Gaston Leroux, The Phantom of the Opera

"... My mother, daroga, my poor, unhappy mother would never... let me kiss her... She used to run away... and throw me my mask!... Nor any other woman... ever, ever!... Ah, you can understand, my happiness was so great, I cried. And fell at her feet, crying... and I kissed her feet... her little feet... crying. You're crying, too, daroga... and she cried also... the angel cried!..."

"Erik: Are you very tired?Christine: Oh, tonight I gave you my soul, and I am dead. Erik: Your soul is a beautiful thing, child. No emperor received so fair a gift. The angels wept to-night."

"While there are things about which one does not boast, there are others for which to be pitied would be all too humiliating."

"He stared dully at the desolate, cold road and the pale, dead night. Nothing was colder or more dead than his heart. He had loved an angel and now he despised a woman."

"He fills me with horror and I do not hate him. How can I hate him, Raoul? Think of Erik at my feet, in the house on the lake, underground. He accuses himself, he curses himself, he implores my forgiveness!... He confesses his cheat. He loves me! He lays at my feet an immense and tragic love. ... He has carried me off for love!... He has imprisoned me with him, underground, for love!... But he respects me: he crawls, he moans, he weeps!... And, when I stood up, Raoul, and told him that I could only despise him if he did not, then and there, give me my liberty...he offered it...he offered to show me the mysterious road... Only...only he rose too...and I was made to remember that, though he was not an angel, nor a ghost, nor a genius, he remained the voice...for he sang. And I listened ... and stayed!... That night, we did not exchange another word. He sang me to sleep."

"I'm sick and tired of having a forest and a torture chamber in my house... I want to have a nice quiet flat with ordinary doors and windows and a wife inside it, like anybody else!"

"All I wanted was to be loved for myself." (Erik)"

"when a man", continued Raoul,"adopts such romantic methods to entice a young girl's affections. .."The man must be either a villain, or the girl a fool: is that it?"

"You must know that I am made of death, from head to foot, and it is a corpse who loves you and adores you and will never, never leave you!"

"Know that it is a corpse who loves you and adores you and will never, never leave you!... Look, I am not laughing now, crying, crying for you, Christine, who have torn off my mask and who therefore can never leave me again!... Oh, mad Christine, who wanted to see me!"