Cosette Quotes

• Who can be sure that Jean Valjean had not been on the verge of losing heart and giving up the struggle? In loving he recovered his strength. But the truth is that he was no less vulnerable than Cosette. He protected her and she sustained him. Thanks to him she could go forward into life, and thanks to her he could continue virtous. He was the child's support and she his mainstay. Sublime, unfathomable marvel of the balance of destiny!

  Victor Hugo

  Children, Giving Up, Struggle

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• You who suffer because you love, love still more. To die of love, is to live by it.

  Victor Hugo

  Love Is, Suffering, Live By

  Victor Hugo (1862). “Saint Denis”, p.66

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• The power of a glance has been so much abused in love stories, that it has come to be disbelieved in. Few people dare now to say that two beings have fallen in love because they have looked at each other. Yet it is in this way that love begins, and in this way only.

  Victor Hugo

  Love, Romantic, Two

  Victor Hugo (1994). “Les Miserables Volume Two”, p.612, Wordsworth Editions

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• Marius and Cosette were in the dark in regard to each other. They did not speak, they did not bow, they were not acquainted; they saw each other; and, like the stars in the sky separated by millions of leagues, they lived by gazing upon each other.

  Victor Hugo

  Stars, Dark, Sky

  Victor Hugo (1994). “Les Miserables Volume Two”, p.614, Wordsworth Editions

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• Marius was of the temperament that sinks into grief and remains there; Cosette was of the sort that plunges in and comes out again.

  Victor Hugo

  Grief, Plunge, Marius

  Victor Hugo (1987). “Les Misérables”, Signet Classics

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• Marius and Cosette did not ask where this would lead them. They looked at themselves as arrived. It is a strange pretension for men to ask that love should lead them somewhere.

  Victor Hugo

  Men, Strange, Should

  Victor Hugo, Charles Edwin Wilbour (1987). “Les misérables”, Dutton Adult

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• Slowly he took out the clothes in which, ten years beforem Cosette had left Montfermeil; first the little dress, then the black scarf, then the great heavy child's shoes Cosette could still almost have worn, so small was her foot, then the vest of very thich fustian, then the knitted petticoat, the the apron with pockets, then the wool stockings.... Then his venerable white head fell on the bed, this old stoical heart broke, his face was swallowed up, so to speak, in Cosette's clothes, and anybody who had passed along the staircase at that moment would have heard irrepressible sobbing.

  Victor Hugo

  Children, Heart, Years

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• 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.

  Victor Hugo

  Eye, Passion, Night

  Victor Hugo (1987). “Les Misérables”, Signet Classics

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• He was at his own request and through his own complicity driven out of all his happinesses one after the other; and he had this sorrow, that after having lost Cosette wholly in one day, he was afterwards obliged to lose her again in detail.

  Victor Hugo

  Sorrow, One Day, Details

  Victor Hugo (2010). “The Works of Victor Hugo”, p.2050, BookCaps Study Guides

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