If we can’t arrange our own happiness, it’s a conceit beyond vulgarity to arrange the happiness of those who come after us. - Tom Stoppard

Poetical feelings are a peril to scholarship. There are always poetical people ready to protest that a corrupt line is exquisite. Exquisite to whom? The Romans were foreigners writing for foreigners two millenniums ago; and for people whose gods we find quaint, whose savagery we abominate, whose private habits we don't like to talk about, but whose idea of what is exquisite is, we flatter ourselves, mysteriously identical to ours.

HENRY: You don’t get visited by happiness like being lucky with the weather. The weather is the weather.
DEBBIE: And happiness?
HENRY: Happiness is . . . equilibrium. Shift your weight.

A foreign correspondent is someone who lives in foreign parts and corresponds, usually in the form of essays containing no new facts. Otherwise he's someone who flies around from hotel to hotel and thinks that the most interesting thing about any story is the fact that he has arrived to cover it.