I know she’s rather plain, but every girl has a right to conceal that fact from people who haven’t seen her.
I can remember the days,’ Mirabeau said, ‘when we didn’t have public opinion. No one had ever heard of such a thing.
He looks down at them and arranges his face. Erasmus says that you must do this each morning before you leave your house: put on a mask, as it were.
He feels as if he is floating, and she is weighting him to earth; he would like to put his arms around her and his face in her apron, and rest there listening to her heartbeat. But he doesn't want to...
He cannot quite accept that real property cannot be changed into money with the same speed and ease with which he changes a wafer into the body of Christ.
He can see that, in the years ahead, treason will take new and various forms. When the last treason act was made, no one could circulate their words in a printed book or bill, because printed books we...
Give me time, she said mockingly. That’s the anthem of the married man. Give me time while I make my excuses, give me time while I sort out my head. Just another week, just another decade, just till m...
For hundreds of years the monks have held the pen, and what they have written is what we take to be our history, but I do not believe it really is. I believe they have suppressed the history they don'...
Feminism hasn't failed, it's just never been tried.
Erasmus says that you should praise a ruler even for qualities he does not have. For the flattery gives him to think. And the qualities he presently lacks, he might go to work on them.
Concentrate on sharpening your memory and peeling your sensibility. Cut every page you write by at least one third. Stop constructing those piffling little similes of yours. Work out what it is you wa...
Call no man happy. Call no man happy until he has gone down to his grave in peace.
But just as everything was going along politely, quietly and wonderfully — in poured Citizen Danton and his crew.
As the year goes on, certain deputies—and others, high in public life—will appear unshaven, without coat or cravat; or they will jettison these marks of the polite man, when the temperature rises. The...
As Danton sees it, the most bizarre aspect of Camille's character is his desire to scribble over every blank surface; he sees a guileless piece of paper, virgin and harmless, and persecutes it till it...
A shock will do it, he said, or strong emotion, strong emotion of any sort. It can be horror. Or disgust. But, then again, it doesn’t have to be. Sometimes, he said, people die laughing.
A pottery outside Paris was turning out his picture on thick glazed crockery in a strident yellow and blue. This is what happens when you become a public figure; people eat their dinners off you.
Think
News comes from Rome that the Emperor’s Spanish and German troops, who have not been paid for months, have run wild through the Holy City paying themselves, plundering the treasuries and stoning the a...
My great-aunts and uncles died in wards like those. Wrapping and muffling themselves, gazing at the long windows streaming rain, visitors would tell the patient: ‘You’re in the best place.