Wedding Readings From Literature – Wedding WednesdayFebruary 8, 2012 by Jamie · 91 Comments

Wedding Wednesday is a feature I created here to chronicle my wedding planning journey until August 17, 2012 when I get married! I’ll also be featuring fun bookish weddings and cute ideas I

find around the blogosphere.Jeez, you guys. I haven’t done a Wedding Wednesday in a while! I’ve doing a lot of random parts of the wedding

planning lately and one of those is picking out readings for the ceremony. I always keep a notebook of quotes that I

like from books I read or poems I come across.  Since I’m not having a bookish wedding myself (since obviously

Will does not share this passion of mine), I do want to incorporate it in subtle ways and I think that a reading from a

book I love would be great! I also put some shorter “love” quotes from books in here, even if they aren’t long

enough for a reading, to maybe incorporate them into things like the program or something like that. The ones with

asterisks are ones I’m really considering for the wedding!

* Great Expectations, Charles Dickens“Once for all, I knew to my sorrow, often and often, if not always, that I loved her against reason, against promise,

against peace, against hope, against happiness, against all discouragement that could be.  Once for all; I loved her

none the less because I knew it, and it had no more influence in restraining me, than if I had devoutly believed her to

be human perfection.”  

*Sonnet 17Pablo Neruda

I don’t love you as if you were the salt-rose, topaz or arrow of carnations that propagate fire: I love you as certain

dark things are loved, secretly, between the shadow and the soul. I love you as the plant that doesn’t bloom, and

carries hidden within itself the light of those flowers, and thanks to your love, darkly in my body lives the dense

fragrance that rises from the earth. I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where, I love you simply,

without problems or pride: I love you in this way because I know no other way of loving but this, in which there is

no I or you; so intimate that your hand upon my chest is my hand, so intimate that when I fall asleep it is your eyes

that close.

In One Another’s Arms – RumiThe moment I heard my first love story I began seeking you,

not realizing the search was useless.

Lovers don’t meet somewhere along the way.

They’re in one another’s souls from the beginning.

* Jane EyreI have for the first time found what I can truly love – I have found you. You are my sympathy – my better self—my

good angel—I am bound to you with a strong attachment. I think you good, gifted, lovely: a fervent, a solemn

passion is conceived in my heart; it leans to you, draws you to my center and spring of life, wraps my existence

about you—and, kindling in pure, powerful flame, fuses you and me in one. —

                  “The Velveteen Rabbit ” by Margery Williams“What is REAL?” asked the Rabbit one day, when they were lying side by side near the nursery fender, before Nana

came to tidy the room. “Does it mean having things that buzz inside you and a stick-out handle?”

“Real isn’t how you are made,” said the Skin Horse. “It’s a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a

long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real.”

“Does it hurt?” asked the Rabbit.

“Sometimes,” said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. “When you are Real you don’t mind being hurt.”

“Does it happen all at once, like being wound up,” he asked, “or bit by bit?”

“It doesn’t happen all at once,” said the Skin Horse. “You become. It takes a long time. That’s why it doesn’t

happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the

time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and

very shabby. But these things don’t matter at all, because once you are Real you can’t be ugly, except to people who

don’t understand.”

Pride and Prejudice  by Jane Austen“I cannot fix on the hour, or the spot, or the look, or the words, which laid the foundation. It is too long ago. I was in

the middle before I knew that I had begun.”

 

 The History of Love by Nicole Krauss“Once upon a time there was a boy who loved a girl, and her laughter was a question he wanted to spend his whole

life answering.”

Jitterbug Perfume by Tom Robbins“The highest function of love is that it makes the loved one a unique and irreplaceable being.

Sarah Dessen, The Truth About ForeverThere is never a time or place for true love. It happens accidentally, in a heartbeat, in a single flashing, throbbing

moment.”

The Amber Spyglass)by Philip Pullman

 

 “I will love you forever; whatever happens. Till I die and after I die, and when I find my way out of the land of the

dead, I’ll drift about forever, all my atoms, till I find you again… I’ll be looking for you, every moment, every

single moment. And when we do find each other again, we’ll cling together so tight that nothing and no one’ll ever

tear us apart. Every atom of me and every atom of you… We’ll live in birds and flowers and dragonflies and pine

trees and in clouds and in those little specks of light you see floating in sunbeams… And when they use our atoms to

make new lives, they won’t just be able to take one, they’ll have to take two, one of you and one of me, we’ll be

joined so tight…” 

*Everything Is Illuminated: A Novelby Jonathan Safran Foer

“If there is no love in the world, we will make a new world, and we will give it walls, and we will furnish it with

soft, red interiors, from the inside out, and give it a knocker that resonates like a diamond falling to a jeweller’s felt

so that we should never hear it. Love me, because love doesn’t exist, and I have tried everything that does.”

So which one is YOUR favorite? What other passages from books do you think would make a great reading

for a wedding? Do share! I’m looking for more!- See more at: http://www.perpetualpageturner.com/2012/02/wedding-readings-from-literature.html#sthash.k36p9nDX.dpuf