For neither good nor evil can last for ever; and so it follows that as evil has lasted a long time, good must now be close at hand.

Reading Don Quixote can be compared to an indefinite visit from your most impossible senior relative, with all his pranks, dirty habits, unstoppable reminiscences, and terrible cronies. When the experience is over, and the old boy checks out at last (on page 846 - the prose wedged tight, with no breaks for dialogue), you will shed tears all right; not tears of relief or regret but tears of pride. You made it, despite all that 'Don Quixote' could do.

There are only two families in the world, my old grandmother used to say, the Haves and the Have-nots.

The reason for the unreason with which you treat my reason , so weakens my reason that with reason I complain of your beauty.

That's the nature of women, not to love when we love them, and to love when we love them not.

Proverbs are short sentences drawn from long experience.

That which costs little is less valued.