Marriage is a game. They (the anxious and powerful) set the rules. We (the ordinary and subversive) bow obediently before those rules. And then we go home and do whatever the hell we want anyhow.

You can measure the happiness of a marriage by the number of scars that each partner carries on their tongues, earned from years of biting back angry words.

To be fully seen by somebody, then, and be loved anyhow - this is a human offering that can border on miraculous.

Maybe the difference between first marriage and second marriage is that the second time at least you know you are gambling.

Sometimes life is too hard to be alone, and sometimes life is too good to be alone.

Marriage becomes hard work once you have poured the entirety of your life’s expectations for happiness into the hands of one mere person. Keeping that going is hard work.

The problem, simply put, is that we cannot choose everything simultaneously. So we live in danger of becoming paralyzed by indecision, terrified that every choice might be the wrong choice.

Every intimacy carries secreted somewhere below its initial lovely surfaces, the ever-coiled makings of complete catastrophe.

I was a veritable Johnny Appleseed of grand expectations, and all I reaped for my trouble was a harvest of bitter fruit.

the great lack of parity between husbands and wives has always been spawned by the disproportionate degree of self-sacrifice that women are willing to make on behalf of those they love.

By unnerving definition, anything that the heart has chosen for its own mysterious reasons it can always unchoose later—again, for its own mysterious reasons.

The sea never dries for it has so many friends.

The Holy Bible is Divine oracles.

Death is the only pure, beautiful conclusion of a great passion.

Things never happen the same way twice.

A woman's suffering is never above half known, for the fact of the publicity of her wrongs is counted to her for disgrace.

The English think soap is civilization.

Each child in each generation chooses faith or disbelief. Faith is not an inheritance; it is a choice.

My father taught in the wise way which unfolds what lies in the child

Not every rider is a horseman and not every horseman is a knight.

When a thing you love faces adversity, you start to feel more protective of it. Also, you take an inventory all the time. You ask yourself, "Is this worth all my fighting?"