How to Stay Married Quotes

“Every marriage is a partnership of two broken assholes with good intentions and varying degrees of ability to deliver.”
― Harrison Scott Key, How to Stay Married: The Most Insane Love Story Ever Told

“That is marriage, in the end: two of you, being you, warring against the worst parts of you, making space for the best to grow, and learning to see that some parts of your spouse are not your favorite, and letting those parts be anyway. Hating those parts is no grounds for divorce. The only thing worth divorcing, in most cases, is the hatred itself, and your inborn desire to shape the world to your will like some kind of Marvel villain.”
― Harrison Scott Key, How to Stay Married: The Most Insane Love Story Ever Told

“I loved being a stay-at-home mom but no one prepares you for how lonely it is.”
― Harrison Scott Key, How to Stay Married: The Most Insane Love Story Ever Told

“One of your greatest misconceptions, the one you must jettison as soon as is convenient to you, is that you’re easy to live with. You’re not. You’re a monster.”
― Harrison Scott Key, How to Stay Married: The Most Insane Love Story Ever Told

“Before he got famous for being a sexual degenerate, Louis C.K. said this dumb thing about marriage: 'Divorce is always good news because no good marriage has ever ended in divorce.' The reality is that every marriage is a partnership of two broken assholes with good intentions and varying degrees of ability to deliver. Marriage is as much a mystery to me now as the origins of the universe and the laws that govern the behavior of matter. What makes one work is just as strange as what makes one not. But I possess more information now than I had when this all began. We both do. Lauren has had to come to terms with some difficult truths, such as how her husband has grown a mustache, and I have had to grapple with other truths, such as how my wife left me for the human equivalent of Diet Mountain Dew.”
― Harrison Scott Key, How to Stay Married: The Most Insane Love Story Ever Told

“Genesis never disappoints, crammed as it is with nudity, murder, and many delicious set pieces involving nudity and murder, in addition to DIY boatbuilding instructions.”
― Harrison Scott Key, How to Stay Married: The Most Insane Love Story Ever Told

“I once attempted to flirt with her our freshman year of college, complimenting her sandals before class. She didn't respond, just glared at me with a scowl that would've liquefied helium, for which I repaid her many years later by marrying into her family and sitting next to her every Thanksgiving.”
― Harrison Scott Key, How to Stay Married: The Most Insane Love Story Ever Told

“Laying up treasures in heaven is what my grandmother would’ve called it, when good people do good things because God is watching and remembering.”
― Harrison Scott Key, How to Stay Married: The Most Insane Love Story Ever Told

“You pay pros to clean your teeth and replace your brake shoes. Why won’t you pay someone to give your marriage a little more mileage, too?”
― Harrison Scott Key, How to Stay Married: The Most Insane Love Story Ever Told

“We won’t be traumatizing our children with our divorce. We’ll traumatize them with our marriage, as God intended.”
― Harrison Scott Key, How to Stay Married: The Most Insane Love Story Ever Told

“He’d throw the kids as high as he could in the air. Why do dads do this? It’s a global problem.”
― Harrison Scott Key, How to Stay Married: The Most Insane Love Story Ever Told

“As a young man, the book of Leviticus was easy to mock, all the evidence you needed of God’s pettiness, but after reading CDC recommendations for the reopening of schools, Leviticus now felt familiar, whole chapters devoted to reminding people to wash their hands.”
― Harrison Scott Key, How to Stay Married: The Most Insane Love Story Ever Told

“Perhaps one day we will evolve ourselves into some better arrangement for the children, where benevolent armies of solar-powered robots raise children on expansive baby farms, but until Elon funds this nightmare, marriage is what we’ve got. It’s good for us and it’s good for the kids, even when it hurts like hell. I think often of our daughters and what they have learned of love in this strange season. I suppose we’ve given them enough trauma to turn all three into artists or writers, or at least law students. But we’re here, all of us: a nuclear family, detonated but not destroyed. We won’t be traumatizing our children with our divorce. We’ll traumatize them with our marriage, as God intended.”
― Harrison Scott Key, How to Stay Married: The Most Insane Love Story Ever Told

“Compatibility is an accomplishment of marriage, not a prerequisite.”
― Harrison Scott Key, How to Stay Married: The Most Insane Love Story Ever Told

“I think I'm going to start seeing other women,' I said to my best friend, Mark, one day, over the phone, updating him on the magical adventure of my marital separation.

