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Anniversary Quotes

There is no anniversary collection behind this page. It is put together from the pages on love, marriage, romance and time, then sorted by quality, so what comes up first is whatever those four pages rate highest.

Expect poems and passages from novels more than card lines. Some of the best material here only works with the sentences around it, which is why each quote links to its own page with the source and the notes. If you plan to put one in print, check the flag first: a line marked misattributed is fine to enjoy and risky to credit.

Random quote on Anniversary

Most quoted on anniversary:

Marriage has played a critical role in the operation of the criminal justice system, including serving as a defense to crime and as a form of punishment

Melissa Murray

I fell in love with this moon-face: Lavishly I am scattered on the honeymouth
I glanced at the black eye; being black I landed on the eyebrow.

Yunus Emre

Time never returns once lost.

Hyder Bux Jatoi

You should learn that life, like love, is the only business whose balance sheet must end in the red: you have to give everything without calculating what you get in return.

Paolo Crepet

What he thought of her she knew, what he was capable of saying to her she had felt; yet they were married, for all that, and marriage meant that a woman should cleave to the man with whom, uttering tremendous vows, she had stood at the altar.

Henry James The Portrait of a Lady (1881)

Time is more complex near the sea than in any other place, for in addition to the circling of the sun and the turning of the seasons, the waves beat out the passage of time on the rocks and the tides rise and fall as a great clepsydra.

John Steinbeck Tortilla Flat (1935)

It wasn't about, 'Oh I want to make a film where I get to kiss a 10-year-old boy'. To me it was I wanted to make a film where you're trying to understand love.

Nicole Kidman

What did my fingers do before they held him?
What did my heart do, with its love?

Sylvia Plath Three Women: A Poem for Three Voices (1962)

I don't understand the ones that have no sense of hope and invest in hate. That's not gonna work out, you know? It's a waste of your time!

Tom Petty Interview With Alan Bangs (1999)

Being an immortal doesn’t matter to me. If one looks out into the universe and perceives what true immortality would mean in terms of time and space, it takes monstrous hubris to even conceive of personal immortality, much less desire it.

Sheri S. Tepper The Visitor (2002)

Set wide the window. Let me drink the day.
I loved light ever, light in eye and brain —
No tapers mirrored in long palace floors,
Nor dedicated depths of silent aisles,
But just the common dusty wind-blown day
That roofs earth's millions.

Edith Wharton Vesalius in Zante (1564)

In love affairs, there is no mediator like a merry, simple-hearted child — ever ready to cement divided hearts, to span the unfriendly gulf of custom, to melt the ice of cold reserve, and overthrow the separating walls of dread formality and pride.

Anne Brontë The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848)

Somewhere In Time is the story of a love which transcends time, What Dreams May Come is the story of a love which transcends death. ... I feel that they represent the best writing I have done in the novel form.

Richard Matheson

Love is just another means of manipulation. We can use that emotion like we use hatred and fear.

John Twelve Hawks Fourth Realm Trilogy (2005)

Forty years ago, my dad gave up a safe seat in Congress to run for governor and, finally, forty years later, we're gonna have a Larry Hogan in the governor's mansion.

Larry Hogan

I wanted the basic needs of human existence—satiation of hunger, good health, love—to take on the shapes of small fruits we could plant and harvest. But who would be the plantation owners, and who the harvesters?

Jaroslav Kalfař Spaceman of Bohemia (2017)

Earth and metal ...
although my breathing ceases
time and tide go on.

Atsujin

Thy love hath taken me from me; Thou, Thou art needed by me.
Day and night do I burn; Thou, Thou art needed by me.
Were they to slay me, let them winnow my ashes into the heavens.
There let my dust cry, "Thou, Thou art needed by me."

Yunus Emre

If we only have love
Then tomorrow will dawn
And the days of our years
Will rise on that morn.

Rod McKuen If We Only Have Love (1968)

Love has a way of cheating itself consciously, like a child who plays at solitary hide-and-seek; it is pleased with assurances that it all the while disbelieves.

George Eliot Adam Bede (1859)

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