Part of what makes this book phenomenal is the writing. It is 3rd person narrative and is kind of obvious about being the narrator. Some people don't like that approach, but Hugo pulled it off very well. And as everybody knows, the best way to get a good taste of a writing style is to read the quotes I post on my blog!!! Or something like that. So without any further ado: Victor Hugo.
As there is always more misery at the lower end than humanity at the top, everything was given away before it was received, like water on parched soil.
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. (one of my favorites!!)
This uninspired play on words had the effect of a stone thrown into a country pond...All the frogs fell silent.
For Cosette, read Euphrasie. The name of the little one was Euprhasie. But the mother had made Cosette out of it, by that sweet and charming instinct of mothers and of the people, who change Josefa into Pepita, and Francoise into Sillette. It is a kind of derivation that confuses and disconcerts the entire science of etymology.
There are souls that, crablike, crawl continually toward darkness, going backward in life rather than advancing, using their experience to increase their deformity, growing continually worse, and becoming steeped more and more thoroughly in the intensifying viciousness. (Description of the Thenadiers)
The supreme happiness of life is the conviction that we are loved; loved for ourselves--say rather, loved in spite of ourselves . (Favorite....)
As for methods of prayer, all are good, as long as they are sincere.
Superstitions, bigotries, hypocrisies, prejudices, these phantoms, phantoms though they be, cling to life; they have teeth and nails in their shadowy substance, and we must grapple with them individually and make war on them without truce; for it is one of humanity's inevitabilities to be condemned to eternal struggle with phantoms.
Laughter is sunshine; it chases winter from the human face.
Give a creature the useless, deprive him of the necessary, and you have the gamin.
What floods ideas are! How quickly they cover all that they are commissioned to destroy and bury, and how rapidly they create frightful abysses!
He was experiencing what the earth may experience at the moment when it is opened by the plow so wheat may be sown; it feels only the wound; the thrill of the seed and joy of the fruit do not come until later.
Beautiful with a beauty that combined all of the woman with all of the angel, a beauty that would have made Petrarch sing and Dante kneel.
Destroy the cave Ignorance, and you destroy the mole Crime...The only social peril is darkness.
"Seeing all those snowflakes fall, it's like a swarm of white butterflies in the sky."
A social deformity perhaps still more hideous than the evil rich: the evil poor.
Algebra applies to the clouds; the radiance of the star benefits the rose; no thinker would dare to say that the perfume of the hawthorn is useless to the constellations. Who could ever calculate the path of a molecule? How do we know that the creations of worlds are not determined by falling grains of sand? ( Oh just check it out and read the whole chapter. It's worth it.)
One evening, little Gavroche had had no dinner; he remembered that he had had no dinner the day before either; this was becoming tiresome.
If noone loved, the sun would go out.
Love almost replaces thought. Love is a burning forgetfulness of everything else.
With eyes closed is the best way to look at the soul.
Civil war? What does that mean? Is there any foreign war? Isn't every war fought between men, between brothers?
The barricade was trembling; he was singing. It was not a child; it was not a man; it was a strange mystic gamin, the invulnerable dwarf of the mêlée. (Gavroche)
He who does not weep does not see.
Before him he saw two roads, both equally straight; but he did see two; and that terrified him--he who had never in his life known anything but one straight line. And, bitter anguish, these two roads were contradictory. (Javert, thinking)
He is asleep. Though his mettle was sorely tried, / He lived, and when he lost his angel, died. / It happened calmly, on its own, / The way the night comes when day is done.
As we see, he had a strange and peculiar way of judging things. I suspect that he acquired it from the Gospel.
Ok....that was a lot. But give me a break! It's a long book.
Anything left? To listen to the soundtrack. But you can do that on your own.
