J'ai un but, une tâche, disons le mot, une passion. Le métier d'écrire en est une violente et presque indestructible."[Letter to Jules Boucoiran, 4 March 1831]

Le vrai est trop simple, il faut y arriver toujours par le compliqué."[Letter to Armand Barbès, 12 May 1867]

If I had learned anything in my life about love, it was that they were tenous things that could end at any moment. Caution was essential-but not at the cost of risking your life

The whole world seems tilted, my inner ear displaced by a hole where my spouse used to be.

Why are you lying to me? I'm so tired of people lying to me. Do I not deserve the truth? Do I look like someone who can't handle it?

Refusal to hope is nothing more than a decision to die.

The Stuart sovereigns of England steadily attempted to strengthen their power, and the resistance to that effort caused an immense growth of Parliamentary influence.

Our world was brutal, immoral, smug and conventional. We had unbounded contempt for all those who did not sin as we sinned.

The reason I act is because I'm trying to understand why people are as they are.

Perl programming is an *empirical* science!

There are no random acts...We are all connected...You can no more separate one life from another than you can separate a breeze from the wind.

The human moral sense can excuse any atrocity in the minds of those who commit it, and it furnishes them with motives for acts of violence that bring them no tangible benefit.