‘Speaking for Myself’… I’ll just shut up then

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19th May, 2008

I’M ALMOST DUMBSTRUCK RIGHT NOW … over Cherie’s Memoirs - “Speaking For Myself”

I’ve decided it might be wise for me to read all of Cherie’s book before I say much more about it. I hate to judge without the full facts. [Not forgetting that the first fact is that book publishers and newspapers with 'deals' retain the right to pick and choose.]

My initial reaction, going from the papers’ coverage, is that if this blog writer and/or spouse wanted a quick way back to singledom, this kind of literary frankness would all but guarantee it. And neither of us is a highly respected world statesman. Nuff said.

I understand Cherie’s memoirs are being serialised on “Book of the Week” all week. I’m going to listen in when I can. Perhaps I’ll feel differently then, though I don’t expect the headlines to be any better, frankly.

Weekdays 9.45am-10.00am, repeated 00.30-00.45am

Monday 19 - Friday 23 May

Speaking for Myself

Cherie Blair tells her story in her own words.

Abridged by Lauris Morgan-Griffiths; producer Sara Davies.

In the meantime, here are some thoughts on marriage, for those interested

A successful marriage requires falling in love many times, always with the same person.
Mignon McLoughlin

Love: A temporary insanity curable by marriage.
Ambrose Bierce

A man in love is not complete until he is married. Then he is finished.
Zsa Zsa Gabor

Some people claim that marriage interferes with romance. There’s no doubt about it. Anytime you have a romance, your wife is bound to interfere.
Groucho Marx

To keep your marriage brimming,
With love in the loving cup,
Whenever you’re wrong admit it;
Whenever you’re right shut up.
Ogden Nash

What greater thing is there for two human souls, than to feel that they are joined for life - to strengthen each other in all labour, to rest on each other in all sorrow, to minister to each other in all pain, to be one with each other in silent unspeakable memories at the moment of the last parting?
George Eliot
Adam Bede

The most important thing a father can do for his children is to love their mother.
Theodore Hesburgh

There is nothing nobler or more admirable than when two people who see eye to eye keep house as man and wife, confounding their enemies and delighting their friends.
Homer

She’s got gaps and I got gaps, and between the two of us, our gaps meet and we sort of fill each other in.
Rocky Balboa
From 1976 Rocky movie.

What counts in making a happy marriage is not so much how compatible you are, but how you deal with incompatibility.
Leo Tolstoy

Never trust a husband too far, nor a bachelor too near.
Helen Rowland

If you want to sacrifice the admiration of many men for the criticism of one, go ahead, get married.
Katharine Hepburn

Marriage is the union of two divinities that a third might be born on earth. It is the union of two souls in a strong love for the abolishment of separateness. It is that higher unity which fuses the separate unities within the two spirits. It is the golden ring in a chain whose beginning is a glance, and whose ending is Eternity. It is the pure rain that falls from an unblemished sky to fructify and bless the fields of divine
Nature.
Kahlil Gibran
Words of the Master

Love at first sight is easy to understand; it’s when two people have been looking at each other for a lifetime that it becomes a miracle.
Amy Bloom

Where you go I will go, and where you stay I will stay. Your people will be my people and your God my God. Where you die I will die, and there I will be buried. May the LORD deal with me, be it ever so severely, if anything but death separates you and me.
The Bible
Ruth 1. 16-17

All married couples should learn the art of battle as they should learn the art of making love. Good battle is objective and honest–never vicious or cruel. Good battle is healthy and constructive, and brings to a marriage the principle of equal partnership.
Ann Landers

All weddings are similar, but every marriage is different.
John Berger

Marriage is our last, best chance to grow up.
Joseph Barth

My advice to you is to get married. If you find a good wife, you’ll be happy; if not, you’ll become a philosopher.
Socrates

The friendship between a man and a woman which does not lead to marriage or desire for marriage may be a life long experience of the greatest value to themselves and to all their circle of acquaintance and of activity; but for this type of friendship both a rare man and a rare woman are needed. Perhaps it should be added that either the man or the woman thus deeply bound in lifelong friendship who seeks marriage must find a still rarer man or woman to wed, to make such a three cornered comradeship a permanent success.
Anna Garlin Spencer

If ever two were one, then surely we.
If ever man were loved by wife, then thee.
Anne Bradstreet

When two people are one
in their inmost hearts,
They shatter even the strength of iron or of bronze.
And when two people understand each other
in their inmost hearts,
Their words are sweet and strong,
like the fragrance of orchids.
I Ching

For two people in a marriage to live together day after day is unquestionably the one miracle the Vatican has overlooked.
Bill Cosby

