As I grew to adolescence, I imagined, from closely observing the boredom and vexations of matrimony, that the act my parents committed and the one I so longed to commit must be two different things.
—Shirley Abbott
Marriage probably originated as a straightforward food-for-sex deal among foraging primates. Compatibility was not a big issue, nor, of course, was there any tension over who would control the remote.
—Barbara Ehrenreich
Women hope men will change after marriage, but they don't; men hope women won't change, but they do.
—Bettina Arndt
However often marriage is dissolved, it remains indissoluble. Real divorce, the divorce of heart and nerve and fiber, does not exist, since there is no divorce from memory.
—Virginia Peterson
I began to see what marriage is for. It's to keep people away from each other. Sometimes I think that two people who love each other can be saved from madness only by the things that come between them—children, duties, visits, bores, relations: the things that protect married people from each other.
—Edith Wharton
Marriage is an extraordinary thing, and I doubt if any outsider—even a child of the marriage—has the right to judge.
—Agatha Christie
In Hollywood a marriage is a success if it outlasts milk.
—Rita Rudner
A successful marriage requires falling in love many times, always with the same person.
—Mignon McLaughlin
The secrets of success are a good wife and a steady job. My wife told me.
—Howard Nemerov
A husband is like a fire, he goes out when unattended.
—Evan Esar
Women won't let me stay single and I won't let me stay married.
—Errol Flynn
I would be married, but I'd have no wife, I would be married to a single life.
—Charles Bukowski
A successful marriage is an edifice that must be rebuilt every day.
—André Maurois
Brought up to respect the conventions, love had to end in marriage. I'm afraid it did.
—Bette Davis
Whenever you want to marry someone, go have lunch with his ex-wife.
—Shelley Winters