We're having our wedding at a historical two-room school house. There are fourteen chalkboards mounted in the walls in both rooms, and of course, we totally got permission to write on them. So, we decided the cheapest way to decorate a literary-themed wedding is to take quotes from our favorite authors and poets about love, hope, marriage and happiness, and get a friend with good penmanship to put them up on the chalkboards for us.
52 incredibly romantic and not (too) cheesy love & wedding quotes
I culled my quotes file and nailed down fifty-two bad-ass quotes that I adore and that I'm sharing with you now. I used most of... Read more
I wanted a good mix of science fiction and classical writers that we both loved, so I turned to Google. I learned while doing my research was that… A) Lots of people don't cite the source, only the author, and verifying that the quote was accurate and finding out what book or poem took a lot longer than I anticipated, and B) Not everything you find on Pinterest is an accurate quote, or is mis-attributed. The Robert Fulghum quote is often cited as Dr. Seuss and the Walt Whitman has a lot of Pins as a stripped-down version of itself. I went to a wedding recently where they did cite the Fulghum quote as Suessian, and I had to really bite my tongue from saying anything. DOUBLE CHECK to avoid dorks like me internally freaking out about the inaccuracies!
I'd like to share with you all these awesome, (and researched!) steal-able quotes…
“Hope is a thing with feathers / That perches in the soul, / And sings the tune without the words / And never stops at all. –Emily Dickinson Journal: Hope Is the Thing with Feathers
“There is nothing more admirable than when two people who see eye to eye keep house … confounding their enemies and delighting their friends.” -Homer, The Odyssey
“Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind; and therefore is winged Cupid painted blind.” –A Midsummer Night's Dream by William Shakespeare
“He took her in his arms and kissed her, under the sunlit sky, and he cared not that they stood high upon the walls in the sight of many.” –The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien
“Whatever souls are made of, his and mine are the same.” –Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë
“Sometimes when you fall, you fly.” –Fables and Reflections by Neil Gaiman
“Love is that condition where another person's happiness is essential to your own.” –Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert A. Heinlein
“Happiness is the highest form of wisdom.” –Kushiel's Mercy by Jacqueline Carey
“Now I think all of us were born with a hole in our hearts, and we go around looking for the person who can fill it. You… you fill me up.” –Wolves of the Calla by Stephen King
“Love is another kind of power, which shouldn't surprise you. Magic comes from emotions, among other things. And when two people are together, in that intimacy, when they really, selflessly love each other it changes them both. It lingers on in the energy of their lives, even when they are apart.” –Blood Rites by Jim Butcher
“We're all a little weird. And life is a little weird. And when we find someone whose weirdness is compatible with ours, we join up with them and fall into mutually satisfying weirdness — and call it love — true love.” –True Love by Robert Fulghum
“Mawwage. Mawwage is what bwings us togevah today. Mawwage, that bwessed awwangement, that dweam wifin a dweam.” –The Princess Bride by William Goldman
“Love doesn't just sit there, like a stone, it has to be made, like bread; remade all the time, made new.” –The Lathe of Heaven by Ursula K. Le Guin
“Day by day and night by night we were together — all else has long been forgotten by me.” –Once I Pass'd Through A Populous City by Walt Whitman
What quotes did you use for your wedding?
We had one reading, done by my oldest friend, by Rumi:
This Marriage
May these vows and this marriage be blessed.
May it be sweet milk,
this marriage, like wine and halvah.
May this marriage offer fruit and shade
like the date palm.
May this marriage be full of laughter,
our every day a day in paradise.
May this marriage be a sign of compassion,
a seal of happiness here and hereafter.
May this marriage have a fair face and a good name,
an omen as welcomes the moon in a clear blue sky.
I am out of words to describe
how spirit mingles in this marriage.
Rumi had a way with words. 🙂 I still get shivers when I read this, and it seemed like the best sort of blessing – short, sweet, and meaningful without being too mushy.
There’s never enough Rumi. They should hand out Rumi with our paychecks. They should hand out Rumi with our coffee.
My absolute favorite!!!! I was asked to do a reading at my brother’s wedding and really wanted to do this one! <3
Best Quote Evah courtesy of Cookie Monster:
Sometimes, me think
What is Love?
Then me think
Love is what last cookie is for.
Me save last cookie for you.
I’m going to have to have one of my kids say this in our ceremony!
In my hometown, it is very common to have a cookie table at your wedding. Hubs and I are major into sugary deliciousness, so our cookie table included a picture of Mr. Monster and his quote.
