A husband and wife ought to continue so long united as they love each other. Any law which should bind them to cohabitation for one moment after the decay of their affection, would be a most intolerable tyranny, and the most unworthy of toleration.
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Notes.Percy Bysshe Shelley
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A servant, indeed, one will be able perhaps to bind down by fear; nay, not even for him, for he will soon leave you. But the partner of one's life, the mother of one's children, the foundation of one's every joy, one ought never to chain down by fear and threats, but with love and good temper. For what sort of union is that, where the wife trembles at her husband? And what sort of pleasure will the husband have if he dwells with his wife as with a slave? Yea, even though you suffer everything on her account, do not scold her; for neither did Christ do this to the Church.
John Chrysostom
Dramatists have always made fun of the friendship between a husband and his wife's lover. But is it so comic? These two men undoubtedly have more to say to one another than the lover and his mistress. They get on perfectly well, and it is often the husband's presence that makes endurable the intolerable boredom of certain affairs of this sort. Cases have been known where a break occurred almost immediately following the husband's withdrawal from the scene.
Andre Maurois
While acknowledging our mutual affection by publicly assuming the relationship of husband and wife, yet in justice to ourselves and a great principle, we deem it a duty to declare that this act on our part implies no sanction of, nor promise of voluntary obedience to such of the present laws of marriage, as refuse to recognize the wife as an independent, rational being, while they confer upon the husband an injurious and unnatural superiority, investing him with legal powers which no honorable man would exercise, and which no man should possess.
Lucy Stone
Since the decay of the belief in personal immortality, death has never seemed funny, and it will be a long time before it does so again. Hence the disappearance of the facetious epitaph, once a common feature of country churchyards. I should be astonished to see a comic epitaph dated later than 1850. There is one in Kew, if I remember rightly, which might be about that date. About half the tombstone is covered with a long panegyric on his dead wife by a bereaved husband: at the bottom of the stone is a later inscription which reads, ‘Now he’s gone, too’.'
George Orwell
Nesretten Hoca's Wife: In our society, they treat us as if women have no names of their own—you are always so-and-so's wife. I mentioned this to my husband once—and, believe me, I didn't do it to blame or scold anyone. He was deeply touched and saddened. He said to me: "You are right, my dear wife. From now on, whenever they ask me what my name is, I'll say 'I'm the husband of the wife of Nasrettin Hoca.' "
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Shelley, Percy Bysshe
Shelvocke, George
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