Marriage and Family

A sort of friendship recognized by the police.
Robert Louis Stevenson on matrimony

Marriage is a long, dull meal with pudding as the first course.
J.B. Priestley

Nothing is to me more distasteful than that entire complacency and satisfaction which beam in the countenances of a new-married couple.
Charles Lamb, Essays of Elia, ‘A Bachelor’s Complaint of Married People’

My first wife drove me to drink. It is the only thing I’m indebted to her for.
W.C. Fields

I call her ‘my first wife’ to keep her on her toes.
Clement Freud

If you want to sacrifice the admiration of many men for the criticism of one, go ahead, get married.
Katharine Hepburn

After a certain age marriage is mostly, its bitter and tender moments both, a mental game of thrust and parry played on the edge of the grave.
John Updike

It was very good of God to let Carlyle and Mrs Carlyle marry one another and so make two people miserable instead of four.
Samuel Butler on the Carlyles

To marry a man out of pity is folly; and, if you think you are going to influence the kind of fellow who has ‘never had a chance, poor devil,’ you are profoundly mistaken. One can only influence the strong characters in life, not the weak; and it is the height of vanity to suppose that you can make an honest man of anyone.
Margot Asquith

Whenever I date a guy, I think, is this the man I want my children to spend their weekends with?
Rita Rudner

I’m on a search for my future ex-wife.
Richie Sambora

Marriage is like a cage: one sees the birds outside desperate to get in, and those inside equally desperate to get out.
Michel de Montaigne, Essais, III

Marriage is the only adventure open to the cowardly.
Voltaire

I am unwell. Bring me a glass of brandy.
George, Prince of Wales, in 1795, on having kissed for the first time his bride-to-be Princess Caroline of Brunswick

She’s been married so many times she has rice marks on her face.
Henry Youngman on Zsa Zsa Gabor

There are two tragedies in life. One is to lose your heart’s desire. The other is to gain it.
George Bernard Shaw

Marriage is the assassin of love.
Aristotle Onassis

Marriages are like tornadoes. There’s all this blowing and sucking at the beginning; and at the end you lose your house.
James Caan

A man in love is incomplete until he has married. Then he’s finished.
Zsa Zsa Gabor

All tragedies are finish’d by death, All comedies are ended by a marriage.
Lord Byron, Don Juan, III

Before marriage a man yearns for the woman he loves. After marriage, the Y becomes silent.
Anonymous

A women’s silly, never staid,
By many longings stirred and swayed.
If husband can’t her needs supply,
Adultery’s the way she’ll try …
Her lustful loins are never stilled:
By just one man she’s unfulfilled.
She’ll spread her legs to all the men
But, ever hungry, won’t say ‘When’.
Thus married women love to stray
And wish their husbands’ lives away.
Since none a woman’s lust can sate
I don’t commend the marriage state.
‘De Coniuge non Ducenda’, anonymous poem on marriage, c. 1225–50. One of the most popular anti-matrimonial satires of the late Middle Ages, surviving in over fifty manuscripts.

As I roll back from you,
From your flabby breasts and breath,
A faint froth is our only link.
How many beaches are you?
Must I comb them all?
I’m not a wave to roll again forever,
And unlike the sea, I don’t come
Every fifteen seconds.
Jim Lindsey, ‘Blank Verse for a Fat Demanding Wife’

Mrs Hall of Sherbourne was brought to bed yesterday of a dead child, some weeks before she expected, owing to a fright. I suppose she happened to look unawares at her husband.
Jane Austen, letter

Going to marry her! Going to marry her! Impossible! You mean, a part of her; he could not marry her all himself. It would be a case, not of bigamy, but of trigamy; the neighbourhood or the magistrates should interfere. There is enough of her to furnish wives for a whole parish. One man marry her! – it is monstrous. You might people a colony with her; or give an assembly with her; or perhaps take your morning walks around her, always providing there were frequent resting places, and you are in rude health. I once was rash enough to try walking round her before breakfast, but only got half-way and gave it up exhausted. Or you might read the Riot Act and disperse her; in short, you might do anything with her but marry her.
Sydney Smith on hearing that a young man planned to marry a fat widow

What a hideous, odd-looking man Sydney Smith is. With a mouth like an oyster and three double chins.
Mrs Brookfield on Sydney Smith

To lose a lover or even a husband or two during the course of one’s life can be vexing. But to lose one’s teeth is a catastrophe.
Hugh Wheeler

Here lies my wife; here let her lie!
Now she’s at rest, and so am I.
John Dryden, ‘Epitaph Intended for Dryden’s Wife’

Men should think twice before making widowhood women’s only path to power.
Gloria Steinem

Bigamy is having one husband too many. Monogamy is the same.
Anonymous, quoted in Erica Jong, Fear of Flying

Mine, or other people’s?
Peggy Guggenheim on being asked on how many husbands she had had