'Are you sure that's a good idea?'

'No. But I need some way to get Lauren off my mind.'

'Have you tried alcoholism?”
― Harrison Scott Key, How to Stay Married: The Most Insane Love Story Ever Told

“When you trim your own hedges, you learn a lot about your home, and what you learn is that your property is aggressively and continually doing the opposite of what you would prefer: gutters stop, eaves rot, crabgrass runs riot, feral cats colonize crawl spaces for their fun cat orgies.”
― Harrison Scott Key, How to Stay Married: The Most Insane Love Story Ever Told

“Don’t assume your partner is cheating. Assume your partner will, eventually. Assume you will, too.”
― Harrison Scott Key, How to Stay Married: The Most Insane Love Story Ever Told

“Now faith is the substance of things hoped for,” says the book of Hebrews, “the evidence of things not seen.”
― Harrison Scott Key, How to Stay Married: The Most Insane Love Story Ever Told

“Tybee is where dreams go to die of tuberculosis.”
― Harrison Scott Key, How to Stay Married: The Most Insane Love Story Ever Told

“I was so sad I listened to Bob Dylan, which always makes me sad, because the man just cannot sing,”
― Harrison Scott Key, How to Stay Married: The Most Insane Love Story Ever Told

“One thing I learned in all this is that sometimes justice is indistinguishable from mercy.”
― Harrison Scott Key, How to Stay Married: The Most Insane Love Story Ever Told

“Best friends remain best friends because you can take breaks, but a marriage is the sleepover that never ends.”
― Harrison Scott Key, How to Stay Married: The Most Insane Love Story Ever Told

“My flaws could not be blamed for the affair, but they hadn’t helped. Take infidelity off the table and I was, from just about every angle, the least likable person in my marriage.”
― Harrison Scott Key, How to Stay Married: The Most Insane Love Story Ever Told

“exploratory dental varnishing,”
― Harrison Scott Key, How to Stay Married: The Most Insane Love Story Ever Told

“Protestant theologies of the Reformation that complicated faith with systematic theologies and liturgies authored by men with too much education.”
― Harrison Scott Key, How to Stay Married: The Most Insane Love Story Ever Told

“That is marriage, in the end: two of you, being you, warring against the worst parts of you, making space for the best to grow, and learning to see that some parts of your spouse are not your favorite, and letting those parts be anyway. Hating those parts is no grounds for divorce. The only thing worth divorcing, in most cases, is the hatred itself, and your inborn desire to shape the world to your will like some kind of Marvel villain.”
― Harrison Scott Key, How to Stay Married: The Most Insane Love Story Ever Told

“The most precious commodities in any life, the Bible seems to say, are disconcertingly paradoxical: wisdom, but also childlike wonder; courage to venture into alien lands and fight monstrous beasts, but also prudence to remember the dragon in you is the scariest of all. The Old Testament wants you to know that existence is rough, rough as they come, but good, too. When you eff it up, a life can still be made beautiful. Hearts of stone can be made into hearts of flesh. Dead things can dance again.”
― Harrison Scott Key, How to Stay Married: The Most Insane Love Story Ever Told

“It would take me years to understand this, but the understanding began in that church hallway, that a good person is a temporary and imaginary creature, as make-believe as unicorns and fire-breathing cows, because the best of us are often the worst, full of proud and viperous snakes, believing ourselves gods. The dragons did not just live in history and myth. They lived inside me.”
― Harrison Scott Key, How to Stay Married: The Most Insane Love Story Ever Told

“Pop knew that the best way to rid yourself of trauma was to bequeath it to your children. He was a generous man.”
― Harrison Scott Key, How to Stay Married: The Most Insane Love Story Ever Told

“I loved the monthly fellowship luncheons, with mountains of fried chicken and biscuits soft and deep as hotel pillows and gravy good enough to drink. I loved the community of it all, the hymnody and the delicious fatty foods and the cute girls from town, smelling of Electric Youth and Teen Spirit, and all the unending praise by nice church ladies who led us through Bible stories and asked me to read them aloud in class and praised my gift for pronunciation.”
― Harrison Scott Key, How to Stay Married: The Most Insane Love Story Ever Told