You will try to improve me, Captain, but I tell you it cannot be done. I am resigned to moral apathy and corporeal decrepitude, and have done with projections. No, Captain,” with a pining sigh, “I think I will simply sit in the shade and wait for either a customer or death, the latter I might prefer, at such a point.

A heart? Peppone knows where one is to be met with. There is always someone in the black market in need of dying early.

Life makes beggars out of those who have joyful hearts, taxing the living with hardship and tribulation, but the charity of companionship, the currency of shared and unmitigated love, alleviates all disconsolation.

Life is really a travesty of will: it is a parade of learning how to lose people and improve at feigning indifference.I suspect I shall always fail at this, and fail miserably. I do not know whether that is winning at life or failing at happiness.

That is the only sure way of knowing we have made someone happy: making someone miserable by our leaving them.