“Well then?' He bent down from his towering height, until I could feel the hard muscles of his chest against mine, and his mouth almost brushed my lips. I could barely breathe, so thick with delicious tension was the air around me.
' What is your answer? Miss Linton, will you be my wife?”
Source: In the Eye of the Storm
“I no longer judge a marriage by its longevity. I judge it by the role it fills in your life.”
Source: I Do (I Think): Conversations About Modern Marriage
“...[G]reat progress was evident in the last Congress of the American 'Labour Union' in that among other things, it treated working women with complete equality. While in this respect the English, and still more the gallant French, are burdened with a spirit of narrow-mindedness. Anybody who knows anything of history knows that great social changes are impossible without the feminine ferment. Social progress can be measured exactly by the social position of the fair sex (the ugly ones included).”
Source: Selected Letters: The Personal Correspondence 1844-1877
“Many of us didn’t marry the woman we truly loved. We married the woman that was around when we were ready to
marry.”
Source: Americanah
“Besides, aren't you dying to see our bedroom?"
"Dying," said Lucy, going up the oak staircase with a stout, determined heart.”
Source: Vera
“As I lay in that dark hour, I was aghast to realize that something within me, long sickening, had quietly died. I felt as a husband might feel in the fourth year of his marriage, who suddenly knew he had no longer any desire, or tenderness, or esteem, for a once beloved wife.”
Source: Brideshead Revisited
“Life was what it was. She'd chosen this every step of the way. (Story: I Love My Husband, But...)”
Source: Scarlet Yearnings: Stories of Love and Desire
“When two are together and one cannot rise, the other can only fall.”
Source: For Better For Worse: Essays on Sex, Love, Marriage, and More
“We can learn to claim our closeness with our partners—to push back against the world’s duties and pressures and insist upon our time together. A little bit of time each and every week is all we’re after. Enough to reconnect, to keep our desire alive and well, and to escape from life’s stresses and obligations long enough to let go into each other.”
Source: The Naked Marriage: Undressing the truth about sex, intimacy and lifelong love
“Making love is a risky business. The more people surrender to, and invest themselves in the one they love, the more they run the risk of being emotionally burnt if the relationship ends. Like any economic investment, there is a realization that the more care and love you give to a loved one, the greater the loss if they leave or die. And yet, despite all the messages to live free, to taste and try, and despite the grief and heartache that comes when love fails or dies, people still enter into marriage and long-term relationships and commitments.”
Source: Love