infidelity Quotes

“O curse of marriage, That we can call these delicate creatures ours And not their appetites! I had rather be a toad And live upon the vapor of a dungeon Than keep a corner in the thing I love For others’ uses. Yet ‘tis the plague of great ones; Prerogatived are they less than the base. ‘Tis destiny unshunnable, like death. Even then this forked plague is fated to us When we do quicken.”

“Do you think I’m that simple-minded, that I think I’m the first woman whose husband ever had an affair? I’m not going anywhere, Michael. I’m standing right here, trying to work through this with you, for the sake of our marriage. For the sake of our son.”

“Why, Troy? After all these years to come dragging this in to me now. It don’t make no sense at your age. I could have expected this ten or fifteen years ago, but not now. . . . I done tried to be everything a wife should be. Everything a wife could be. Been married eighteen years.”

“I gave everything I had to try and erase the doubt that you wasn’t the finest man in the world. And wherever you was going . . . I wanted to be there with you. Because you was my husband. Cause that’s the only way I was gonna survive as your wife.”

“Infidelity does not consist in believing, or in disbelieving; it consists in professing to believe what he does not believe.”

“After he and June had Nina and Jay, a woman appeared at June’s door while Mick was on tour—Mick fathered her son Hud, whom she leaves with June. June forgave Mick for his affair, but eventually, he left her to marry another woman.”

‘I’d simply love to come with you for a week in July,’ she went on. (Anyhow, she was publicly proving her unfaithfulness to Henry. Fanny ought to be pleased, even though it was Bernard.) ‘That is,’ Lenina gave him her most deliciously significant smile, ‘if you still want to have me.’

She felt that at that moment she could not put into words the sense of shame, of rapture, and of horror at this stepping into a new life, and she did not want to speak of it, to vulgarize this feeling by inappropriate words.

He felt what a murderer must feel, when he sees the body he has robbed of life. That body, robbed by him of life, was their love, the first stage of their love. There was something awful and revolting in the memory of what had been bought at this fearful price of shame. Shame at their spiritual nakedness crushed her and infected him. But in spite of all the murderer’s horror before the body of his victim, he must hack it to pieces, hide the body, must use what he has gained by his murder.

She felt that the position in the world that she enjoyed, and that had seemed to her of so little consequence in the morning, that this position was precious to her, that she would not have the strength to exchange it for the shameful position of a woman who has abandoned husband and child to join her lover; that however much she might struggle, she could not be stronger than herself. She would never know freedom in love, but would remain forever a guilty wife, with the menace of detection hanging over her at every instant; deceiving her husband for the sake of a shameful connection with a man living apart and away from her, whose life she could never share. She knew that this was how it would be, and at the same time it was so awful that she could not even conceive what it would end in. And she cried without restraint, as children cry when they are punished.

The inequality in marriage, in his opinion, lay in the fact that the infidelity of the wife and the infidelity of the husband are punished unequally, both by the law and by public opinion.