“The novelist Dumas would one day borrow features from both of his uncles, not to mention his grandfather, the acknowledged scoundrel, in fashioning the central villains of The Count of Monte Cristo...”

“-I'm going to heaven! I replied.-What do you mean, you're going to heaven?-Let me pass.-And what will you do in heaven, my poor child?-I'm going there to kill God, who killed Daddy.”

“Eighteenth-century doctors prescribed sugar pills for nearly everything: heart problems, headache, consumption, labor pains, insanity, old age, and blindness. Hence, the French expression 'like an ...”

“Today, the world is so awash in sugar - it is such a staple of the modern diet, associated with all that is cheap and unhealthy - that it's hard to believe things were once exactly the opposite. Th...”

“Alex Dumas was a consummate warrior and a man of great conviction and moral courage. He was renowned for his strength, his swordsmanship, his bravery, and his knack for pulling victory out of the t...”

“In the winter of 1940, 'The Atlantic Monthly' invited Peter Viereck, a twenty-three-year-old Harvard graduate who had won the college's top essay and poetry prizes, to write about 'the meaning of y...”

“To create art with all the passion in one's soul is to live art with all the beauty in one's heart.”

“art is risk made visible”

“Eleanor was right. She never looked nice. She looked like art, and art wasn't supposed to look nice; it was supposed to make you feel something.”

“The two ideas, justice and vocation, are inseparable.... It is by way of the principle and practice of vocation that sanctity and reverence enter into the human economy. It was thus possible for tr...”

“There can be no deep disappointment where there is not deep love.”

“Never forget that justice is what love looks like in public.”

“Pain is not the same as suffering. Left to itself, the body discharges pain spontaneously, letting go of it the moment that the underlying cause is healed. Suffering is pain that we hold on to. It ...”

“In pleasant peace and security How suddenly the soul in a man begins to die He shall look up above the stalled oxen Envying the cruel falcon, And dig under the straw for a stone To bruise himself on.”

“It is amazing, though, what pains your subconscious will undergo in achieve sustainable peace.”