15 Quotes For Your LGBTQ Wedding

It’s finally happened: the Supreme Court has ruled same-sex marriage bans unconstitutional! So, whether or not you’re rushing out to get hitched yourself, you’re still probably about to have a whole lot of weddings to go to, and that means these gay marriage quotes are going to come in handy. After all, you'll need to make sure you have just the right words to send your friends, family, or your own happy self down the aisle and into a blissful married life.

The upcoming LGBTQIA weddings will mark such a momentous and crucial change in U.S. history. Throughout time, queer relationships have struggled under laws that refused to allow their love to be expressed through marriage. So, the same old words you've always scribbled on guestbooks or slurred into the mic just won’t do. During times like these, you have to turn to the pros. And who better than some of your favorite authors (many of whom were themselves unable to marry their partners) to capture what love means for those who’ve been denied the right to express it for far too long?

Consider one of these 15 gay marriage quotes for a wedding reading — or just to post to celebrate this momentous decision. It's the beginning of a beautiful, new era.

“What is straight? A line can be straight, or a street, but the human heart, oh, no, it's curved like a road through mountains.”

―Tennessee Williams, A Streetcar Named Desire

“The world has changed: it did not change without your prayers without your faith without your determination to believe in liberation and kindness; without your dancing through the years that had no beat.”

― Alice Walker, Hard Times Require Furious Dancing: New Poems

“To burn with desire and keep quiet about it is the greatest punishment we can bring on ourselves.”

― Federico García Lorca, Blood Wedding and Yerma

“...but I say whatever / one loves, is”

― Sappho, "To any army wife," Poems of Sappho

“No rest without love,No sleepwithout dreamsof love -be mad or chillobsessed with angelsor machinesthe final wishis love.”

― Allen Ginsberg, "Song," Collected Poems 1947-1997

“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 do not know any 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 your eyes close.”

― Pablo Neruda, "Sonnet XVII," 100 Love Sonnets

“One wordFrees us of all the weight and pain of life:That word is love.”

― Sophocles, Oedipus at Colonus

"Love had caught him out of triviality and Maurice out of bewilderment in order that two imperfect souls might touch perfection.”

—E.M. Forster, Maurice

“It has made me better loving you ... it has made me wiser, and easier, and brighter.”

—Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady

“Day by day and night by night we were together — all else has long been forgotten by me,I remember I saw only that man who passionately clung to me,”

—Walt Whitman, “Once I Pass’d Through a Populous City”, Leaves of Grass

“Grow old along with me! The best is yet to be”

—Robert Browning, “Rabbi ben Ezra,” Dramatis Personae

“What is hell? I maintain that it is the suffering of being unable to love.”

—Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

“You smile upon your friend to-day,To-day his ills are over;You hearken to the lover's say,And happy is the lover.'Tis late to hearken, late to smile, But better late than never:I shall have lived a little whileBefore I die for ever.”

― A.E. Housman, A Shropshire Lad

“Love him,’ said Jacques, with vehemence, ‘love him and let him love you. Do you think anything else under heaven really matters? ... you can give each other something which will make both of you better — forever — if you will not be ashamed, if you will only not play it safe."

― James Baldwin, Giovanni's Room

“I began to wonder if girls could marry girls, because I was sure I wanted to marry Leota and look in her green eyes forever. But I would only marry her if I didn't have to do the housework. I was certain of that. But if Leota really didn't want to do it either, I guessed I'd do it. I'd do anything for Leota.”

― Rita Mae Brown, Rubyfruit Jungle

Images: Getty (6); purplesherbet, Allegro Photography, the_matt, purplesherbet (2), remyandlina, celesteh, John Heil/Flickr