Human life is a sad show, undoubtedly: ugly, heavy and complex. Art has no other end, for people of feeling, than to conjure away the burden and bitterness.

Pecock, Reginald. The Repressor of Over Much Blaming of the Clergy 2 Volume Set, edited by Churchill Babington. Vol. 2, Cambridge University Press, 2012.

Shakespeare, William. "As You Like It." The Norton Shakespeare, edited by Stephen Greenblatt, et al., 3rd ed., W. W. Norton & Company, 2015, act 2, sc. 7.

Lincoln, Abraham. "To Albert G. Hodges, April 4, 1864." Abraham Lincoln: Speeches and Writings 1859-1865, edited by Don E. Fehrenbacher. Library of America, 1989.

Proust, Marcel. Sodom and Gomorrah, translated by John Sturrock. Penguin Classics, 2005.