Jeanette Winterson
Jan. 24th, 2005 09:07 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
thisearthlyrideProbably one the most amazing authors I've ever read... Couldn't
really get into "Sexing the Cherry," but I think "Written on the Body"
should be mandatory for anyone who has ever been in love...
Here's a large selection of quotes. There are also a couple more in my userinfo profile. Enjoy!
from: Written On the Body
I used to think of marriage as a plate-glass window just begging for a
brick. The self-exhibition, the self-satisfaction, smarmimess,
tightness, tight-arsedness. The way married couples go out in fours
like a pantomime horse, the men walking together at the front, the
women trailing a little way behind. The men fetching the gin and
tonics from the bar while the women take their handbags to the toilet.
I doesn't have to be like that but mostly it is.
When I say "I will be true to you" I must mean it in spite of the
formalities, instead of the formalities. If I commit adultery in my
heart then I have lost you a little. The bright vision of your face
will blur. I may not notice this once or twice, I may pride myself on
having enjoyed those fleshy excursions in the most cerebral way. Yet I
wil have blunted that sharp flint that sparks between us, our desire
for another above all else.
Written on the body is a secret code only visible in certain lights:
the accumulations of a lifetime gather there. In places the palimpsest
is so heavily worked that the letters feel like braille.
What you risk reveal what you value.
**************************************
Very few people ever manage what nature manages without effort and
mostly without fail. We don't know who we are or how to function, much
less how to bloom. Blind nature. Homo Sapiens. Who's kidding whom?
They say that every snowflake is different. If that were true, how
could we go on? How could we ever get up off our knees? How could we
ever recover from the wonder of it?
However it is debased or misinterpreted, love is a redemptive
feature. To focus on one individual so that their desires become
superior to yours is a very cleansing experience.
Any measurement must take into account the position of the observer.
There is no such thing as measurement absolute, there is only
measurement relative.
It's true that heroes are inspiring, but mustn't they also do some
rescuing if they are to be worthy of their name? Would Wonder Woman
matter if she only sent commiserating telegrams to the distressed?
I say I'm in love with her. What does that mean? It means I review my
future and my past in the light of this feeling. It is as though I
wrote in a foreign language that I am suddenly able to read.
Wordlessly, she explains me to myself. Like a genuis, she is ignorant
of what she does. -"The Passion"
I don't want to eke out my life like a resource in short supply. The
only selfish life is a timid one. To hold back, to withdraw, to keep
the best in reserve both overvalues the self and undervalues what the
self is. Here's my life - I have to mine it, farm it, trade it, tenant
it and when the lease is up it cannot be renewed. Here's my chance.
I'll take it. -"The Powerbook"
What a strange world it is where you can have as much sex as you like
but love is taboo. I'm talking about the real thing, the grand
passion, which may not allow affection or convenience or happiness.
The truth is that love smashes into your life like an ice floe, and
even if your heart is built like the Titanic you go down. That's the
size of it, the immensity of it. It's not proper, it's not clean, it's
not containable. -"The Powerbook"
Love has got complicated, tied up with promises, bruised with plans,
dogged with an ending that nobody wants - when all love is, is what it
always is - that you look at me and wante me and I don't turn away. If
I want to say no, I will, but for the right reasons. If I want to say
yes, I will, but for the right reasons. Leave the consequences. Leave
the finale. Leave the grand statements. This simplicity of feeling
should not be taxed. -"The Powerbook"
**************************************
from: Gut Symmetries
Now that physics is proving the intelligence of the universe what are
we to do about the stupidity of mankind? I include myself. I know that
the earth is not flat but my feet are. I know that space is curved but
my brain has been condoned by habit to grow in a straight line. What I
call light is my own blend of darkness. What I call a view is my
hand-peinted trompe - l'oeil. I run after knowledge like a ferret down
a ferret hole. My limitations, I call the boundaries of what can be
known. I interpret the world by confusing other people's psychology
with my own. I say I am open-minded but what I think is.
I did not believe in fate, but it can be a useful excuse.
When children learn to count they naturally add and multiply.
Subtraction and devision are harder to teach them, perhaps because
reducing the world is an adult skill.
The probability of separate worlds meeting is very small. The lure of
it is immense. We send starships. We fall in love.
When we killed what we were to become what we are, what did we do with
the bodies? We did what most people do; buried them under the
floorboards and got used to the smell.