There are two dilemmas that rattle the human skull: How do you hang on to someone who won’t stay? And how do you get rid of someone who won’t go?
Danny DeVito
The War of the Roses

Marriage is not just spiritual communion, it is also remembering to take out the trash.
Joyce Brothers

My husband and I have never considered divorce… murder sometimes, but never divorce.
Joyce Brothers

It is most unwise for people in love to marry.
George Bernard Shaw

One should always be in love. That is the reason one should never marry.
Oscar Wilde

What is a vow,
but an intention
spoken out before the world
so that the world, in hearing,
might take part
in aspirations
of the willing heart?
In our coming here today
to join and bless
the joy of your becoming wed,
may we enter in
the truth of the words you’ve said,
“I do.”
Maureen Tolman Flannery
Entering the Vow

It is not a lack of love, but a lack of friendship that makes unhappy marriages.
Friedrich Nietzsche

I first learned the concepts of non-violence in my marriage.
Mahatma Gandhi

Love is blind, but marriage restores its sight.
Georg C. Lichtenberg

What you are as a single person, you will be as a married person, only to a greater degree. Any negative character trait will be intensified in a marriage relationship, because you will feel free to let your guard down — that person has committed himself to you and you no longer have to worry about scaring him off.
Josh McDowell

After all these years, I see that I was mistaken about Eve in the beginning; it is better to live outside the Garden with her than inside it without her.
Mark Twain

Only two things are necessary to keep one’s wife happy. One is to let her think she is having her own way, the the other, to let her have it.
Lyndon B. Johnson

Two are better than one, because they have a good return for their work:
If one falls down, his friend can help him up. But pity the man who falls and has no one to help him up!
Also, if two lie down together, they will keep warm. But how can one keep warm alone?
Though one may be overpowered, two can defend themselves. A cord of three strands is not quickly broken.
The Bible
Ecclesiastes 4

Love seems the swiftest, but it is the slowest of all growths. No man or woman really knows what perfect love is until they have been married a quarter of a century.
Mark Twain

I have yet to hear a man ask for advice on how to combine marriage and a career.
Gloria Steinem

Any one must see at a glance that if men and women marry those whom they do not love, they must love those whom they do not marry.
Harriet Martineau

Marriage is that relation between man and woman in which the independence is equal, the dependence mutual, and the obligation reciprocal.
Louis K. Anspacher

Marriage is the triumph of imagination over intelligence.
Oscar Wilde

Marriage is the triumph of hope over experience.
Samuel Johnson

A good marriage is at least 80 percent good luck in finding the right person at the right time. The rest is trust.
Nanette Newman

A good marriage is that in which each appoints the other guardian of his solitude.
Rainer Maria Rilke

Marriage is the alliance of two people, one of whom never remembers birthdays and the other who never forgets.
Ogden Nash

Now you will feel no rain, for each of you will be shelter for the other.
Now you will feel no cold, for each of you will be warmth for the other.
Now there is no more loneliness, for each of you will be companion for the other.
Now you are two persons, but there is only one life before you.
Go now to your dwelling place to begin the days of your life together.
May your days together be good and long upon the earth.
Apache Blessing

A good marriage is one which allows for change and growth in the individuals and in the way they express their love.
Pearl S. Buck

Is not marriage an open question, when it is alleged, from the beginning of the world, that such as are in the institution wish to get out, and such as are out wish to get in?
Ralph Waldo Emerson

Chains do not hold a marriage together. It is threads, hundreds of tiny threads which sew people together through the years. That is what makes a marriage last –more than passion or even sex!
Simone Signoret

Love is an ideal thing, marriage a real thing; a confusion of the real with the ideal never goes unpunished.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Happy marriages begin when we marry the ones we love, and they blossom when we love the ones we marry.
Tom Mullen

Getting a dog is like getting married. It teaches you to be less self-centered, to accept sudden, surprising outbursts of affection, and not to be upset by a few scratches on your car.
Will Staunton

Like everything which is not the involuntary result of fleeting emotion but the creation of time and will, any marriage, happy or unhappy, is infinitely more interesting than any romance, however passionate.
W. H. Auden

You and I
Have so much love,
That it
Burns like a fire,
In which we bake a lump of clay
Molded into a figure of you
And a figure of me.
Then we take both of them,
And break them into pieces,
And mix the pieces with water,
And mold again a figure of you,
And a figure of me.
I am in your clay.
You are in my clay.
In life we share a single quilt.
In death we will share a single coffin.
Kuan Tao-Sheng
Married Love

Tags: cherie blair, cherie blair booth memoirs book, Speaking For Myself, Tony Blair