Victor Hugo

The barber in his shop, warmed by a good stove, was shaving a customer and casting from time to time a look towards this enemy, this frozen and brazen gamin, who had both hands in his pockets, but his wits evidently out of their sheath.

There are moments when a man has a furnace in his brain. Marius was in one of those moments.

"You are pitiable, but my life is not worth the trouble of so long a defence. As to your imagining that you could make me speak, that you could make me write what I do not wish to write, that you could make me say what I do not wish to say —"

He pulled up the sleeve of his left arm, and added:

"Here."

At the same time he extended his arm, and laid upon the naked flesh the glowing chisel, which he held in his right hand, by the wooden handle.

They heard the hissing of the burning flesh; the odour peculiar to chambers of torture spread through the den. Marius staggered, lost in horror; the brigands themselves felt a shudder; the face of the wonderful old man hardly contracted, and while the red iron was sinking into the smoking, impassable, and almost august wound, he turned upon Thenardier his fine face, in which there was no hatred, and in which suffering was swallowed up in a serene majesty.

The endeavor is vain, you cannot annihilate that eternal relic of the human heart, love.

Dante would have thought he saw the seven circles of Hell on their passage.

Women play with their beauty as children do with their knives. They wound themselves with it.

That will be swallowing a language very rapidly or a hundred-sous piece very slowly.

A compliment is something like a kiss through a veil.

Nothing is more dangerous than discontinued labor; it is habit lost. A habit easy to abandon, difficult to resume.

Let us lament as over stomachs, over minds which do not eat. If there is anything more poignant than a body agonising for want of bread, it is a soul which is dying of hunger for light.

There is but one way of refusing To-morrow, that is to die.

I have just met Marius' new hat and coat, with Marius inside. Probably he was going to an examination. He looked stupid enough.