With all my heart. Whose wife shall it be?
John Horne Tooke, replying to the suggestion that he take a wife

I give to Elizabeth Parker the sum of £50, whom, through my foolish fondness, I made my wife; and who in return has not spared, most unjustly, to accuse me of every crime regarding human nature, save highway-robbery.
Charles Parker, excerpt from will, 1785

I bequeath all my property to my wife on the condition that she remarry immediately. Then there will be at least one man to regret my death.
Heinrich Heine

Now at least I know where he is.
Queen Alexandra, to Lord Esher, shortly after the death of her husband Edward VII, noted for his string of mistresses

It should be a very happy marriage – they are both so much in love with him.
Irene Thomas

I have very little of Mr Blake’s company. He is always in paradise.
Mrs Blake on her husband William

You have sent me a Flanders mare.
Henry VIII when he saw Anne of Cleves, his fourth wife, for the first time. Quoted by Tobias Smollett.

I like him and his wife. He is so ladylike, and she is such a perfect gentleman.
Sydney Smith

She is an excellent creature, but never can remember which came first, the Greeks or the Romans.
Benjamin Disraeli on his wife. Attrib.

… fools are like husbands as pilchards are to herrings; the husband’s the bigger.
William Shakespeare, Twelfth Night

Twenty years of romance makes a woman look like a ruin; but twenty years of marriage makes her something like a public building.
Oscar Wilde

A wedding is just a funeral where you can smell your own flowers.
Victor Lewis-Smith

I married beneath me – all women do.
Nancy Astor

I wouldn’t be caught dead marrying a woman old enough to be my wife.
Tony Curtis

There are only about 20 murders a year in London and not all are serious – some are just husbands killing their wives.
Commander G.H. Hatherhill of Scotland Yard, 1954

It’s going to be very, very expensive, but it will be worth every penny.
John Cleese referring to his divorce

The three great lies of modern divorce: it was pressure of work, it’s an amicable break, and there’s no one else involved.
Julie Burchill

If you are afraid of loneliness, don’t marry.
Anton Chekhov

Why shouldn’t gay people marry? Why shouldn’t they suffer like us heterosexuals do?
Dolly Parton

A man doesn’t know what happiness is until he’s married. By then it’s too late.
Frank Sinatra

Eighty per cent of married men cheat in America. The rest cheat in Europe.
Jackie Mason

The only time my wife and I had a simultaneous orgasm was when the judge signed the divorce papers.
Woody Allen

They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.
Philip Larkin, This Be The Verse

As a child I thought I hated everybody, but when I grew up I realised it was just children that I didn’t like.
Philip Larkin

[A] sheep on LSD.
Philip Larkin, describing his appearance

Wherever my dad is now, he’s looking down on me … Not because he is dead, but because he is very condescending.
Jack Whitehall

The problem with the gene pool is that there’s no lifeguard.
Sam Levenson

She got her looks from her father. He’s a plastic surgeon.
Groucho Marx

A loud noise at one end and no sense of responsibility at the other.
Ronald Knox on babies

Do not leave your mother alone with your dog. The unruliness of mothers is great.
Dabi’Ibn al-harith al-Burjumi on some people who had refused to return a borrowed dog. For this piece of hija, or Arabic invective poetry, he was imprisoned.

I haven’t spoken to my mother-in-law for eighteen months. I don’t like to interrupt her.
Ken Dodd

Happiness is having a large, loving, caring, close-knit family in another city.
George Burns

Santa Claus has the right idea. Visit people only once a year.
Victor Borge

Friends are God’s apology for relations.
Hugh Kingsmill

His mother should have thrown him away and kept the stork.
Mae West

The first half of our lives is ruined by our parents, and the second half by our children.
Clarence Darrow, US lawyer

The reason grandparents and grandchildren get along so well is that they have a common enemy.
Sam Levenson

Guilt is to motherhood as grapes are to wine.
Fay Weldon

Who has not watched a mother stroke her child’s cheek or kiss in a certain way and felt a nervous shudder at the possessive outrage done to a free solitary human soul?
John Cowper Powys, The Meaning of Culture

They make pederasty an incomprehensible vice.
Brian Sewell, asked by the head of St Paul’s Boys school what he thought of the pupils

Literature is mostly about having sex and not much about having children. Life is the other way round.
David Lodge

I wonder who thought of the innocence of children. It must have been a person of great originality.
Ivy Compton-Burnett

Money – the one thing that keeps us in touch with our children.
Gyles Brandreth

Men are generally more careful of the breed of their horses and dogs than of their children.
William Penn

It is no wonder that people are so horrible when they start their life as children.
Kingsley Amis

A two-year-old is kind of like having a blender, but you don’t have a top for it.
Jerry Seinfeld

It is no use telling me that there are bad aunts and good aunts. At the core they are all alike. Sooner or later, out pops the cloven hoof.
P.G. Wodehouse, The Code of the Woosters