The goals we pursue are always veiled. A girl who longs for marriage longs for something she knows nothing about.

Milan Kundera, "The Unbearable Lightness of Being"

Love is love, but marriage is an investment.

Erica Jong, "How to Save Your Own Life"

Grief at the absence of a loved one is happiness compared to life with a person one hates.

Jean de La Bruyere, "Of the Heart"

...married life is very trying, and does need infinite patience as well as love...

Louisa May Alcott, "Little Women"

It may be said that married men of forty are usually ready and generous enough to fling passing glances at any specimen of moderate beauty they may discern by the way. Probably, as with persons playing whist for love, the consciousness of a certain immunity under any circumstances from that worst possible ultimate, the having to pay, makes them unduly speculative.

Thomas Hardy, "Far From The Madding Crowd"

It may have been observed that there is no regulal path for getting out of love as there is for getting in. Some people look upon marriage as a short cut that way, but it has been known to fail.

Thomas Hardy, "Far From The Madding Crowd"

He was so far from conceiving of love for woman apart from marriage that he positively pictured to himself first the family, and only secondarily the woman who would give him a family. His ideas of marriage were, consequently, quite unlike those of the great majority of his acquaintances, for whom getting married was one of the numerous facts of social life. For Levin it was the chief affair of life, on which its whole happiness turned.

Leo Tolstoy, "Anna Karenina"