John P.

“Yes, indeed, if some of these boys are a bit soft and chicken-hearted and hesitate, they shoot them immediately, a dozen bullets through the skin and that’s that. In a way it’s got to be done and what does it matter to the officers? They get their pesetas all the same and that’s all they care about.”
― Marcel Proust, Time Regained [In Search of Lost Time vol. 7]

“whatever reason they give, simply don’t want to be killed, it’s nothing but funk.” And with a more emphatic gesture than when he alluded to others, “And if I don’t rejoin my regiment, it’s for the same reason.”
― Marcel Proust, Time Regained [In Search of Lost Time vol. 7]

“another reason why the good are afflicted with temporal calamities--the reason which Job's case exemplifies:that the human spirit may be proved, and that it may be manifested with what fortitude of pious trust, and with how unmercenary a love, it cleaves to God.”
― Augustine of Hippo, St. Augustine of Hippo: The City of God

“As it had been with Dreyfusism, so it was with the marriage of Saint-Loup and Odette’s daughter, a marriage people protested against at first. Now that people met everyone they knew at the Saint-Loups’, Gilberte might have had the morals of Odette herself, people would have gone there just the same and would have agreed with Gilberte in condemning undigested moral novelties like a dowager-duchess.”
― Marcel Proust, Time Regained [In Search of Lost Time vol. 7]