Bonnie

“But you left; you had to. Because you knew, if they didn’t, that Jeff Kerwin, Junior, wasn’t the boy they loved. Probably, if it came to that, the first Jeff Kerwin, your father, hadn’t been that boy either, and that was why he had left. They loved something they had made up for themselves and called their son, and perhaps, you thought, they’d even be happier with memories and no real boy around to destroy that image of their perfect son.”
― Marion Zimmer Bradley, The Bloody Sun

“I say the gods deal very unrightly with us. For they will neither (which would be best of all) go away and leave us to live our own short days to ourselves, nor will they show themselves openly and tell us what they would have us do. For that too would be endurable. But to hint and hover, to draw us in dreams and oracles, or in a waking vision that vanishes as soon as seen, to be dead silent when we question them and then glide back and whisper (words we cannot understand) in our ears when we most wish to be free of them, and to show to one what they hide from another; what is all this but cat-and-mouse play, blindman's bluff, and mere jugglery? Why must holy places be dark places?”
― C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces

“I always pity the bridegroom on these occasions. The bride is supported by her father, and attended by her bridesmaids, and everybody is or pretends to be in a fright, lest she should faint or cry; and she has all the protection of a veil in case she should be too shy or not shy enough; and there is a general sympathy in her feelings. The poor man has to walk himself up alone to the altar, where he stands, looking uncommonly foolish, without even the protection of his hat. There is the mother sobbing at him for carrying off her child; the sisters scowling at him because he did not choose one of them; the clergyman frowning at him for not producing the ring at the right moment, or for neglecting the responses in their proper places; the brothers laugh at him; the bride turns from him; and the only person who pays him the slightest attention is the clerk, who tells him when he is to kneel, and when to stand, and which is his right hand, and which his left, and helps him to the discovery of his waistcoat pocket, in which the ring may or may not be.”
― Emily Eden, The Semi-Attached Couple

“Dr. Rosbone ingeniously argues that the author, a wingless neuter-female worker, yearns hopelessly to be a winged male, and to found a new colony, flying upward in the nuptial flight with a new Queen.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Author of the Acacia Seeds and Other Extracts from the Journal of the Association of Therolinguistics