When a storm comes, bamboo bends. It doesn’t break.

customers away. The Palais-Royal has become a veritable den of iniquity,

I’d always thought I would feel like an animal released from its cage when my student days were finished, I felt more like a bird that had been pushed from its nest and told it...

Look at Rose Bertin. From an ordinary seamstress to the milliner

Pain moves us forward, changing us into something else, something we need to be.

We can help pave the roads of those around us, but we can’t choose their direction.

Even prisoners can escape if they have books.

The only words free of suspicious motives will be the ones I find in books.

We’ve all done things we’d rather keep in the dark. It’s only by shedding light on them that our demons can disappear.

Sometimes, Anu, we have to take actions that make us sad because it’s the right thing to do for the future.

Grandmother was like an opal. You could never be sure which colors were really there and which were just tricks of the light.

…we are all sorry when loss comes for us. The test of our character comes not in how many tears we shed but in how we act after those tears have dried.

Nothing is forever…nothing lasts.

Some people are so impoverished all they have is gold.

After all, that’s why we read historical fiction-to be transported to another time, and to be astonished at ancient people’s lives and traditions, just as they would probably be astonished at ours.

You mean we won’t get to run through burning buildings?” I could see he wanted to laugh, but instead he watched me intently. “What? Why are you staring at me?” “I’m not staring. I’m observing.”I...

our countrymen are starving, she is decorating herself with diamond aigrettes!

such a short time. I am about to tell our barker,