Unlike my father she could not speak what she felt. Unlike him she
knew this and sat many hours with her head in her hands, I thought
then, to make the words fall out. But the words did not fall out and
her feelings hung inside her, preserved.
The wind up at dusk and the leaves in squalls and the birds flying
into the wind-backed leaves so that in the lost light I could not say
where the leaves stopped and the birds began. I try to distinguish but
at crucial moments the space between carefully separated objects
collapses and I too am whirled up against my will into the dervish of
matter. The difficultly is that every firm step I win out of chaos is
a firm step towards...more chaos. I throw a rope bridge, haul myself
across the gap, and huddled on the little outcrop, safe for now,
observe the view. What is the view? Another gap, another stretch of
water.
If time is a river then we shall all meet death by water.
Whatever it is that pulls the pin, that hurls you past the boundaries
of your own life into a brief and total beauty, even for a moment, it
is enough.
**************************************
from: Art and Lies: A Piece for Three Voices and a Bawd
Why is it that the Church of Rome had burned her poems and excommunicated her?
Galileo has had his pardon but not Sappho.
Galileo is no longer a heretic but Sappho is still a Sapphist.
"Know thyself", said Socrates.
"Know thyself", said Sappho, "and make sure that the Church never finds out".
After loss of Identity, the most potent modern terror, is loss of
sexuality, or, as Descartes didn't say, "I fuck therefore I am".
Shame. Unusual for a Catholic to feel shame. Guilt is our ticket.
Guilt to confess, guilt to expiate, guilt, good riddance and gone. The
priest understands that. Shame comes from an older and different moral
sense, where the wrong-doer does not fear punishment, either in this
world or the next, but fears that shrinking up of self, the loss that
any small, mean, dirty or stupid act, charges to the soul.
If I cheat another, I cheat myself out of the person that I could be.
If I wound another, I will eventually find the cut recalled to my own
heart. There is no appropriate confession, only the will not to fail
again so readily, perhaps because while failure can be forgiven it
cannot be excused.
Two things significantly distinguish human beings from the other
animals; an interest in the past and the possibility of language.
Brought together they make a third: Art.
There's no such thing as autobiography, there's only art and lies.
Popular culture, that's art isn't it? Subjective, romantic,
democratic, approachable, good notices in the quality press. If they
don't like it there must be something wrong with it. Does is smell
fishy? What's it about anyway? Where shall I put it?
Fit it all in. Fit it all in, as they say in the back alleys for a
Saturday night fiver. So little time. Fit it all in.
Clock culture. Stuff me until I burst and make an installation out o
the purée. Art? Don't be silly. The contemplative life? I have a lunch
appointment. How long will it take?
Lunch? Forever. Be forever lunching. Chomping bovinely through the
day, wondering why all flesh is grass.
**************************************
from: "The Poetics of Sex."
I am proud to be Picasso's lover in spite of queer looks we get when
holding hands on busy streets. "Mummy, why is that man staring at us?"
I said when only one month old. "Don't worry, dear, he can't help it,
he's got something wrong with his eyes".
We need more Labradors. The world is full of blind people. They don't
see Picasso and me dignified in our love. They see perverts, inverts,
tribades, homosexuals. They see circus freaks and Satan worshippers,
girl-catchers and porno turn-ons. Picasso says they don't know how to
look at pictures either.
I like to be a hero, like to come back to my island full of girls
carrying a net of words forbidden them. Poor girls, they are locked
outside their words just as the words are locked into meaning. Such a
lot of locking up goes on on the Mainland but here on Lesbos our doors
are always open.
Stay inside, don't walk the streets, bar the windows, keep your mouth
shut, keep your legs together, strap your purse around your neck,
don't wear valuables, don't look up, don't talk to strangers, don't
risk it, don't try it. He means she but not when He means Men.
Mainland is a Private Club.
That's all right boys, so is this. This delicious unacknowledged
island where we are naked with each other. The boat that brings us
here will crack beneath your weight. This is territory you cannot
invade.
**************************************
from: Sexing the Cherry
All times can be inhabited, all places be visited. In a single day the
mind can make a millpond of the oceans. Some people who never have
crossed the land they were born on have travelled all over the world.
