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Nineteen years. In October 1815 he was released. He had gone in there in 1796 for breaking a pane of glass and stealing a loaf of bread.
Release is not freedom. You are let out of prison, but you continue to serve your sentence.
‘Pull yourselves together. This unexpected pun shouldn’t be greeted with too much amazement. Not everything that comes out of the blue is necessarily worthy of admiration and respect. Puns are the droppings of the mind on the wing. The joke lands wherever it falls, and after excreting a joke the mind soars. A white splodge splattered on a rock does not prevent the condor from scaling the heights. Far be it from me to belittle the pun! I have a due respect for its merits, nothing more.
He had painted it himself, for he knew how to do a little of everything, badly.
They fed her on everyone’s scraps – a little better than the dog, a little worse than the cat.
The supreme happiness of life is the conviction that you are loved, loved for yourself, better still, loved despite yourself.
Even though he hated books, in his moments of leisure, which were few and far between, he read, with the result that he was not completely uneducated.
There is nothing like those for whom it is none of their business, for spying on other people’s actions.
He was very pale and slightly trembling. His hair, still grey when he arrived in Arras, was now completely white. It had turned white during the hour he had been there.
Paris does more than set the rules, it sets the fashion. Paris does more than set the fashion, it sets the pattern of daily life. Paris may be stupid if it pleases. It sometimes allows itself this luxury, and the universe is stupid along with it. Then Paris wakes up, rubs its eyes, says ‘What a fool I am!’ and bursts out laughing in the face of humankind.
He never went out without a book under his arm and he often returned with two.
Here is an awkward corner of wall; move away from it. Here is a bastion that may afford protection; shelter behind it. The left-handed are valuable – they take places that are awkward for others. Many contrive to fight seated, wanting to be at their ease for killing and comfortable for dying.
