Look, we've all seen Wedding Crashers. We know that Corinthians can be a real drag — and no matter how pretty your reading voice is, everyone's already heard it. That explains why more and more wedding guests, bridesmaids, and groomsmen are taking to literature for inspiring and romantic passages come toast-time. We've heard the trend is leaning toward kids' books, though frankly, if someone read a line from The Velveteen Rabbit at any of our weddings, it would just turn into a total sob-fest.
Sloppy tears aside, wedding season is still going strong in our little black books. So, we're looking for something cute, appropriate, but not totally cliché to read to our dearly beloveds. If you're in the same boat, here are 11 sweet little quotations that might help you out in a tight spot.
For the dreamers: The Last Battle by C.S. Lewis
"Now at last they were beginning Chapter One of the Great Story no one on earth has ever read: which goes on for ever: in which every chapter is better than the one before."
Photo: Courtesy of HarperCollins.
For the cool couple: Just Kids by Patti Smith
"Where does it all lead? What will become of us? These were our young questions, and young answers were revealed. It leads to each other. We become ourselves...'What will happen to us?' I asked. 'There will always be us,' he answered.”
Photo: Courtesy of Ecco.
For the high school sweethearts: The History of Love by Nicole Krauss
"Once upon a time there was a boy who loved a girl and her laughter was a question he wanted to spend his whole life answering."
Photo: Courtesy of W.W. Norton & Company.
For a short and sweet moment: Kokoro by Natsume Soseki
“Like the first whiff of burning incense, or like the taste of one's first cup of saké, there is in love that moment when all its power is felt.”
Photo: Courtesy of Gateway Editions.
For the non-traditional ceremony: A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers
"We throw the frisbee farther than anyone has ever seen a frisbee go. First it goes higher than anyone has thrown before, so that in the middle of the pale blue there is only the sun’s glazed headlight and the tiny white disc, and then it goes farther than anyone has known a frisbee to go, with us having to use miles of beach, from one cliff to the other, thousands of people in between, to catch it. It’s the trajectory that’s important, we know that, that the distance relies on both velocity and angle of flight, that you have to throw the hell out of the thing, and also put it on the correct trajectory, an upward trajectory both straight and steady, not too high, not too low, because if it’s sent on the right upward path, its momentum will carry it almost twice the distance, the second half on its way down, the second half a gimme, meaning that you need only to provide for half of its distance yourself, it’s momentum providing for the second half, when finally its forward progress slows and slows and stops and it falls, as if parachuting, and then we move and run under, our quick steps scratching into the wet sand and when it falls, it falls into our hands, because we are there. We look like professionals, like we’ve been playing together for years. Busty women stop and stare. Senior citizens sit and shake their heads, gasping. Religious people fall to the knees. No one has ever seen anything like it."
Photo: Courtesy of Simon & Schuster.
For the deep-thinking pair: Swann's Way by Marcel Proust
“To achieve accurate knowledge of others, if such a thing were possible, we could only ever arrive at it through the slow and unsure recognition of our own initial optical inaccuracies. However, such knowledge is not possible: for, while our vision of others is being adjusted, they, who are not made of mere brute matter, are also changing; we think we have managed to see them more clearly, but they shift; and when we believe we have them fully in focus, it is merely our older images of them that we have clarified, but which are themselves already out of date.”
Photo: Courtesy of Modern Library.
For the classic Kodak moment: Sonnet 116, by William Shakespeare
Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O no! it is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.
Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come:
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.
Photo: Courtesy of Oxford.
For the bluntly honest: Captain Corelli's Mandolin by Louis de Bernières
"When you fall in love, it is a temporary madness. It erupts like an earthquake, and then it subsides. And when it subsides, you have to make a decision. You have to work out whether your roots are to become so entwined together that it is inconceivable that you should ever part. Because this is what love is. Love is not breathlessness, it is not excitement, it is not the desire to mate every second of the day. It is not lying awake at night imagining that he is kissing every part of your body. No...don't blush. I am telling you some truths. For that is just being in love; which any of us can convince ourselves we are. Love itself is what is left over, when being in love has burned away. Doesn't sound very exciting, does it? But it is!"
Photo: Courtesy of Secker & Warburg.
When everyone's in the mood to happy-cry: The Velveteen Rabbit by Margery Williams
"You become. It takes a long time. That's why it doesn't happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don't matter at all, because once you are Real you can't be ugly, except to people who don't understand."
Photo: Courtesy of Doubleday.
For the end of the night: A Light in the Attic by Shel Silverstein
“There are no happy endings. Endings are sad, so let's have a happy beginning and a happy middle.”
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