“Woman is sacred the woman one loves is holy.”

“I am not proud, but I am happy; and happiness blinds, I think, more than pride.”

“Happiness is like those palaces in fairytales whose gates are guarded by dragons: We must fight in order to conquer it.”

“True love always makes a man better, no matter what woman inspires it.”

“Love is the most selfish of all the passions.”

“He who has felt the deepest grief is best able to experience supreme happiness.”

“Paris was all so... Parisian. I was captivated by the wonderful wrongness of it all - the unfamiliar fonts, the brand names in the supermarket, the dimensions of the bricks and paving stones. Child...”

“Oh, well, it might look like a patterned world, laid out in prim design, but to those living there it could never be so simple. They were as alive as she: that old peasant contriving to outwit the ...”

“I knew how severe I had been and how bad things had been. The one who is doing his work and getting satisfaction from it is not the one who poverty bothers.”

“London? Paris? Berlin? Zurich? Maybe Brussels, center of the young union? They all strive to outdo one another culturally, architecturally, politically, fiscally. But Rome, it should be said, has n...”

“Humiliating events have a way of capturing the public's imagination. So it has been since antiquity, when gladiators were pitted against each other and the legions of Spartacus were crucified in en...”

“When thou art at Rome, do as they do at Rome.”