Every novelist should write something for children at least once in his lifetime.

Amid the stillness of the night, in the depths of the ravine, from the direction in which the corpses lay suddenly resounded a kind of inhuman, frightful laughter in which quivered despair, and joy, and cruelty, and suffering, and pain, and sobbing, and derision; the heart-rending and spasmodic laughter of the insane or condemned.

There is within us a moral instinct which forbids us to rejoice at the death of even an enemy.

He always smiles, even when contemplating nothing good.

The shots had dispersed the birds; there remained only two marabous, standing between ten and twenty paces away and plunged in reverie. They were like two old men with bald heads pressed between the shoulders.

I go to church because I am a skeptic in regard to my own skepticism.

England is never in a hurry because she is eternal.