As I began reading this month I thought OH NO not again…..some of the backstory and side story that has nothing to do with the story at times can be tedious. Then just when you are at your limit you read passages and pages of such pure beautiful prose you cry. August reading was this for me. The following are things I paged marked for either the beauty of the quote, accurate to today happenings, a line of story I wanted to remember, or just stunning prose to me.
“My name is Thénardier”
“You should always begin by arresting the victims.”
“Damn it, He MUST have been the real prize!”
A FEW PAGES OF HISTORY
“Some people have wanted wrongly to identify the bourgeoisie as a class. The bourgeoisie is simply the contented section of the people. The bourgeoisie is the man who now has the time to sit down. A chair is not a caste. But the very progress of the human race may be halted because of a desire to sit down too soon. This has often been the case of the bourgeoisie. A class is not made up of those with a failing, Selfishness is not one of the divisions of the social order.”
Louis-Phillippe
“He was not much of a church-goer, no huntsman, and never went to the Opera. Incorruptible by the religious lobby. dog-handlers or ballet-dancers. This had something to do with his bourgeoisie popularity. He had no court.
His great failing was that he was modest in the name of France.
Louis was a King of total transparency. While he reigned there was freedom of press, parliamentary freedom, freedom of conscience and freedom of speech.
Although aware of the corrosive power of the light on privileges he left his throne exposed to the light. History will recognise him for this.
Take away the the king part, Louis was a good man.
Now, goodness is that rare pearly in history, and for us the good almost take precedence over the great.
Resistance was born the next day and maybe even the day before.
God makes his will visible to men in events-an obscure text written in a mysterious language. Men produce instant translations, hasty, incorrect translations full of errors, gaps and misconstructions. Very few minds comprehend the divine language. The most discerning, most calm, most profound, decipher slowly, and by the time they come up with their text the task has long been completed – there are already twenty translations in the public arena. Each translation gives birth to a party, each misconstruction to a faction. And every party thinks it has the only true text, and every faction thinks it possesses the light.
Revolutions result not from accident but from necessity. A revolution is a return from the artificial to the real.
Meanwhile back at home, poverty, the proletariat, wages, education, the penal system, prostitution, the condition of women, wealth, destitution, production, consumption, distribution, exchange, currency, credit , capital’s rights, labour’s rights – all these problems multiplied, looming grimly over society.
And the world will let you come to grief and die because the world allows everything that is mere selfishness, everything that does not represent for humankind a virtue or an idea, to come to grief and die.
He had one sweet fantasy left to him: that she had loved him, that her glance had told him so, that she did not know his name but she knew his soul, and wherever she was, whatever that mysterious place might be, perhaps she still loved him.
This is her meadow. I shall learn here where she lives.
No, she replied, I’m the devil but I don’t mind.
With its mysterious and inexorable patience, destiny slowly brought together these two individuals, thoroughly charge and pining away with the raging electricities of passion, these two souls bearing love like two clouds bearing thunderbolts, who were bound to meet and converge in a glance like clouds in a flash of lightning.
The glance has been so over-exploited in romantic novels , it has eventually been discredited. You hardly dare say nowadays that two people fell in love because they looked at each other. Yet that is the way, and the only way, that people fall in love. The rest is just that and comes afterwards. Nothing is more real than the great shock two souls give each other by exchanging that spark.
Woman wield their beauty the way children play with knives.
The first symptom of true love in a young man is timidity;
in a young girl,
it is boldness.
THEY SAW EACH OTHER. And like the stars of the heavens, millions of miles apart, they existed by gazing at each other.
Does not everything start with indifference.
