There is a painful joke that Europeans often tell of their Gallic neighbors: God created France, the most beautiful country in the world with so much good in it, and ended up feeling guilty about it. He had to do something to make it fair. And so, he created the French people.

They have a saying, the French, that no woman, can be truly beautiful who is not also sometimes truly ugly.

Sarajevo was this beautiful city, very cosmopolitan, multiethnic, full of wonderful people, artists and writers and poets and Serbs and Muslims and Croats, and living side by side. And then this medieval siege, and it was a medieval siege, came, and the Bosnian Serbs were on the hills lobbing in rockets and grenades and mortars.

The most beautiful thing in the world is a ballpark filled with people.

There is a romantic, often misguided, misconception among the British that life in France is akin to life in Paradise.

Death is not painful. It is the most beautiful experience you will have.