Richard Corliss Quotes

Both marriage and death ought to be welcome: the one promises happiness, doubtless the other assures it.

"And they lived happily ever after" is one of the most tragic sentences in literature. It's tragic because it's falsehood. It is a myth that has led generations to expect something from marriage that is not possible.

From infancy, almost, the average girl is told that marriage is her ultimate goal; therefore her training and education must be directed toward that end. Like the mute beast fattened for slaughter, she is prepared for that.

As unmarried business women we must constantly use our opportunities in business in such a way that we are prepared for the marriage which may be ours tomorrow.

At twenty-five, girls begin to talk about being old maids, but secretly resolve that they never will. At thirty, they say nothing about it, but quietly accept the fact.

I think there are plenty of men out there who are capable and accomplished in their own realm. You don't have to be in the same field. I've often been asked, "Didn't you want to get married?" And of course I wanted to get married, but you have to fall in love and want to marry a particular person. You don't get married in the abstract. So, although there were people I felt I might have married, it just never happened.

The reason why so few marriages are happy is because young ladies spend their time in making nets, not in making cages.

I promise to be a splendid husband, but give me a wife who, like the moon, won't in my sky every day...

Why should I cook for my husband? So he can tell a hooker I make a delicious cake?

Women want certain things in marriage--the right to a title and a front seat in the lap of luxury.

Madelyne, we're married now. 'Tis a usual occurrence to bed one's wife on the wedding night.

Worst, when this sensualism intrudes into the education of young women, and withers the hope and affection of human nature, by teaching that marriage signifies nothing but a housewife's thrift, and that woman's life has no other aim.

Life is a freak. That’s its hope and glory.

In the long run wives are to be paid in a peculiar coin — consideration for their feelings. As it usually turns out this is an enormous, unthinkable inflation few men will remit, or if they will, only with a sense of being overcharged.

It is terribly hard to be married, harder than anything. I think one has to be an angel.

Even the God of Calvin never judged anyone as harshly as married couples judge each other.

We have the beginnings of feminism starting to rear its head, where all of that got blown up. The whole point of going to college became not to find a husband - screw that! - feminism became, "You don't want anything about a man to be defining you, and you don't want your relationship to define, you! You don't want a relationship to be your happiness. You certainly don't want marriage to be the sole determining reason you live".

Women come into marriage with great inflated expectations for what they want this relationship to be, and men don't give it that much thought. Men come into it with reluctance about being capsized or trapped or whatever their fear is. When you check in later, women are disappointed because their expectations have not come to pass, and men are pleasantly surprised.

I don't believe in bringing children into the world out of wedlock.

The trouble with marriage is that, while every woman is at heart a mother, every man is at heart a bachelor.

You know how funerals are not for the dead, they’re for the living? Bachelor parties are not for the groom, they’re for the uncommitted.

I've always said that I expected to grow up and get married like any nice southern girl, but the fact is you don't get married in the abstract. You find someone that you'd like to be married to.

The tragedy of marriage is that while all women marry thinking that their man will change, all men marry believing their wife will never change.

To take a wife merely as an agreeable and rational companion, will commonly be found to be a grand mistake.