"How to Stay Married"... My Favorite Quotes

I laughed. I cried. It moved me!

On Wednesday, I shared about finishing Harrison Scott Key’s “How to Stay Married” while freezer cooking, then I promised some favorite quotes. Here they are. Hopefully they’ll pique your interest in this book and nudge you to give it a listen

Men never talk about being betrayed. I want to. I feel I must. I have many deep convictions, and one of them is that suffering can and should be monetized.

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[The book of] 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.

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Compatibility is an accomplishment of marriage, not a prerequisite.

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Audacity, therapy, honesty, intimacy, nudity, a belief in transcendent profundity, a loving community that does not bless the whims of your ego but loves you anyway: You need all of these to stay married, and a thousand million other mercies besides, including perhaps the most obvious and impossible of virtues. You need comedy.

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They hug us. They feed us. We feed them. They feed our children and we feed theirs and they feed Gary when we’re out of town and when they’re out of town, we ffed their cats. All we’re doing is feeding each other, basically, with hymns and prayers and sermons thrown in there to remind us why.

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Maybe you think me a fool for believing in a God that helped me stay married to a woman who gave me every good reason to let her go. Maybe I let bad things happen because for many years I had the emotional intelligence of a potted succulent. Maybe so. There are a lot maybes in this book. Sometimes maybe is all you have to hold on to. That’s all faith is, an enthusiastic maybe. A passionate probably. A hopeful hopefully.

Maybe some these questions disqualify me from calling myself a Good American Christian, but I’m not worried about the approval of whitewashed tombs who can’t tell the difference between doubt and wonder.