"Don't leave a piece of jewelry at his house so you can go back and get it later; he may be with his real girlfriend."
— Amy Sedaris (I Like You: Hospitality Under the Influence)

"How can I be reasonable? To me our love was everything and you were my whole life. It is not very pleasant to realize that to you it was only an episode."
— W. Somerset Maugham (The Painted Veil)

""...foreign policy is a matter of costs and benefits, not theology.""
— Fareed Zakaria (The Post-American World)

"He spent the next weeks blocking scenes of the bureaucrat fucking his wife. On the floor with cooking ingredients. Standing, with socks still on. In the grass of the yard of their new and immense house. He imagined her making noises she never made for him and feeling pleasures he could never provide because the bureaucrat was a man, and he was not a man. Does she suck his penis? he wondered. I know this is a silly thought, a thought that will only bring me pain, but I can't free myself of it. And when she sucks his penis, because she must, what is he doing? Is he pulling her hair back to watch? Is he touching her chest? Is he thinking of someone else? I'll kill him if he is."
— Jonathan Safran Foer (Everything Is Illuminated: A Novel)

"She says it's really not very flattering to her that the women who fall in love with her husband are so uncommonly second-rate."
— W. Somerset Maugham (The Painted Veil)

"'Was it necessary to tell me that you wanted nothing in the world but me?'

The corners of his mouth drooped peevishly.

'Oh, my dear, it's rather hard to take quite literally the things a man says when he's in love with you.'

'Didn't you mean them?'

'At the moment.'"
— W. Somerset Maugham (The Painted Veil)

"His question reminded me of how easy he had been to deceive, so easy that he seemed to me almost a conniver at his wife's unfaithfulness, as the man who leaves loose banknotes in a hotel bedroom connives at theft, and I hated him for the very quality which had once helped my love."
— Graham Greene (The End of the Affair)

"He should in humility have asked her why it was that he was naturally a cuckold, why two women of different temperaments and characters had been inspired to have lovers at his expense. He should be telling her, with the warmth of her body warming his, that his second wife had confessed to greater sexual pleasure when she remembered that she was deceiving him."
— William Trevor

"Do not mess in the affairs of dragons; for you are tasty, and good with ketchup. "
— Someone

"Women writers make for rewarding (and efficient) lovers. They are clever liars to fathers and husbands; yet they never hold their tongues too long, nor keep ardent typing fingers still."
— Roman Payne (Rooftop Soliloquy)