Maybe happiness too is a metaphor invented on a day of boredom

What a man Balzac would have been if he had known how to write.

To be stupid, selfish, and have good health are three requirements for happiness, though if stupidity is lacking, all is lost.

A mystery is so much more exciting than a wrapped up answer...A mystery carries on but an answer just ends.

She wanted to get some personal profit out of things, and she rejected as useless all that did not contribute to the immediate desires of her heart, being of a temperament more sentimental than artistic, looking for emotions, not landscapes.

Yet she resigned herself: reverently she put away in the chest of drawers her beautiful dress and even her satin shoes, whose soles had been yellowed by the slippery wax of the dance floor. Her heart was like them: contact with wealth had laid something over it that would not be wiped away.