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1 " A love story can never be about full possession. The happy marriage, the requited love, the desire that never dims--these are lucky eventualites but they aren't love stories. Love stories depend on disappointment, on unequal births and feuding families, on matrimonial boredom and at least one cold heart. Love stories, nearly without exception, give love a bad name.We value love not because it's stronger than death but because it's weaker. Say what you want about love: death will finish it. You will not go on loving in the grave, not in any physical way that will at all resemble love as we know it on earth. The perishable nature of love is what gives love its importance in our lives. If it were endless, if it were on tap, love wouldn't hit us the way it does.And we certainly wouldn't write about it. "
― Jeffrey Eugenides , My Mistress's Sparrow is Dead: Great Love Stories, from Chekhov to Munro
2 " Nicholas: I know you, brother. You've been threatened with matrimonial pursuits before. Why are you really here?William: I received an invitation.Nicholas: Not from me you didn't.William: Of course not from you, brother. Parliament would go up in flames before I receive a social invitation from you. "
― Donna MacMeans , The Education of Mrs. Brimley (Chambers Trilogy, #1)
3 " (Nicholas)" Am I dead?" An odd question, but then she rememberd her mourning attire. " No sir, you are not." He relaxed a moment, then turned his head slightly as if searching for other passengers. His brows dived in a scowl.Am I married?" She wasn't sure how to answer. His kid gloves hid any evidence of his matrimonial state, but his expression of instantaneous alarm and regret suggested he was referring specifically to her. No sir, we are not. "
4 " This revolution - will it be a living?''We must hope so. Look, I have to go, I'm visiting a client. He's going to be hanged tomorrow.''Is that usual?''Oh, they always hang my clients. Even in property and matrimonial cases. "
― Hilary Mantel , A Place of Greater Safety
5 " The essential matrimonial facts: that to be happy you have to find variety in repetition "
6 " Luck which so often defies anticipation in matrimonial affairs, giving attraction to what is moderate rather than to what is superior. "
― Jane Austen , Emma
7 " Don't expect to drop into matrimonial harmony with the end of the honeymoon "
8 " Older women are of less sexual and reproductive, and thus by extension, matrimonial value. This is just biology meets the Catholic sacrament of matrimony, of which its virtues are 1) pleasing your spouse and 2) making children. Older women, being less fertile and less able to please their spouse, thus make for less virtuous marriages.If the excellence of marriage is grounded in the unitative and procreative telos of sexuality, a woman's youth and fertility are virtuous traits and a virtuous man would rightly prize those traits in a prospective wife.Let us perform an empirical investigation. If we compare societies where the norm of marriage is at a younger age (for the girl) rather than an older age, which marriages are more fruitful? That is, which marriages produce more children and are less likely to end in divorce? I'm sure we are equally acquainted with the results of our modern Western norms, are you acquainted with the results of non-modern Western norms?Excusing, rather than excoriating, modern Western norms is mere sophistry, sophistry which our host has held forth as an ostensibly authentic Catholic view. However, it simply isn't; it is a modern view dressed up in Catholic-sounding phrases. "
9 " I suppose it must be admitted that I was raised in a " dysfunctional" family, but in truth, I do not think I had any sense of that as I was growing up. Probably part of the reason was that all of my extended kin had families at least as dysfunctional as mine. Just to give a little of the flavor of it, my " Aunt Fern," who lived just across the street and was one of the most present and puissant female relatives in my life, was, to be genealogically precise, my mother's brother's, first wife's, second husband's, father's, 3rd, 4th, and 5th wife. (She married " Uncle Lew" three times in the course of her seven matrimonial ventures.) "
