“Most married people can expect a specific other person to be there for them in a way that a single person typically cannot. Does that make married people more mature than single people?Married people are on training wheels. Singles are riding the bikes for grown-ups.”

“The other side of mental blanketing - the buffing and puffing up of marriage to keep it seeming shiny and magical - is up against a formidable fact. Statistically speaking, the act of marrying is banal. Even though many Americans wait longer than ever to marry, and often do not stay long in the marriages they do enter, most Americans - close to 90 percent - still do marry at some point in their lives. Some try it over and over again. Marrying, then, does not make people special; it makes them conventional.”

“The freedom to be single, to create a path through life that does not look like everyone else's, can be unsettling to people who feel more secure with fewer choices.”

“There is another reason ever-single women fare even better than previously married women in later life. They mastered the single life long ago. From structuring social events in a culture that caters to couples, to figuring out how to work and get all the tasks of everyday life accomplished when there may or may not be others readily available to do their unfair share, always-single women have been there, done that. It is not a new or daunting challenge.”

“The most important single thing that any Latter-day Saint ever does in this world is to marry the right person, in the right place, by the right authority.”

“The great unsold truth of libraries is that people need them not because they’re about study and solitude, but because they’re about connection. Connection with other worlds and different views, even if that’s no more than being among other people thinking and breathing.”

“Many people have asked me, 'How do you make a single life a happy one? My answer is, 'Create the best life possible. The decisions you make determine where life takes you. I would make every effort, married or single, to get closer to Heavenly Father, to get the most education possible, to make my home a heaven on earth, and to learn how to manage my time and finances.' I sought for and still seek for any experience I can have to make my life happier and more fulfilling; being single or married has nothing to do with it.”