Do you happen to be from Pittsburgh or thereabouts? I found out about the cookie table when I was living there, and am SO STOKED about it. Even though I’m eloping, I still plan to bake and freeze a bunch of cookies for the day to have for my small amount of guests. Because cookie tables.
Before the month before I got married, I posted a new quote on my Facebook every day. Some of my favorites are in this list!
Some others are:
“The supreme happiness of life consists in the conviction that one is loved; loved for one’s own sake–let us say rather, loved in spite of one’s self.” — Victor Hugo, Les Misérables
“So yes, I know that love in unconditional. But I also know that it can be unpredictable, unexpected, uncontrollable, unbearable, and strangely easy to mistake for loathing.” — Stardust
“Love should end with hope… Hope guides me. It is what gets me through the day, and especially the night. The hope that after you’re gone from my sight, it will not be the last time I look upon you.” — A Knight’s Tale
“‘I love you’ is the inscription on Pandora’s Box.” — Mason Cooley, City Aphorisms, Seventh Selection
“Oh, the comfort — the inexpressible comfort of feeling safe with a person — having neither to weigh thoughts nor measure words, but pouring them all right out, just as they are, chaff and grain together; certain that a faithful hand will take and sift them, keep what is worth keeping, and then with the breath of kindness blow the rest away.” — Dinah Craik, A Life for a Life
“You have made a place in my heart where I thought there was no room for anything else. You have made flowers grow where I cultivated dust and stones.” — Robert Jordan, The Shadow Rising
There can never be enough Neil Gaiman! The full quote is from Matthew the Raven in Sandman “Sometimes you wake up. Sometimes the fall kills you. And Sometimes when you fall, you fly.” I have it hanging in my home office- in my Denver “burb” house! 😉
While helping friends with wedding crafts they showed me her programs that had all been printed, cut, and tied together with ribbons. They flipped them over to show me the ‘adorable’ Dr. Seuss quote on the back. (Yes, the one mentioned above.)
We were standing in a study filled with books. I told them. I wouldn’t have told them on their wedding day, but seeing it there and then- I’m not exactly someone to hold my tongue lol.
A couple of poems:
since feeling is first
who pays any attention
to the syntax of things
will never wholly kiss you;
wholly to be a fool
while Spring is in the world
my blood approves,
and kisses are a far better fate
than wisdom
lady i swear by all flowers. Don’t cry
–the best gesture of my brain is less than
your eyelids’ flutter which says
we are for eachother: then
laugh, leaning back in my arms
for life’s not a paragraph
And death i think is no parenthesis
E. E. Cummings
I do not love you as if you were salt-rose, or topaz,
or the arrow of carnations the fire shoots off.
I love you as certain dark things are to be loved,
in secret, between the shadow and the soul.
I love you as the plant that never blooms
but carries in itself the light of hidden flowers;
thanks to your love a certain solid fragrance,
risen from the earth, lives darkly in my body.
I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where.
I love you straightforwardly, without complexities or pride;
so I love you because I know no other way
than this: where I does not exist, nor you,
so close that your hand on my chest is my hand,
so close that your eyes close as I fall asleep.
Pablo Neruda, Sonnet XVII
Also, a line by Rumi:
“The whole business of love is to drown in the sea.”
Oh, Neruda. That sonnet gives me goosebumps every time I read it. His book _100 Love Sonnets_ is worth tracking down.
I am using quotes from final fantasy posted on table cards from games in the series.
My favorite is “I am the darkness, you are the stars, our love is brighter than the sun” from the original snes version of FF VI aka III
This is wonderful, thank you for sharing!! We’re using author names as table names, and adding a ‘love’ sort of quote under each name. I will happily steal a few of these 🙂
Thank you, this is a great post. Your taste in quotes, authors and in life is awesome!
So spot on! As a librarian/research skills teacher and general Lit geek I’m finding it really frustrating that there’s loads of brilliant quotes going around teh interwebs with no or completely erroneous citation. I think the worse one I’ve found so far was a segment from a distinctly ‘adult’ author attributed to Winnie the Pooh/ A. A.Milne :S It’s yearly easy to do know, I’ll admit that some of my secret Pinterest boards are chockablock of stuff that I’ve gone ‘oh I’ll verify it later…’ Six week holidays task methinks…
One thing I’ve found though is that there’s just too much good lit/film/tv/song quotes, who’d thought it? 😉 Puzzling as to how to share as many of these as possible with people without overwhelming them.
