Maria

“an old mother with whom he shares the thirty or forty francs allocated to him per month. “If he’s a man, why do you call him ‘old greatcoat’?” said Simonnin, with the expression of a schoolboy catching his teacher out. And he went back to eating his bread and cheese, leaning his shoulder against the stile of the window, since he took his rest standing up, like the cab-horses of Paris, with one of his legs bent and propped on his other shoe’s toe. “Think of the fun we could have with that old codger!” muttered the third clerk, Godeschal by name, as he paused in the middle of a line of argument he was developing in a petition to be copied out in a fair hand by the fourth clerk, the draft copies of which were”
― Honoré de Balzac, Colonel Chabert

“Physical pain pales beside moral suffering, but arouses more pity since it can be seen.”
― Honoré de Balzac, Le Colonel Chabert

“Truth is less complete in its utterance; it does not put everything on the outside; it allows us to see what is within.”
― Honoré de Balzac, Le Colonel Chabert

“In three words I can sum up everything I've learned about life: it goes on.”
― Robert Frost