I wasn't sure how that would happen, but it had always been my experience in the past, anyhow, that the more I learned about something, the less it frightened me.-22쪽
In the modern industrialized Western world, where I come from, the person whom you choose to marry is perhaps the single most vivid representation of your own personality. Your spouse becomes the most gleaming possible mirror through which your emotional individualism is reflected back to the world. There is no choice more inteselt personal, after all, than whom you choose to marry; that choice tells us, to a large extent, who you are. -35쪽
I was born into a late-twentieth-century American middle-class family. Like untold millions of other people in the comtemporary world born into similar circumstances, I was raised to believe that I was special. My parents(who were neither hippies nor radicals; who in fact voted for Ronald Reagan twice)simply believed that their childeren had particular gift and dreams that set them apart from other people's children. My "me-ness"was always prized, and was moreover reccognized as being different from my sister's "her-ness". Though I was certainly not spoiled, my parents believed that my personal happiness was of some importance, and that I should learn to shape my life's journey in such a way that would support and reflect my individual for contentment. -42쪽
a great wave of matrimonial fever swept across medieval Europe right after the Black Death had killed off seventy five million people. For the survivors, there were suddenly unprecedented avenues for social advancement through marriage. After all, there were thousands of brand-new widows and widowers floating around Europe with a considerable amount of valuable property waiting to be redistributed., and perhaps no more living heirs. What followed, then, was a kind of matrimonial gold rush, a land grab of the highest order. Court recourds from this era are suspiciously filled with cases of twenty-year-old men marrying elderly women. They weren't idiots, these guys. They saw their window-or widow-of opportunity, and they leapt.-61쪽
2010 U.S Census will be documenting same-sex couples as "married"for the first time in order to chart clearly the actual demographics of the nation-73쪽
sometimes life is too hard to be alone, and sometimes life is too good to be alone.-81쪽
I love hime and therefore I want to protect him-even from me.-121쪽
it's the same with relationaships, I think. People always fall in love with the most perfect aspects of each other's personalities. Who wouldn't? Anybody can love the most wonderful parts of another person. But that's not the clever trick. The really clever trick is this: Can you accept the flaws? Can you look at your partner's faults honestly and say 'I can work around that. I can make something out of that.'? Because the good stuff is always going to be there, and it's always going to be pretty and sparkly, but the crap undertneath can ruin you. -129쪽
Moreover, as I aged, I discovered that I loved my work as a writer more and more, and I didn't want to give ip even an hour of that communion.-187쪽
The poet Jack Gilbert wrote that marrige is what happens "between the memorable". He said that we often look back on our marriages years later, perhaps after one spouse has died, and all we can recall are "the vacations, and emergencies"- the high points and low points. The rest of it blends into a blurry sort of daily sameness. But it is that very blurred samenes,s the poet argues, that comprises marriage. Marriage is those two thousand indistinguishable break fasts, where intimacy turns like a slow whell. How do you measure the worth of becoming that familiar to somebody-so utterly well known and so throughly ever-present that you become ad almost invisible necessity, like air?-196쪽
I had grown accustomed to shaping my own agenda without having to take account of somebody else's wishes up untill this point in our love story.-224쪽
Greek, as in: from the contry of Greece, or a member of a collegiate fraternity, or enamored of the sexual passion that bonds two men in love. Instead, I eman that I am Greek in the way I think. Because here's the thing: It has long been understood by pholosophers that the entire bedrock of Western culture is based on two rival world views-the Greek and the Hebrew-and whichever side you embrace more strongly determines to a large extent how you see life.
From the Greeks-specifically from the glory days of ancient Athens-we have inherited our ideas about secular humanism and the sancitity of the indivudual. The Greeks gave us all our notions about democracy and equality and personal liberty and scientific reason and intellectual freedone and open-mindness and what we might cal today "multiculturalism" The Greek take on life, therefore, is urban, sophisticated, and exploratory, always leaving plenty of room for doubt and debate.
-250쪽
On the other hand, there is the Hebrew way of seeing the world. When I say "Hebrew"here, I'm no specifically referring to the tenets of Judaism. "Hebrew", in the sense that philosophers use it here, is shorthand for an ancient world view that is all about tribalism, faith, obedience, and respect. The Hebrew credo is clannish, pathriarchal, authritarian, moralistic, retualistic, and instinctively suspicious of outsiders.Hebrew thinkers see the world as a clear play between good and evil, with god always firmly on "our"side. Human actions are either right or wrong. There is no gray area. The collective is more important than the individual, morality is mroe important thatn happiness, and vow are inviolable.-250쪽
Evety couple in the world has the ptential ober time to become a small and isolated nation of two-creating their own culture, their own language, and their own moral code, to which nobody else can be privy.
Marrige represented a kind of leberty of the heart.-257쪽
Rome! dont be an idiot tonight!-266쪽
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