Elizabeth Gilbert Quotes

Marriage has been in a constant state of evolution since the dawn of the Stone Age. In the process, it has become more flexible - but also more optional.

Times change. The vices of your age are stylish today.

I married the first man I ever kissed. When I tell this to my children, they just about throw up.

The institution of marriage, if you look at it over many centuries, has come and gone.

When cultural change succeeds, it succeeds because it's so embedded in what we do that we don't have to think about.

Cultural standards evolve. The meaning of the public interest also, of course, evolves.

Look - There's good creepy and there's bad creepy. Today's creepy is tomorrow's necessity.

The attempt to redefine the family as a purely voluntary arrangement grows out of the modern delusion that people can keep all their options open all the time.

You can't always count on the devices, attitudes, and conceits that stood you in good stead in 1972 or 1973, or 1978-79, to still have the same impact all these years later.

I think it has been a tremendous feat on the part of East Germans since 1990 to adapt to everything changing.

Heterosexuals were the upstarts who turned marriage into a voluntary love relationship rather than a mandatory economic and political institution.

It takes more than a few generations to change a human nation. Those who are intent to bring (change) will do so.

I like to think about society as being a flock of birds: There seems to be a common consciousness in different time periods, and the new common consciousness reacts to the old standards.

Marriage is an ongoing, centuries-long social experiment that is mostly controlled by the individuals in the relationships who insist on determining what the relationship terms are going to be. And that's why the terms of marriage change with every century and decade. We're shaping it from the inside. Marriage endures because it evolves. Obviously it does. None of us would accept marriage on its 13th century terms, not even the most conservative people...

Isn't it our job to be appalled by our parents? Isn't it every generation's duty to be dismayed by the previous generation? And to assert that we are different - only to discover later that we are distressingly the same?

It's all that the young can do for the old, to shock them and keep them up to date.

The "female culture" has shifted more rapidly than the "male culture"; the image of the go-get 'em woman has yet to be fully matched by the image of the let's take-care-of-the-kids- together man. More important, over the last thirty years, men's underlying feelings about taking responsibility at home have changed much less than women's feelings have changed about forging some kind of identity at work.

We're going to have to change our traditions, our history.

We are the generation that came of age in an ageless society.

Culture is a product of law. And laws create norms for society. This is why anyone who wants to change the culture of a country must try to change the norms of the country.

It's the end of the day where wives stay home and raise the kids and all that. That demeaning stuff? No more. Country club memberships, that's what you shoot for! To hell with that.

It is obvious to any observer that in every western country the increase of importance of public schools has been at least coincident with the relaxation of older family ties.

I don't want to speak too disparagingly of my generation (actually I do, we had a chance to change the world but opted for the Home Shopping Network Instead).

Marriage is going to disappear, should disappear. And now the point is coming in the history of humanity where it becomes possible that marriage can disappear. It is already an outmoded phenomenon, it has lived too long and it has created nothing but misery. Marriage should disappear and love should flower again. One should live with insecurity and freedom. That I call intelligence.

there are now no elders who know more than the young themselves about what the young are experiencing.