unhappy marriages Quotes

“Ah thought you would ‘preciate good treatement. Thought Ah’d take and make somethin’ outa yuh. You think youse white folks by de way you act.”

“Thinking of Father’s scheme to marry me off, I said, “Sometimes people are forced into wedlock. If they must marry, perhaps it’s better if they must love.”

“John laughs at me, of course, but one expects that in marriage.”

“Her husband seemed to her now like a person whom she had married without love as an excuse.”

“Then slowly she thrust her wet wrinkled hand into her bosom and she drew forth the small package and she gave it to him and watched him as he unwrapped it; and the pearls lay in his hand and they caught softly and fully the light of the sun, and he laughed. But O-lan returned to the beating of his clothes and when tears dropped slowly and heavily from her eyes she did not put up her hand to wipe them away; only she beat the more steadily with her wooden stick upon the clothes spread over the stone.”

“Over just a few years, the old Amy, the girl of the big laugh and the easy ways, literally shed herself, a pile of skin and soul on the floor, and out stepped this new, brittle, bitter Amy. My wife was no longer my wife, but a razor-wire knot daring me to unloop her.”

“If I seek to fulfill my own needs at the expense of my partner, we are sure to experience unhappiness, resentment, and conflict. The secret of forming a successful relationship is for both partners to win.”

“And besides – he’s so proud of being a man – it’d be so painful and humiliating for him to know that he owed anything to me. It’d completely wreck our relationship.”

“As a bride it been she who had “dragged” Benjamin to dances and dinners – now conditions were reversed. She went out socially with him, but without enthusiasm, devoured already by that eternal inertia which comes to live with each of us one day and stays with us to the end.”

“I called my parents and asked if I could come home, but they wouldn’t even speak to me. It was bad enough that I’d married a Jew, but now I wanted a divorce as well? My father made Mother tell me that in his eyes I had died the day I eloped.”

“In her less important moments she returned to America, met Stephen Blaine and married him—this almost entirely because she was a little bit weary, a little bit sad.”

“Twice we stood beside each other at the altar, Rosie. Twice. And twice we got it wrong. I needed you to be there for my wedding day but I was too stupid to see that I needed you to be the reason for my wedding day. ”

″...For Doctor Diver to marry a mental patient? How did it happen? Where did it begin?”

“When marriage fail, it is not increasing conflict that is the cause. It is decreasing affection and emotional responsiveness. (...) The lack of emotional responsiveness rather than the level of conflict is the best predictor of how solid a marriage will be.”

“And I did, I did so much, I did love you!—I even loved your hate and your hardness, Big Daddy!”

“Beautiful teeth, black eyes, dainty feet, and graceful as a Parisian. How the devil did she get here? How did such a clumsy oaf ever get a wife like that?”

“Marriage, like religion and erudition, nay, like authorship itself, was fated to become an outward requirement.”

“And how can you say a man had a good mind when he couldn’t even bother to do anything when the best-hearted, most beautiful woman in the world, his own wife, was dying for lack of love and understanding…”

“Gottman has found, in fact, that the presence of contempt in a marriage can even predict such things as how many colds a husband or wife gets; in other words, having someone you love express contempt toward you is so stressful that it begins to affect the functioning of your immune system.”

“I married a man who worked for the telephone company! [. . .] A telephone man who—fell in love with long-distance!”

“So what was it like being married?” “Well, it’s hard, for sure. But there’s something that feels so good about sharing your life with somebody.”

“To say the truth women are, in general, too familiar with each other, which leads to that gross degree of familiarity that so frequently renders the marriage state unhappy.”

“When I married Eleanor, I thought: ‘You lucky man. The richest woman in the world. She owns the Aquitaine, the greatest province on the Continent - and beautiful as well.‘”

“Medea: how I bless you both… not here—beyond… every blessing here you father has despoiled.”

“For these ten years you’ve lived with everything I’ve lost and loved another woman through it all. And I’m cruel. I could peel you like a pear and God would call it justice ...”

“‘Miss Clara, I’ve never seen anything like this. And I admire it, I really do. It’s just that I don’t have time to pray that much every day.’ Elizabeth said. ‘But you apparently have time to fight losing battles with your husband.‘”

″‘You been married?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘What happened?’ ‘Mental Cruelty,’ according to the divorce papers. ‘Was it true?’ she asked. ‘Of course: both ways.‘”

“Mum- my Mum- said once that having to cope with a handicapped child was supposed to make good marriages better and bad marriages worse. ‘The Shaws belong to the first lot, all right,’ she told me.”

“Sid and May’s marriage is an extremely unhappy one, May making enemies of all her in-laws, alternately screaming, sulking, and throwing things.”