A Passion in the Desert

Honoré de Balzac

Mme. Vauquer (_nee_ de Conflans) is an elderly person, who for the past forty years has kept a lodging-house in the Rue Nueve-Sainte-Genevieve, in the district that lies between the Latin Quarter a...

Honoré de Balzac

TO A LORD 1845 I--GILLETTE On a cold December morning in the year 1612, a young man, whose clothing was somewhat of the thinnest, was walking to and fro before a gateway in the Rue des Grands...

Honoré de Balzac

I was buried in one of those profound reveries to which everybody, even a frivolous man, is subject in the midst of the most uproarious festivities.

Honoré de Balzac

There is that old Box-coat again!"

Jonathan Swift

1729 It is a melancholy object to those, who walk through this great town, or travel in the country, when they see the streets, the roads and cabbin-doors crowded with beggars of the female sex,...

Charlotte Perkins Gilman

It is very seldom that mere ordinary people like John and myself secure ancestral halls for the summer.

Plato

Translated by Benjamin Jowett INTRODUCTION.

Ambrose Bierce

THE MILLENNIUM FULCRUM EDITION, 1988 A man stood upon a railroad bridge in northern Alabama, looking down into the swift water twenty feet below.