“[Milton argued] that if people who could not love each other were compelled not to separate and to be faithful to each other, it amounted to treating marriage as stock breeding. If human love was holy, he argued, and if the individual soul mattered, people had to be free to find a mate who shared their heart’s affections. This turns out to be one of the deep paradoxes in the history of marriage: that the freedom to marry was established by the freedom to divorce.”

—Robert Hass, Introduction to Into the Garden: A Wedding Anthology

“I believe that living is an act of creativity and that, at certain moments in our lives, our creative imaginations are more conspicuously demanded than at others. At certain moments, the need to decide upon the story of our own lives becomes particularly pressing—when we choose a mate, for example … every marriage [is] a narrative construct—or two narrative constructs. In unhappy marriages, I see two versions of reality rather than two people in conflict. I see a struggle for imaginative dominance going on. Happy marriages seem to me those in which the two partners agree on the scenario they are enacting.”

—Phyllis Rose, from Parallel Lives: Five Victorian Marriages