Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

"[He] had to submit to the fate of every newcomer in a small town, where many tongues talk but few heads think."

"In a little town, there are many mouths which talk, and very few heads which think."

"Blacheville smiles with the self-satisfied smugness of a man whose vanity is tickled"

"To err his human, to stroll is Parisian."

"To breathe Paris is to preserve one's soul."

"To breath the air of Paris preserves the soul."

"If you ask the great city, ‘Who is this person?,’ she will answer, ‘He is my child."

"To study in Paris is to be born in Paris!"

"If the soul is left in darkness, sins will be committed. The guilty one is not he who commits the sin, but the one who causes the darkness. (Monseigneur Bienvenu in _Les Miserables_)"

"The boughs, without becoming detached from the trunk grow away from it."

"... plunged into chance,--that is to say, swallowed up in Providence"

". . .where there is no more hope, song remains."

"Monsieur, innocence is its own crown. Innocence has no truck with highness. It is as august in rags as it is draped in the fleur-de-lis."

"Cosette, in her seclusion, like Marius in his, was all ready to take fire. Destiny, with its mysterious and fatal patience, was slowly bringing these two beings near each other, fully charged and all languishing with the stormy electricities of passion,—these two souls which held love as two clouds hold lightning, and which were to meet and mingle in a glace like clouds in a flash. The power of a glance has been so much abused in love stories, that it has come to be disbelieved in. Few people dare now to say that two beings have fallen in love because they have looked at each other. Yet it is in this way that love begins, and in this way only. The rest is only the rest, and comes afterwards. Nothing is more real than these great shocks which two souls give each other in exchanging this spark. At that particular moment when Cosette unconsciously looked with this glance which so affected Marius, Marius had no suspicion that he also had a glance which affected Cosette."

"Listen, Monsieur Director, here's what I think. Obviously this is wrong. There are twenty-six of you in five or six small rooms; there are three of us in space enough for sixty. That is wrong, I assure you. You have my house and I am in yours. Give me back mine and this will be your home."

"Madame Thenardier was approaching her forties, which is equivalent to fifty in a woman..."

"I propose a toast to mirth; be merry! Let us complete our course of law by folly and eating! Indigestion and the digest. let Justinian be the male, and Feasting, the female! Joy the depths! Live, O creation! The world is a great diamond. I am happy. The birds are astonishing. What a festival everywhere! The nightingale is a gratuitous Elleviou. Summer, I salute thee!"

"I repeat, whether we be Italians or Frenchmen, misery concerns us all."

"I have a dream my life would be. So different from this hell I'm living. So different now from what it seem. Now life has killed the dream I dreamed."*Fantine"

"Are you what is called a lucky man? Well, you are sad every day. Each day has its great grief or its little care... Hardly one day in a hundred of unbroken joy and sunshine. And you are of that small number who at lucky! As for the other men, stagnant night is upon them."