“Hours of ecstasy are never more than a moment”

“At that moment of love, a moment when passion is absolutely silent under omnipotence of ecstasy, Marius, pure seraphic Marius, would have been more capable of visiting a woman of the streets than of raising Cosette’s dress above the ankle. Once on a moonlit night, Cosette stopped to pick up something from the ground, her dress loosened and revealed the swelling of her breasts. Marius averted his eyes.”

“Sometimes, if the two old womenwere not asleep, they heard him pacing slowly along the walks at a veryadvanced hour of the night. He was there alone, communing with himself,peaceful, adoring, comparing the serenity of his heart with theserenity of the ether, moved amid the darkness by the visible splendor ofthe constellations and the invisible splendor of God, opening his heart tothe thoughts which fall from the Unknown. At such moments, while heoffered his heart at the hour when nocturnal flowers offer their perfume,illuminated like a lamp amid the starry night, as he poured himself outin ecstasy in the midst of the universal radiance of creation, he could nothave told himself, probably, what was passing in his spirit; he feltsomething take its flight from him, and something descend into him.Mysterious exchange of the abysses of the soul with the abysses of theuniverse!”

“It may indeed be said that the word is never a more splendid mystery than when it travels in a man's mind from thought to conscience and back again to thought.”

“You were right to come to see a dying man. It is right that these moments should have witnesses. Everyone has his dream; I would like to live till dawn, but I know I have less than three hours left. It will be night, but no matter. Dying is simple. It does not take daylight. So be it: I will die by starlight”

“At the moment when her eyes closed, when all feeling vanished in her, she thought that she felt a touch of fire imprinted on her lips, a kiss more burning than the red-hot iron of the executioner.”

“These are true felicities. No joy beyond these joys. Love is the only ecstasy, everything else weeps”