Millions and millions of years would still not give me half enough time to describe that tiny instant of eternity when you put your arms around me and I put my arms around you.

Jacques Prévert

The music at a wedding procession always reminds me of the music of soldiers going into battle.

Heinrich Heine

Restore me with raisins, comfort me with apples, for I am sick with love.

Song of Solomon

Love is an ideal thing, marriage a real thing; a confusion of the real with the ideal never goes unpunished.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

The mind sees a magnificent pie in the sky; it dwells on it; it wants it; it yearns single-mindedly; the cry for more is endless.

Sai Baba

Commitment means we haven’t left ourselves an escape hatch.

Charlotte Joko Beck

Every one of us is an island. If it were not so we would go mad at once. Between these islands are ships, airplanes, telephones . . . (yet) they remain islands — islands that can sink or disappear forever. You are an island that has not sunk.

John Fowles

I’m OK. So thankful to God. Had him sixty-six years and now I’m glad to give him back to God.

Rubye Stronger on the death of her eighty-nine-year-old husband Bill

A young woman once said to an old woman, “What is life’s heaviest burden?” And the old woman said, “To have nothing to carry.”

Jewish tale

Marriage is our last, best chance to grow up.

Joseph Barth

Come and stand in my heart, whoever you are, and a whole river would cover your feet and rise higher and take your knees in whirlpools, and draw you down to itself, your whole body, your heart too.

Eudora Welty

Remember, you have come here having already understood the necessity of struggling with yourself — only with yourself. Therefore, thank everyone who gives you the opportunity.

George Ivanovitch Gurdjieff

The freedom of the rose-tree is the rose.

George Macdonald

My faults, too, have been those of excess; I too have made emotional demands, without being aware of what I was asking; I too have imagined that I was giving when I was battering at someone for attention.

May Sarton

Only a marriage with partners strong enough to risk divorce is strong enough to avoid it.

Carolyn Heilbrun

The state of marriage is one that requires more virtue and constancy than any other; it is a perpetual exercise of mortification.

St. Frances de Sales

“When one of us dies, I’ll move to the Riviera,” said a woman to her husband when she saw the beautiful Mediterranean coast.

Further Departures

It has been said that the continuation of the species is due to humankind being forgiving.

The Mahabharata

What I cannot love, I overlook. Is that real friendship?

Anaïs Nin

If you were going to die soon and had only one phone call you could make, who would you call and what would you say? And why are you waiting?

Stephen Levine