Wedding Toasts I'll Never Give

And every night you’d come home, kick off your Crocs, and say, ‘Oof, my dogs are barkin’!’ ”

I want to be better than that. In her story “Floating Bridge,” Alice Munro writes about times “when anything you look at is just a peg to hang the unruly sensations of your body on, and the bits and pieces of your mind.”

Sanskrit is all about creating potentialities—the linguistic word is ‘optionality.’

If I indulged my desire to eat ice cream for breakfast every morning, I would no longer have the pleasure of fitting into my jeans. In this case, I wanted Neal to feel secure more than I wanted to sit at a café with that man wondering if he would hold my hand.

Our abilities narrow, our worlds narrow, our lives narrow, until we are a person whose life is not full of infinite potential but, instead, is teeming with memories of things done and left undone. At forty, I am slowly coming to terms with the elementary notion that being in this world means giving up on other worlds.

“I’ve been thinking about this whole other-people thing. And I think after all this time I have a new thought about it: it’s a terrible idea. I mean, I guess I have three distinct thoughts, all totally true. One: It’s hot. Two: It makes me jealous. Three: It’s a terrible idea. Probably, at least until we’re old, it will keep coming up, and we’ll ke

He said marriage is creative, “a craftsman’s task, a goldsmith’s work, because the husband has the duty of making the wife more of a woman and the wife has the duty of making the husband more of a man. . . . One day you will walk along the streets of your town and the people will say: ‘Look at that beautiful woman, so strong!’ ‘With the husband tha

That it isn’t about the Golden Anniversary at all, But about all the unremarkable years that Hallmark doesn’t even make a card for. It’s about the 2nd anniversary when they were surprised to find they cared for each other more than last year And the 4th when both kids had chickenpox and she threw her shoe at him for no real reason

How terribly hard it is to accept that other people feel what we feel.

There’s a softening in the first few minutes—watching his joy makes me understand his humanity. I’ve entered his world. That’s a big deal.”