Joy Nicholas > Joy's Quotes

“He had discovered that there was not just one God but many, and some were more than cruel — they were insane, and that changed all. Cruelty, after all, was understandable. With insanity, however, there was no arguing.”
― Stephen King, Misery

“Writing does not cause misery, it is born of misery. – Montaigne”
― Stephen King, Misery

“Only a silly person would try to start a good work with a bad tool.”
― Stephen King, Misery

“How its heart beats! How it struggles to get away! As we do, Paul. As we do. We think we know so much, but we really don’t know any more than a rat in a trap—a rat with a broken back that thinks it still wants to live.”
― Stephen King, Misery

“The book the reader has now before his eyes - from one end to the other, in its whole and in its details, whatever the omissions, the exceptions, or the faults - is the march from evil to good, from injustice to justice, from the false to the true, from night to day, from appetite to conscience, from rottenness to life, from brutality to duty, from Hell to Heaven, from nothingness to God. Starting point: matter; goal: the soul. Hydra at the beginning, angel at the end.”
― Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

“Should we continue to look upwards? Is the light we can see in the sky one of those which will presently be extinguished? The ideal is terrifying to behold... brilliant but threatened on all sides by the dark forces that surround it: nevertheless, no more in danger than a star in the jaws of the clouds.”
― Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

“Woe, alas, to those who have loved only bodies, forms, appearances! Death will rob them of everything. Try to love souls, you will find them again.”
― Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

“The earth is a great piece of stupidity.”
― Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

“To err is human. To loaf is Parisian.”
― Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

“The soul gropes in search of a soul, and finds it. And that soul, found and proven, is a woman. A hand sustains you, it is hers; lips lightly touch your forehead, they are her lips; you hear breathing near you, it is she. To have her wholly, from her devotion to her pity, never to be left alone, to have that sweet shyness as, to lean on that unbending reed, to touch, Providence with your hands and be able to grasp it in your arms; God made palpable, what transport! The heart, that dark celestial flower, bursts into a mysterious bloom. You would not give up that shade for all the light in the world! The angel soul is there, forever there; if she goes away, it is only to return; she fades away in a dream and reappears in reality. You feel an approaching warmth, she is there. You overflow with serenity, gaiety, and ecstasy; you are radiant in your darkness. And the thousand little cares! The trifles that are enormous in this void. The most ineffable accents of the womanly voice used to comfort you, and replacing for you the vanished universe! You are caressed through the soul. You see nothing but you feel yourself adored. It is paradise of darkness.”
― Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

“To lie a little is not possible: he who lies, lies the whole lie.”
― Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

“Yes, the brutalities of progress are called revolutions. When they are over, this is recognised: that the human race has been harshly treated, but that it has advanced.”
― Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

“Great griefs exhaust. They discourage us with life. The man into whom they enter feels something taken from him. In youth, their visit is sad; later on, it is ominous.”
― Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

“There are accepted revolutions, revolutions which are called revolutions; there are refused revolutions, which are called riots.”
― Víctor Hugo, Les Misérables

“In fact, were it given to our human eye to see into the consciences of others, we would judge a man much more surely from what he dreams than from what he thinks. There is will in the thought, there is none in the dream. Even in the gigantic and the ideal, the dream, which is completely spontaneous, takes and keeps the form of our mind. Nothing springs more directly and more sincerely from our innermost souls than our unreflected and indefinite aspirations, much more than in ideas, which are structured, studied, and compared, can we find the true character of each man. Our chimeras are most like us. Each of us dreams the unknown and the impossible according to his own nature.”
― Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

“there is a point when the unfortunate and the infamous are associated and confused in a word, a mortal word, les miserables”
― Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

“Certainly we talk to ourselves; there is no thinking being who has not experienced that. One could even say that the word is never a more magnificent mystery than when, within a man, it travels from his thought to his conscience and returns from his conscience to his thought. This is the only sense of the words, so often used in this chapter, “he said,” “he exclaimed”; we say to ourselves, we speak to ourselves, we exclaim within ourselves, without breaking the external silence. There is great tumult within; everything within us speaks, except the tongue. The realities of the soul, though not visible and palpable, are nonetheless realities. (pg. 226)”
― Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

“I think, therefore I doubt.”
― Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

“So long as ignorance and poverty exist on earth, books of the nature of Les Miserables cannot fail to be of use.”
― Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

“Every day has its great grief or its small anxiety. ... One cloud is dispelled, another forms. There is hardly one day in a hundred of real joy and bright sunshine.”
― Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

“Nothing can be sadder or more profound than to see a thousand things for the first and last time. To journey is to be born and die each minute...All the elements of life are in constant flight from us, with darkness and clarity intermingled, the vision and the eclipse; we look and hasten, reaching out our hands to clutch; every happening is a bend in the road...and suddenly we have grown old. We have a sense of shock and gathering darkness; ahead is a black doorway; the life that bore us is a flagging horse, and a veiled stranger is waiting in the shadows to unharness us. ”
― Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

“People weighed down with troubles do not look back; they know only too well that misfortune stalks them.”
― Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

“Let us fear ourselves. Prejudices are the real robbers; vices are the real murderers. The great dangers lie within ourselves.”
― Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

“He loved books, those undemanding but faithful friends.”
― Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

“Love is a fault; so be it.”
― Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

“Man is not a circle with a single center; he is an ellipse with two focii. Facts are one, ideas are the other.”
― Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

“where the telescope ends the microscope begins, and who can say which has the wider vision?”
― Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

“Revolutions are not born of chance but of necessity.”
― Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

“The guilty one is not he who commits the sin, but he who causes the darkness.”
― Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

“It is man's consolation that the future is to be a sunrise instead of a sunset.”
― Victor Hugo, Les Misérables