Quote by Diana Gabaldon

“Could anything possibly be more humorous than believing in the depth or in the depravity of the Parisian character?”

— Stendhal

“He thought of nothing. Some thoughts or fragments of thoughts, some images without order or coherence floated before his mind--faces of people he had…

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

“Jerome was a marvelous advocate of chastity: yet hear his confession: “O, how often have I thought myself to be in the midst of…

— Martin Luther

“He blushed to see other Frenchmen overcome with joy whenever they met a compatriot abroad. The would fall on each other, cluster in a…

— Sarah Bakewell

“The reaction came when he realized the waste and extravagance involved. He somtimes looked back with awe at the carnivals of affection he had…

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

“His manner had the offensive jauntiness of the man who has had a cold bath when he might just as easily have had a…

— P.G. Wodehouse

“To meet in Paris a fisher-girl from Balbec or a peasant-girl from Méséglise would have been like receiving the present of a shell which…

— Marcel Proust

“He [Muffat] experienced a sense of pleasure mingled with remorse, the sort of pleasure peculiar to those Catholics whom the fear of hell spurs…

— Émile Zola

“she was as unused to seeing tenderness in a man's eyes as she was to being caught off guard. Admiration? Amusement? Yes. Even desire.…

— Connie Brockway

“But there were endless rewards. There was a pervasive sense of adventure, that a surprise was just waiting to be discovered in the next…

— Penelope Rowlands

“He completely lacked any ardent interest that might have occupied his mind. His interior life was impoverished, had undergone a deterioration so severe that…

— Thomas Mann

“Like many visitors, they had been unnerved by the inimitable creepiness of the Holy Sepulchre, a grimly gaudy, theopathical Turkish bathhouse where their childhood…

— Robert Stone