10 " Fireflies out on a warm summer's night, seeing the urgent, flashing, yellow-white phosphorescence below them, go crazy with desire; moths cast to the winds an enchantment potion that draws the opposite sex, wings beating hurriedly, from kilometers away; peacocks display a devastating corona of blue and green and the peahens are all aflutter; competing pollen grains extrude tiny tubes that race each other down the female flower's orifice to the waiting egg below; luminescent squid present rhapsodic light shows, altering the pattern, brightness and color radiated from their heads, tentacles, and eyeballs; a tapeworm diligently lays a hundred thousand fertilized eggs in a single day; a great whale rumbles through the ocean depths uttering plaintive cries that are understood hundreds of thousands of kilometers away, where another lonely behemoth is attentively listening; bacteria sidle up to one another and merge; cicadas chorus in a collective serenade of love; honeybee couples soar on matrimonial flights from which only one partner returns; male fish spray their spunk over a slimy clutch of eggs laid by God-knows-who; dogs, out cruising, sniff each other's nether parts, seeking erotic stimuli; flowers exude sultry perfumes and decorate their petals with garish ultraviolet advertisements for passing insects, birds, and bats; and men and women sing, dance, dress, adorn, paint, posture, self-mutilate, demand, coerce, dissemble, plead, succumb, and risk their lives. To say that love makes the world go around is to go too far. The Earth spins because it did so as it was formed and there has been nothing to stop it since. But the nearly maniacal devotion to sex and love by most of the plants, animals, and microbes with which we are familiar is a pervasive and striking aspect of life on Earth. It cries out for explanation. What is all this in aid of? What is the torrent of passion and obsession about? Why will organisms go without sleep, without food, gladly put themselves in mortal danger for sex? ... For more than half the history of life on Earth organisms seem to have done perfectly well without it. What good is sex?... Through 4 billion years of natural selection, instructions have been honed and fine-tuned...sequences of As, Cs, Gs, and Ts, manuals written out in the alphabet of life in competition with other similar manuals published by other firms. The organisms become the means through which the instructions flow and copy themselves, by which new instructions are tried out, on which selection operates. 'The hen,' said Samuel Butler, 'is the egg's way of making another egg.' It is on this level that we must understand what sex is for. ... The sockeye salmon exhaust themselves swimming up the mighty Columbia River to spawn, heroically hurdling cataracts, in a single-minded effort that works to propagate their DNA sequences into future generation. The moment their work is done, they fall to pieces. Scales flake off, fins drop, and soon--often within hours of spawning--they are dead and becoming distinctly aromatic. They've served their purpose. Nature is unsentimental. Death is built in. "
― Carl Sagan , Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors
11 " --the ethereal, fine-nerved, sensitive girl, quite unfitted by temperament and instinct to fulfil the conditions of the matrimonial relation with Phillotson, possibly with scarce any man... "
― Thomas Hardy , Jude the Obscure
12 " The mortality rate of literary friendships is high. Writers tend to be bad risks as friends ~ probably for much the same reasons that they are bad matrimonial risks. They expend the best parts of themselves in their work. Moreover, literary ambition has a way of turning into literary competition; if fame is the spur, envy may be a concomitant. "
― Matthew J. Bruccoli
13 " They still had sexual relations with another, slept in the same bed, shared kisses and intimacy and matrimonial fluid, however both were not married to each other in that sense, although there was a piece of paper that said otherwise. "
― Keira D. Skye
14 " We gave the woman for her trouble a generous fee, with which she was highly pleased, and proceeded to put it in the bed under her sleeping husband's head. We laughingly told her not to put it there as he might get it, and it was money she had earned herself. She appreciated the joke, though it was told mostly by gestures, but seemed to have true ideas of the matrimonial relation, and was nothing loath to trust her all with him. page. 116 "
― Helen Josephine Sanborn , A Winter In Central America And Mexico
15 " You will reciprocally promise love, loyalty and matrimonial honesty. We only want for you this day that these words constitute the principle of your entire life and that with the help of divine grace you will observe these solemn vows that today, before God, you formulate. "
16 " In India, by and large, women are not educated enough to be bread winners and, within the moorings of traditional cultures, do not have the courage and the capacity to leave the matrimonial home. Given the inequality prevalent in family structures, the woman's right to opt out is suicidal. "