The doctor's wife wasn't a bad woman. She was sufficiently convinced of her own importance to believe that God actually did watch everything she did and listen to everything she said, and she was too taken up with rooting out the pride she was prone to feeling in her own holiness to notice any other failings she might have had. She was a do-gooder, which means that all the ill she did, she did without realizing it.

People whose lives are not balanced by a healthy love of money suffer from an appalling obsession with personal integrity.

When one is nothing, one invents. It fills a void.

Politeness. Now there's a poor man's virtue if ever there was one. What's so admirable about inoffensiveness, I should like to know. After all, it's easily achieved. One needs no particular talent to be polite. On the contrary, being nice is what's left when you've failed at everything else. People with ambition don't give a damn what other people think about them.

But silence is not a natural environment for stories. They need words. Without them they grown pale, sicken and die. And then they haunt you.

Reading can be dangerous.

Fate, at first so amenable, so reasonable, so open to negotiation, ends up by exacting a cruel revenge for happiness.