The journey is not linear, it is always back and forth, denying the
calendar, the wrinkles and lines of the body. The self is not
contained in any moment or any place, but it is only in the
intersection of moment and place that the self might, for a moment, be
seen vanishing through a door, which disappears at once.
Lies 1: There is only the present and nothing to remember.
Lies 2: Time is a straight line.
Lies 3: The difference between the past and the future is that one has
happened while the other has not.
Lies 4: We can only be in one place at a time.
Lies 5: Any proposition that contains the word "finite" (the world,
the universe, experience, ourseleves...)
Lies 6: Reality as something which can be agreed upon.
Lies 7: Reality as truth.
Thinking about time is to acknowledge two contradictory certainties:
that our outward lives are governed by the seasons and the clock; that
our inward lives are governed by something much less regular - an
imaginative impulse cutting through the dictates of daily time, and
leaving us free to ignore the boundaries of here and now and pass like
lightning along the coil of pure time, that is, the circle of the
universe and whatever it does or does not contain.
The Buddhists say there are 149 ways to God. I'm not looking for God,
only for myself, and that is far more complicated. God has had a great
deal written about Him; nothing has been written about me. God is
bigger, like my mother, easier to find, even in the dark. I could be
anywhere, and since I can't describe myself I can't ask for help.
If you're a hero you can be an idiot, behave badly, ruin your personal
life, have any number of mistresses and talk about yourself all the
time and nobody minds. Heroes are immune. They have wide shoulders and
plenty of hair and wherever they go a crowd gathers. Mostly they enjoy
the company of other men, although attractive women are part of their
reward.
**************************************
from: The Passion.
You play, you win, you play, you lose. You play. It's the playing
that's irresistible. Dicing from one year to the next with the things
you love, what you risk reveals what you value.
To kiss well one must kiss solely. No groping hands or stammering
hearts. The lips and the lips alone are the pleasure. Passion is
sweeter split strand by strand. Divided and re-divided like mercury
then gathered up only at the last moment.
I say I'm in love with her. What does that mean?
It means I review my future and my past in the light of this feeling.
It is as though I wrote in a foreign language that I am suddenly able
to read. Wordlessly, she explains me to myself. Like genius, she is
ignorant of what she does.
**************************************
from: Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit
I went into the living room, looking for something to do. In the
kitchen I heard my mother switch on the radio.
"And now", said a voice, "a programme about the family life of snails."
My mother shrieked.
"Did you hear that?" she demanded, and poked her head round the
kitchen door. "The family life of snails, it's an Abomination, it's
like saying we come from monkeys."
I thought about it. Mr and Mrs Snail at home on a wet Wednesday night;
Mr Snail dozing quietly, Mrs Snail reading a book about difficult
children. "I'm so worried doctor. He's so quiet, won't come out of his
shell."
"No mum," I replied, "it's not like that at all."
But she wasn't listening.
History should be a hammock for swinging and a game for playing, the
way cats play. Claw it, chew it, rearrange it and at bedtime it's
still a ball of string full of knots. Nobody should mind. Some people
make a lot of money out of it. Publishers do well, children, when
bright, can come top. It's an all-purpose rainy day pursuit, this
reducing of stories called history.
And when I look at a history book and think of the imaginative effort
it has taken to squeeze this oozing world between two boards and
typeset, I am astonished. Perhaps the event has an unassailable truth.
God saw it. God knows. But I am not God. And so when someone tells me
what they heard or saw, I believe them, and I believe their friend who
also saw, but not in the same way, and I can put these accounts
together and I will not have a seamless wonder but a sandwich laced
with mustard of my own. (...)
Here is some advice. If you want to keep your own teeth, make your own
sandwiches...
There are many forms of love and affection, some people can spend
their whole lives together without knowing each other's names. Naming
is a difficult and time-consuming process; it concerns essences, and
it means power. But on wild nights who can call you home? Only the one
who knows your name. Romantic love has been diluted into paperback
form and has sold thousands and millions of copies. Somewhere it is
still in the original, written on tablets of stone. I would cross seas
and suffer sunstroke and give away all I have, but not for a man,
because they want to be the destroyer and never be destroyed. That is
why they are unfit for romantic love. There are exceptions and I hope
they are happy.
Marriage isn't for life any more - life is too long. Marriage is for
love. Love gladly accepts responsibility. Love wants commitment.
