Miserable

If you emerge from that sad place with thoughts of hatred and of wrath against mankind, you are desrving of pity. If you emerge with thoughts of goodwill and of peace, you are more worthy than any of us.

Is thre not something truly evangelical in this delicay which abstains from sermon, from moralizing, from allusions? And is not the truest pity, when a man has a sore point, not to touch it at all?

What an ominous minute is that in which society draws back and consummates the irreparable abondonement of a sentient being?

It is always the same story. These poor living beings, these creatures of God, henceforth without support, without guide, without refuge, wandered away at random, who even knows? Each in his own direction perhaps, and little by little buried themselves in that cold mist which engulfs solitary destinies; gloomy shades into which disappears in succession so many unlucky heads, in the sombre march of the human race.

That is in any case a poor door to escape from misery through which infamy enters.

Can the heart become misshapen and contract incurable deformities and infirmities under the oppression of a disproportionate unhappiness as the vertebral column beneath too low a vault?

Only at intervals, these suddenly come to him, from without and within, an excess of wrath, a surcharge of suffereing, a livid and rapid flash which illuminated his whole soul, and caused to appear abruptly all around him, in fromt, behind, amid the gleams of a frightful light, the hideous precipices and the sombre perspective of his destiny.

Realities full of spectres, phantasmogories full of realities.

The imperturpable tempest obeys only the infinite.

Nature sometimes mingles her effects and her spectacles with our actions with sombre and intelligent appropriateness, as though she desired to make us reflect.

Misfortune does form the education of intelligence.

His brain was going through one of those violet yet perfectly calm moments in which revery is so profound that it absorbs reality.

In that heart where there was a wound, there is now a scar.

"What need have i to know your name? Besides, before you told me, you had one which I knew."

The man opened his eyes in astonishment.

"Really? You knew what I was called?"

"Yes," replied the Bishop, "you are called my Brother."

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I am trying to re-read Les Miserables. The musical just doesn't do the book justice. And the bits above were some of what I think are the more beautiful lines from the front part of the book.

I confess, there were times when I cried reading the book. And it's not that I cried because it was sad or anything, but it was just very touching. Just like the bit when the Bishop first called Valjean brother.

I remember that I read the end of the book on a bus. And I remembered desperately fighting the tears. I ended up tearing anyways.

If you haven't already, take some time out to read the book.