You enter a state of controlled passivity, you relax your grip and accept that even if your declared intention is to justify the ways of God to man, you might end up interesting your readers rather more in Satan.

What can it be about low temperatures that sharpens the edges of objects?

Daylight seemed then to be the physical manifestation of common sense.

Novels help us to resist the temptation to think of the past as deficient.

Wasn't writing a kind of soaring, an achievable form of flight, of fancy, of the imagination?

How easily this unthinking family love was forgotten.

For the professors in the academy, for the humanities generally, misery is more amenable to analysis: happiness is a harder nut to crack.