Marius was of the temperament that sinks into grief and remains there; Cosette was of the sort that plunges in and comes out again.
I have found myself writing poetry shortly after I retired. Which I hadn't done in forty years.
Oh, a bookshop. Why not pop in and buy a little Kant? And perhaps just a quarter-pound of Kafka. Don't bother to wrap it, thanks. I'll eat it here.
The best defense is a good story.
What to know about pain is how little we do to deserve it, how simple it is to give, how hard to lose.
If you can propose a memoir, even if you are eighteen years old - and what do you remember? What are you memeing? If you can propose a memoir, I believe someone will pay you to write it. And you will get a contract for nonfiction. And if it is about victimology in one way or another than you'll get more money. It's a sensation.
Good art is a form of prayer. It's a way to say what is not sayable.
A strange thing — nails will hold a building together, but there's nothing better for taking a man apart.
Meanwhile the mind, from pleasure less, Withdraws into its happiness; The mind, that ocean where each kind Does straight its own resemblance find; Yet it creates, transcending these, Far other worlds, and other seas; Annihilating all that's made To a green thought in a green glade. . . Such was that happy garden-state.
If you can't trust your president to get the right information on a Googleable fact, then can you really trust him with the harder stuff? Which, by the way, is everything else the president of the United States has to deal with.
Live and work but do not forget to play, to have fun in life and really enjoy it.