Marriage should be celebrated as the optimistic and glorious thing
that it is. We can't call it a failure if it doesn't last for ever."
really get into "Sexing the Cherry," but I think "Written on the Body"
should be mandatory for anyone who has ever been in love...
Here's a large selection of quotes. There are also a couple more in my userinfo profile. Enjoy!
from: Written On the Body
I used to think of marriage as a plate-glass window just begging for a
brick. The self-exhibition, the self-satisfaction, smarmimess,
tightness, tight-arsedness. The way married couples go out in fours
like a pantomime horse, the men walking together at the front, the
women trailing a little way behind. The men fetching the gin and
tonics from the bar while the women take their handbags to the toilet.
I doesn't have to be like that but mostly it is.
When I say "I will be true to you" I must mean it in spite of the
formalities, instead of the formalities. If I commit adultery in my
heart then I have lost you a little. The bright vision of your face
will blur. I may not notice this once or twice, I may pride myself on
having enjoyed those fleshy excursions in the most cerebral way. Yet I
wil have blunted that sharp flint that sparks between us, our desire
for another above all else.
Written on the body is a secret code only visible in certain lights:
the accumulations of a lifetime gather there. In places the palimpsest
is so heavily worked that the letters feel like braille.
What you risk reveal what you value.
**************************************
Very few people ever manage what nature manages without effort and
mostly without fail. We don't know who we are or how to function, much
less how to bloom. Blind nature. Homo Sapiens. Who's kidding whom?
They say that every snowflake is different. If that were true, how
could we go on? How could we ever get up off our knees? How could we
ever recover from the wonder of it?
However it is debased or misinterpreted, love is a redemptive
feature. To focus on one individual so that their desires become
superior to yours is a very cleansing experience.
Any measurement must take into account the position of the observer.
There is no such thing as measurement absolute, there is only
measurement relative.
It's true that heroes are inspiring, but mustn't they also do some
rescuing if they are to be worthy of their name? Would Wonder Woman
matter if she only sent commiserating telegrams to the distressed?
I say I'm in love with her. What does that mean? It means I review my
future and my past in the light of this feeling. It is as though I
wrote in a foreign language that I am suddenly able to read.
Wordlessly, she explains me to myself. Like a genuis, she is ignorant
of what she does. -"The Passion"
I don't want to eke out my life like a resource in short supply. The
only selfish life is a timid one. To hold back, to withdraw, to keep
the best in reserve both overvalues the self and undervalues what the
self is. Here's my life - I have to mine it, farm it, trade it, tenant
it and when the lease is up it cannot be renewed. Here's my chance.
I'll take it. -"The Powerbook"
What a strange world it is where you can have as much sex as you like
but love is taboo. I'm talking about the real thing, the grand
passion, which may not allow affection or convenience or happiness.
The truth is that love smashes into your life like an ice floe, and
even if your heart is built like the Titanic you go down. That's the
size of it, the immensity of it. It's not proper, it's not clean, it's
not containable. -"The Powerbook"
Love has got complicated, tied up with promises, bruised with plans,
dogged with an ending that nobody wants - when all love is, is what it
always is - that you look at me and wante me and I don't turn away. If
I want to say no, I will, but for the right reasons. If I want to say
yes, I will, but for the right reasons. Leave the consequences. Leave
the finale. Leave the grand statements. This simplicity of feeling
should not be taxed. -"The Powerbook"
**************************************
from: Gut Symmetries
Now that physics is proving the intelligence of the universe what are
we to do about the stupidity of mankind? I include myself. I know that
the earth is not flat but my feet are. I know that space is curved but
my brain has been condoned by habit to grow in a straight line. What I
call light is my own blend of darkness. What I call a view is my
hand-peinted trompe - l'oeil. I run after knowledge like a ferret down
a ferret hole. My limitations, I call the boundaries of what can be
known. I interpret the world by confusing other people's psychology
with my own. I say I am open-minded but what I think is.
I did not believe in fate, but it can be a useful excuse.
When children learn to count they naturally add and multiply.
Subtraction and devision are harder to teach them, perhaps because
reducing the world is an adult skill.
The probability of separate worlds meeting is very small. The lure of
it is immense. We send starships. We fall in love.
When we killed what we were to become what we are, what did we do with
the bodies? We did what most people do; buried them under the
floorboards and got used to the smell.
