Roman author Quotes

“The world of sleep has an existence of its own.”

“If a man has his throat cut in Paris, it's a murder. If 50,000 people are murdered in the east, it is a question.”

“A translation in verse . . . seems to me something absurd, impossible.”

“Never had the sky been more studded with stars and more charming, the trees more trembling, the odor of the grass more penetrating; never had the birds fallen asleep among the leaves with a sweeter noise; never had all the harmonies of universal serenity responded more thoroughly to the inward music of love; never had Marius been more captivated, more happy, more ecstatic.”

“To pay compliments to the one we love is the first method of caressing, a demi-audacity venturing. A compliment is something like a kiss through a veil.”

“There is a secret drawer in every woman's heart.”

“If suffer we must, let's suffer on the heights.”

“I was always a lover of soft-winged things.”

“Creation lives, grows, and multiplies; man is but a witness.”

“Strong and bitter words indicate a weak cause.”

“Men become accustomed to poison by degrees.”

“It is often our best friends who throw us down.”

“She might have melted a heart of stone, but nothing can melt a heart of wood.”

“Many great actions are committed in small struggles.”

“Dreaming is happiness. Waiting is life.”

“Man's greatest actions are performed in minor struggles. Life, misfortune, isolation, abandonment and poverty are battlefields which have their heroes - obscure heroes who are at times greater than illustrious heroes.”

“There are many lovely women, but no perfect ones.”

“Symmetry is ennui, and ennui is the very essence of grief and melancholy. Despair yawns.”

“For the rest, he was the same to all men, the fashionable world and the ordinary people. He judged nothing in haste, or without taking account of the cirumstances. He said, 'Let me see how the fault arose.”

“If she gives me all her time it is because I have all her heart.”

“This book should be read as one would read the book of a dead man.”

“While contemplating the bride, and eyeing the cake of soap, he muttered between his teeth: 'Tuesday. It was not Tuesday. Was it Tuesday? Perhaps it was Tuesday. Yes, it was Tuesday.' No one has ever discovered to what this monologue referred. Yes, perchance, this monologue had some connection with the last occasion on which he had dined, three days before, for it was now Friday.”

“When grace combines with wrinkles, it is admirable. There is an indescribable light of dawn about intensely happy old age. . . . The young person is handsome, but the old, superb.”

“A day will come when all nations on our continent will form a European brotherhood... A day will come when we shall see... the United States of America and the United States of Europe face to face, reaching out for each other across the seas.”

“My tastes are aristocratic, my actions democratic.”