also to your ambassador likewise the same answer with scarcely any variation of the words, that we do not conceive in our heart to take a husband but highly commend this single life, and hope that your Serene Highness will no longer spend time in waiting for us.

There can be no disparity in marriage like unsuitability of mind and purpose.

After one divorce and other on the way I am seriously considering a ME-rriage now and .t's going to be epic! I will ask my hand in meTRInomy, for it will become a trigamy. And me, my higher self and third I will live happily ever after life...We will live in threesomeness!

[Marriage] happens as with cages: the birds without despair to get in, and those within despair of getting out.

[O]ur honeymoon will shine our life long: its beams will only fade over your grave or mine.

The critical period of matrimony is breakfast-time.

Marriage: a deeply peculiar and ultimately unkind thing to inflict on anyone one claims to care for.

Marriage is not 'I', its 'We'.

Philip wasn't the sort of man to make a friend of a woman. He wanted devotion. I gave him that. I did, you know. But I couldn't stand being made a fool of. I couldn;t stand being put on probation, like an office-boy, to see if I was good enough to be condescended to. I quite thought he was honest when he said he didn't believe in marriage -- and then it turned out that it was a test, to see whether my devotion was abject enough. Well, it wasn't. I didn't like having matrimony offered as a bad-conduct prize.

Some women marry houses.

I shall expect my husband to have no pleasures but what he shares with me; and if his greatest pleasure of all is not the enjoyment of my company - why - it will be the worse for him - that's all.''If such are your expectations of matrimony, Esther, you must, indeed, be careful whom you marry - or rather, you must avoid it altogether.

In modern times couples are more concerned about loyalty than love.

I know enough to know that no woman should ever marry a man who hated his mother.

Marriage is not a process for prolonging the life of love, sir. It merely mummifies its corpse.

Ode to the Chamber...linger here amidst the chamberin which we embrace our lovetalk to me of sonnetsand call me turtledove...

There must be some other possibility than death or lifelong penance ... some meeting, some intersection of lines; and some cowardly, hopeful geometer in my brain tells me it is the angle at which two lines prop each other up, the leaning-together from the vertical which produces the false arch. For lack of a keystone, the false arch may be as much as one can expect in this life. Only the very lucky discover the keystone.