I too ranted recently about the actual source of the “Dr Seuss” quote when a friend’s parent posted it on facebook about her daughter’s new relationship. Then I saw it on a wedding magazine blog (in someone’s real wedding photos) and had a double cringe. It’s so cringey now it almost takes the awesome out of the quote itself.
I do think the Dr Seuss one I have seen in both places is a slightly diluted version though, just to make it sound more Seussy me thinks.
At my sister’s wedding just over 2 years (!!) ago, I did a reading. I wanted something sufficiently offbeat, to bring my flair into it, but traditional enough to slip under the radar. It took a lot of searching to strike the right balance.
I went with Mr Roger’s “It’s You I Like”
It’s you I like,
It’s not the things you wear,
It’s not the way you do your hair–
But it’s you I like.
The way you are right now,
The way down deep inside you–
Not the things that hide you,
Not your toys–
They’re just beside you.
But it’s you I like–
Every part of you,
Your skin, your eyes, your feelings
Whether old or new.
I hope that you’ll remember
Even when you’re feeling blue
That it’s you I like,
It’s you yourself,
It’s you, it’s you I like.
(source: http://pbskids.org/rogers/songLyricsItsYouILike.html )
On a different note, my Quotes Board on Pinterest is named “Abraham Lincoln” because of this exact problem. There’s this awesome joke quote that says something like “You can’t trust quotes on the Internet. ~Abraham Lincoln”
There are some great quotes here, but do your own research before using them. The midsummer night’s dream one means the opposite of what it seems when excerpted like that. It’s basically saying love has nothing to do with the person who is loved, who in the case of the quote is a terrible person. It isn’t saying that the mind loves for quality while the eyes love for looks; loving with the mind is loving ones own concept without regard for the subject (which the eyes discern.) A theme of the play is how little love has to do with the beloved, it’s all, foolishly, about the lover, and therefore the beloved can be easily switched. It’s a very cynical play towards love, and not a concept of love most of us want at our weddings. A theme of the play is making fun of earnest Petrarchan love.
Yes! That’s what I was thinking re: the wuthering heights quote too. Like, yeah their souls are the same which leads them to completely ruin everybody’s lives because they only care about themselves. I love the book, but Catherine/Heathcliff is not the couple we should all try to emulate.
Oh my God, that Princess Bride quote.
And I would love to somehow include the quote from Kushiel’s Mercy, if only to imagine the look on some prudish relatives’ faces when they discover what kind of book it is >:)
Jacqueline has a horrid habit of saying tons of quotable, beautiful things; her and Jim Butcher both. I want to quote All Of The Things they both say about love.
(and by horrid, I mean awesome, but in the way that makes you try and quote a whole book to somebody, which tends to get you in trouble.)
We used quotes from scientists on our tables (each scientist was a “table number”), and then had readings from The Union by Robert Fulghum and one “inspired by Carl Sagan” read by loved ones during the ceremony. At the very end, before we were pronounced, my dad (our dad’s were our officiants) read the following from John Muir, which was also in our 16-page Field Guide program:
“The sun shines not on us but in us. The rivers flow not past, but through us. Thrilling, tingling, vibrating every fiber and cell of the substance of our bodies, making them glide and sing. The trees wave and the flowers bloom in our bodies as well as our souls, and every bird song, wind song, and tremendous storm song of the rocks in the heart of the mountains is our song, our very own, and sings our love.”
Here’s another good one, from the film Frida:
Tina Modotti: ” I don’t believe in marriage.
No, I really don’t. Let me be clear about that. I think at worst it’s a hostile political act, a way for small-minded men to keep women in the house and out of the way, wrapped up in the guise of tradition and conservative religious nonsense. At best, it’s a happy delusion – these two people who truly love each other and have no idea how truly miserable they’re about to make each other. But, but, when two people know that, and they decide with eyes wide open to face each other and get married anyway, then I don’t think it’s conservative or delusional. I think it’s radical and courageous and very romantic. To Diego and Frida.”
“Frida Quotes.” Quotes.net. STANDS4 LLC, 2015. Web. 7 Feb. 2015. .
Jim Butcher. Jim freaking Butcher!!! That quote made me jump up and down!! I could do nothing but Dresden Files quotes on love and not worry about running out!!
All the this. I have been a Butcher fan for… well almost half my life now! I am so glad to see others so enthusiastic about him here!
Thank you Thank you thank you! We are constructing our ceremony soon and both love classic literature. You have taken out a lot of the work! Cheers