“His wife...always dressed in mourning for the children who died in infancy and squeezed breathless by the pressure of her corset, her religion, and the husband fate had dealt her”

“When a man dies, his wife is burned alive with him, but if the wife dies before her husband, the man does not suffer the same fate. If a man dies before marriage, he is given a posthumous wife. The women passionately want to be burned because they believe they will enter paradise.”

“It was not right, thought Han Fei-tzu, for his wife to die before him: her ancestor-of-the-heart had outlived her husband. Besides, wives should live longer than husbands. Women were more complete inside themselves. They were also better at living in their children. They were never as solitary as a man alone.”

“Years later when she was being eccentric, had shed her corset and let her arse spread unhindered by anything but her perpetual dressing gown.”

“A good wife always forgives her husband when she's wrong.”

“No one alive today has a single ancestor in his or her past who died in infancy. We are the champions, my friend!”