Husbands: Don't you just love 'em?

This book, that to my shame, I have been unable to find a link for purchasing or viewing anywhere on the whole internet - but it's from an Oxfordian Past Times Trading Corp, so it'll probably be reprinted or whatever when the Time Traveller's Wife shows up. Publishing joke, sorry.

   Anyway - it's a veritable treasure trove of old wives' wisdoms regarding their partners, warty, gentle or not and all; and rather than react to the book in any Christological depth as I have done this essentially here and here already - I'm just going to drop a few choice para-edited quotes from it. Pretty even split on gender for source quotation'd figures.

• Marriage is like paying an endless visit in your worst cloths; but is popular by its very combination with the maximum of temptation with the maximum of opportunity.
• All women become like their mothers; that is their tragedy. No man does; that is his.
• Before marriage, a man will lie awake thinking all night about something you said; after marriage he will fall asleep before you have finished saying it.
• The road to success is paved with women pushing their husbands along. (although if we're taking the backseat driver metaphor - they give the co-passengers a bad name if it ever gets above first gear.)
• It's a funny thing that when a person hasn't got anything on Earth to worry about, they tend to go off and get married. It's the woman's job to do this ASAP - the man as late as possible.
• "Beware men wearing flowers" - as a bachelor never quite gets over the idea that he is a thing of beauty and a boy forever.
• Being a spouse is a full-time job. That is why so many husbands fail; they cannot, or do not give their full attention to it.
• "Having someone wonder where you are when you don't come home at night is a very human need." On these grounds, every woman should marry an archaeologist - since she'll grow increasingly attractive to him as she grows increasingly to resemble a ruin.
• "Married life's charm is that it makes a life of deception absolutely necessary for both parties" - and while open marriages are rare, Zsa Zsa Gabor knew a few that were "quite ajar".
• "Bigamy and monogamy are the same - having one husband too many." Oscar Wilde; going on to claim that "divorces are made in heaven."
• Marlene Dietrich says, "once a woman has forgiven her man, she must not reheat his sins for breakfast." Helen Rowland cites this meal and its microcosmic fallout as the Patriarchal Savagery Litmus Test.
• A Mexican proverb: "it is the only war where one sleeps with the enemy." *
• "Even quarrels with one's husband are preferable to ennuis of solitary existence."
• "FATHERS SHOULD BE NEITHER SEEN NOR HEARD. That is the only proper basis for family life." - also O. Wilde. Boys will be boys, and so will a lot of middle-aged men. The purported success of a successful marriage compared to a mediocre one is that three or four things each day are left unsaid.
• Did you know that DIY stands for Do Yourself In?
• Victoria Wood: "He thinks I can't do anything. When he was in ceiling tiles, he used to look up to me, but now he's in contract carpeting he looks at me like I'm underlay."
• Stirling Moss: two things no man will admit to be bad at - driving & fucking.
• After a short discourse on technological interference in marital domestic economy, the next eye-catching quote was the great secret of all successful marriages; "treat all disasters as incidents, and none of the incidents as disasters."
• "Why does a woman work ten years to change a man's habits, the complain he's not the man she married?"
• Men are working to be as mediocre as possible, which is what women want. Dickens makes a reference here to uniforms, but I think algorithms have taken that place in the centuries since that quote flew out straight and true.
• "Suffer the little children to come to me" - Jesus of Nazareth.
• Mrs Patrick Campbell claims that God withheld the sense of humour from women, so that men may love them rather than laugh at them.
• Sydney Smith's quote I will not replicate as it smells too much like Tim Burton.
• Ruth Stafford Peale: "a man's job, basically, is to tame this world; a wife's job is to control herself - and thus indirectly her husband." As it was said by Ian Dury, "the natural thing [we blokes]'ve been born to do is grab someone and go wallop!"
• "Any hope of applying logic or common sense can be blown away with the Cupid arrows of a pretty face and a flattered male ego."
• Mary Lamb: "I have known many single men I should have liked in my life (if it had suited them)... but very few husbands have I ever wished were mine."
• "NO MAN IS RESPONSIBLE FOR HIS FATHER.
• THAT IS ENTIRELY HIS MOTHER'S AFFAIR." - Margaret Turnbull
• "Kissing dun't last - cookery do!" and "when a man discovers a brand of beer exactly to his taste, he should at once throw up his job and go to work in the brewery."
• 3 kinds of kisses;
• fire extinguisher
• mummy
• vacuum cleaner
• Emma Bombeck, on noting the male post-marital appetite; stated "I am not a glutton; I am an explorer of food."
• If you hear BAD music, it's your job to drown it in conversation. And it's probably no mere chance that in legal textbooks the problems relating to married women are usually considered immediately after the pages devoted to idiots and lunatics.
• All unhappy marriages come from husbands having brains.
• "Always suspect any job men willingly vacate for women." - Jill Tweedie
• Liz Taylor - "a diamond in the only kind of ice that keeps a girl warm."
• Bachelors being those who enjoy the chase but don't eat the game; a man & woman may eventually marry because they do not know what else to do with themselves.
• "Marriage is a bribe to make a housekeeper think she's a householder." - T. Wilder - also, Herbert Spenser calling it "a ceremony in which rings are put on the finger of the lady and through the nose of the gentleman."
• Leo J. Burke; "he who dun't tell his wife everything, probly reckons what she doesn't know won't hurt him."

I really enjoyed this - a great gift-book as a coffee table or bathroom shelf go-to LOLzer.

* Although, given the massive prevalence of civilian locals' being raped en masse by any invading armed forces - this one needs tweaking, Kurdishly - get on it, Spanish speakers.