Marriage Quote by James Herriot

Domestic intimacy is doing a thing so often it becomes your signature annoyance. Herriot’s line opens on a sly, self-deprecating portrait: a man who can’t stop narrating his own little comic archive, and a wife who has heard the greatest hits enough times to know the punchlines in advance. The verb “bore” is the tell. He doesn’t romanticize his storytelling as charming; he frames it as a minor act of marital tyranny, delivered not with malice but with habit. That honesty is a Herriot trademark: warmth without self-mythology.

“For years” stretches the scene into a long-running ritual, and “over lunch” pins it to the most ordinary, shared time of day. No dramatic fireside confessional, no grand literary salon; just a table, a meal, and the gentle grind of familiarity. The humor isn’t only in the “funny incidents” he recounts, but in the mismatch between his delight and her likely patience. He’s admitting that what feels like spontaneous comedy to the teller can feel like forced listening to the loved one.

Context matters: Herriot built his career transforming veterinary life in rural Yorkshire into humane, episodic storytelling. These “incidents” are the raw material of that project - messy, absurd, tender - tested first in the small arena of marriage before being offered to the public. Subtextually, it’s also an origin story for his voice: the writer as compulsive collector of anecdotes, and the spouse as the first editor, the first audience, the first person to signal when charm tips into repetition.