Unlike my father she could not speak what she felt. Unlike him she
knew this and sat many hours with her head in her hands, I thought
then, to make the words fall out. But the words did not fall out and
her feelings hung inside her, preserved.
The wind up at dusk and the leaves in squalls and the birds flying
into the wind-backed leaves so that in the lost light I could not say
where the leaves stopped and the birds began. I try to distinguish but
at crucial moments the space between carefully separated objects
collapses and I too am whirled up against my will into the dervish of
matter. The difficultly is that every firm step I win out of chaos is
a firm step towards...more chaos. I throw a rope bridge, haul myself
across the gap, and huddled on the little outcrop, safe for now,
observe the view. What is the view? Another gap, another stretch of
water.
If time is a river then we shall all meet death by water.
Whatever it is that pulls the pin, that hurls you past the boundaries
of your own life into a brief and total beauty, even for a moment, it
is enough.
**************************************
from: Art and Lies: A Piece for Three Voices and a Bawd
Why is it that the Church of Rome had burned her poems and excommunicated her?
Galileo has had his pardon but not Sappho.
Galileo is no longer a heretic but Sappho is still a Sapphist.
"Know thyself", said Socrates.
"Know thyself", said Sappho, "and make sure that the Church never finds out".
After loss of Identity, the most potent modern terror, is loss of
sexuality, or, as Descartes didn't say, "I fuck therefore I am".
Shame. Unusual for a Catholic to feel shame. Guilt is our ticket.
Guilt to confess, guilt to expiate, guilt, good riddance and gone. The
priest understands that. Shame comes from an older and different moral
sense, where the wrong-doer does not fear punishment, either in this
world or the next, but fears that shrinking up of self, the loss that
any small, mean, dirty or stupid act, charges to the soul.
If I cheat another, I cheat myself out of the person that I could be.
If I wound another, I will eventually find the cut recalled to my own
heart. There is no appropriate confession, only the will not to fail
again so readily, perhaps because while failure can be forgiven it
cannot be excused.
Two things significantly distinguish human beings from the other
animals; an interest in the past and the possibility of language.
Brought together they make a third: Art.
There's no such thing as autobiography, there's only art and lies.
Popular culture, that's art isn't it? Subjective, romantic,
democratic, approachable, good notices in the quality press. If they
don't like it there must be something wrong with it. Does is smell
fishy? What's it about anyway? Where shall I put it?
Fit it all in. Fit it all in, as they say in the back alleys for a
Saturday night fiver. So little time. Fit it all in.
Clock culture. Stuff me until I burst and make an installation out o
the purée. Art? Don't be silly. The contemplative life? I have a lunch
appointment. How long will it take?
Lunch? Forever. Be forever lunching. Chomping bovinely through the
day, wondering why all flesh is grass.
**************************************
from: "The Poetics of Sex."
I am proud to be Picasso's lover in spite of queer looks we get when
holding hands on busy streets. "Mummy, why is that man staring at us?"
I said when only one month old. "Don't worry, dear, he can't help it,
he's got something wrong with his eyes".
We need more Labradors. The world is full of blind people. They don't
see Picasso and me dignified in our love. They see perverts, inverts,
tribades, homosexuals. They see circus freaks and Satan worshippers,
girl-catchers and porno turn-ons. Picasso says they don't know how to
look at pictures either.
I like to be a hero, like to come back to my island full of girls
carrying a net of words forbidden them. Poor girls, they are locked
outside their words just as the words are locked into meaning. Such a
lot of locking up goes on on the Mainland but here on Lesbos our doors
are always open.
Stay inside, don't walk the streets, bar the windows, keep your mouth
shut, keep your legs together, strap your purse around your neck,
don't wear valuables, don't look up, don't talk to strangers, don't
risk it, don't try it. He means she but not when He means Men.
Mainland is a Private Club.
That's all right boys, so is this. This delicious unacknowledged
island where we are naked with each other. The boat that brings us
here will crack beneath your weight. This is territory you cannot
invade.
**************************************
from: Sexing the Cherry
All times can be inhabited, all places be visited. In a single day the
mind can make a millpond of the oceans. Some people who never have
crossed the land they were born on have travelled all over the world.
The journey is not linear, it is always back and forth, denying the
calendar, the wrinkles and lines of the body. The self is not
contained in any moment or any place, but it is only in the
intersection of moment and place that the self might, for a moment, be
seen vanishing through a door, which disappears at once.
