Les Miserables (Les Misérables)

While the voices were singing, Jean Valjean was entirely absorbed in them. He no longer saw the night; he saw a blue sky. He seemed to feel the spreading of the wings we all have within us.

Truly at that instant, if Jean Valjean had had a kingdom, he would have given it for a rope.

Later, when we are no longer there, we find that those streets are very dear to us, that we miss the roofs, windows, and doors, that the walls are essential to us, that the trees are beloved, that every day we did enter those houses we never entered, and that we have left something of our affections, our life, and our heart on those paving stones.

But, as he was fifty-five and Cosette only eight, all the love he might have felt through his whole life melted into a sort of ineffable glow. This was the second white vision he had met. The bishop had caused the dawn of virtue on his horizon; Cosette invoked the dawn of love.

everywhere hovels and heaps of trash, old walls as black as widows’ clothes, and new walls as white as shrouds; everywhere, parallel rows of trees, buildings in rigid lines, low, flat structures, long, cold perspectives, and the dreary sameness of right angles. No variation in the terrain, not a caprice of architecture, not a wrinkle. Altogether, i

The doll is one of the most imperative needs, and at the same time one of the most charming instincts, of feminine childhood. To care for, clothe, adorn, dress, undress, dress over again, teach, scold a little, rock, cuddle, put to sleep, pretend that something is somebody—the whole future of the woman is there.

A large tree, covered with the excrescences that are the warts of vegetation, was a few steps from the heap of stones.

Forests are apocalypses; and a tiny soul’s beating wings make an agonizing sound beneath their monstrous vault.

The socket of night, the haggard look of everything, taciturn profiles that fade away as you advance, obscure dishevelments, angry clumps, livid pools, the gloomy reflected in the funereal, the sepulchral immensity of silence, the possible unknown beings, swaying of mysterious branches, frightful torsos of the trees, long wisps of shivering grass—y