We adore these short wedding readings – sweet and sentimental, these are perfect for the not-so confident speakers!
Not all couples will want long readings at their ceremony, and equally not all speakers will feel confident talking for a long time – especially with emotions running high! These short wedding readings are every bit as sweet as longer pieces, and we’ve included a mixture of poems, book extracts, and religious readings to suit every wedding style…
Your Personal Penguin by Sandra Boynton
I like you a lot. You’re funny and kind. So let me explain What I have in mind. I want to be Your Personal Penguin. I want to walk right by your side. I want to be Your Personal Penguin. I want to travel with you far and wide.
Extract from The Notebook by Nicholas Sparks
“I am nothing special; just a common man with common thoughts, and I’ve led a common life. There are no monuments dedicated to me and my name will soon be forgotten. But in one respect I have succeeded as gloriously as anyone who’s ever lived: I’ve loved another with all my heart and soul; and to me, this has always been enough.”
Marriage Advice by Jane Wells
Let your love be stronger than your hate or anger.
Learn the wisdom of compromise, for it is better to bend a little than to break.
Believe the best rather than the worst.
People have a way of living up or down to your opinion of them.
Remember that true friendship is the basis for any lasting relationship.
The person you choose to marry is deserving of the courtesies and kindness you bestow on your friends.
Please hand this down to your children and your children’s children.
Some Things Go Together by Charlotte Zolotow
Pigeons with park
Stars with dark
Sand with sea
and you with me.
Hats with heads
Pillows with beds
Sky with blue
and me with you.
Delirium by Lauren Oliver
“Love: a single word, a wispy thing, a word no bigger or longer than an edge. That’s what it is: an edge; a razor. It draws up through the center of your life, cutting everything in two. Before and after. The rest of the world falls away on either side.”

ATEIA Photography
Eskimo Love Song
You are my husband, you are my wife
My feet shall run because of you
My feet dance because of you
My heart shall beat because of you
My eyes see because of you
My mind thinks because of you
And I shall love, because of you.
Ruth 1:16-17
But Ruth replied, “Don’t urge me to leave you or to turn back from you. Where you go I will go, and where you stay I will stay. Your people will be my people and your God my God. Where you die I will die, and there I will be buried. May the Lord deal with me, be it ever so severely, if even death separates you and me.”
Allegiant by Veronica Roth
“I fell in love with him. But I don’t just stay with him by default as if there’s no one else available to me. I stay with him because I choose to, every day that I wake up, every day that we fight or lie to each other or disappoint each other. I choose him over and over again, and he chooses me.”
Albert Einstein on Relativity
“Gravitation cannot be held responsible for people falling in love. How on earth can you explain in terms of chemistry and physics so important a biological phenomenon as first love? Put your hand on a stove for a minute and it seems like an hour. Sit with that special girl for an hour and it seems like a minute. That’s relativity.”

Laura Holman Photography
Main image credit: Ellie Gillard Photography