Lies 1: There is only the present and nothing to remember.
Lies 2: Time is a straight line.
Lies 3: The difference between the past and the future is that one has
happened while the other has not.
Lies 4: We can only be in one place at a time.
Lies 5: Any proposition that contains the word "finite" (the world,
the universe, experience, ourseleves...)
Lies 6: Reality as something which can be agreed upon.
Lies 7: Reality as truth.
Thinking about time is to acknowledge two contradictory certainties:
that our outward lives are governed by the seasons and the clock; that
our inward lives are governed by something much less regular - an
imaginative impulse cutting through the dictates of daily time, and
leaving us free to ignore the boundaries of here and now and pass like
lightning along the coil of pure time, that is, the circle of the
universe and whatever it does or does not contain.
The Buddhists say there are 149 ways to God. I'm not looking for God,
only for myself, and that is far more complicated. God has had a great
deal written about Him; nothing has been written about me. God is
bigger, like my mother, easier to find, even in the dark. I could be
anywhere, and since I can't describe myself I can't ask for help.
If you're a hero you can be an idiot, behave badly, ruin your personal
life, have any number of mistresses and talk about yourself all the
time and nobody minds. Heroes are immune. They have wide shoulders and
plenty of hair and wherever they go a crowd gathers. Mostly they enjoy
the company of other men, although attractive women are part of their
reward.
**************************************
from: The Passion.
You play, you win, you play, you lose. You play. It's the playing
that's irresistible. Dicing from one year to the next with the things
you love, what you risk reveals what you value.
To kiss well one must kiss solely. No groping hands or stammering
hearts. The lips and the lips alone are the pleasure. Passion is
sweeter split strand by strand. Divided and re-divided like mercury
then gathered up only at the last moment.
I say I'm in love with her. What does that mean?
It means I review my future and my past in the light of this feeling.
It is as though I wrote in a foreign language that I am suddenly able
to read. Wordlessly, she explains me to myself. Like genius, she is
ignorant of what she does.
**************************************
from: Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit
I went into the living room, looking for something to do. In the
kitchen I heard my mother switch on the radio.
"And now", said a voice, "a programme about the family life of snails."
My mother shrieked.
"Did you hear that?" she demanded, and poked her head round the
kitchen door. "The family life of snails, it's an Abomination, it's
like saying we come from monkeys."
I thought about it. Mr and Mrs Snail at home on a wet Wednesday night;
Mr Snail dozing quietly, Mrs Snail reading a book about difficult
children. "I'm so worried doctor. He's so quiet, won't come out of his
shell."
"No mum," I replied, "it's not like that at all."
But she wasn't listening.
History should be a hammock for swinging and a game for playing, the
way cats play. Claw it, chew it, rearrange it and at bedtime it's
still a ball of string full of knots. Nobody should mind. Some people
make a lot of money out of it. Publishers do well, children, when
bright, can come top. It's an all-purpose rainy day pursuit, this
reducing of stories called history.
And when I look at a history book and think of the imaginative effort
it has taken to squeeze this oozing world between two boards and
typeset, I am astonished. Perhaps the event has an unassailable truth.
God saw it. God knows. But I am not God. And so when someone tells me
what they heard or saw, I believe them, and I believe their friend who
also saw, but not in the same way, and I can put these accounts
together and I will not have a seamless wonder but a sandwich laced
with mustard of my own. (...)
Here is some advice. If you want to keep your own teeth, make your own
sandwiches...
There are many forms of love and affection, some people can spend
their whole lives together without knowing each other's names. Naming
is a difficult and time-consuming process; it concerns essences, and
it means power. But on wild nights who can call you home? Only the one
who knows your name. Romantic love has been diluted into paperback
form and has sold thousands and millions of copies. Somewhere it is
still in the original, written on tablets of stone. I would cross seas
and suffer sunstroke and give away all I have, but not for a man,
because they want to be the destroyer and never be destroyed. That is
why they are unfit for romantic love. There are exceptions and I hope
they are happy.
Marriage isn't for life any more - life is too long. Marriage is for
love. Love gladly accepts responsibility. Love wants commitment.
Marriage should be celebrated as the optimistic and glorious thing
that it is. We can't call it a failure if it doesn't last for ever."
