Elizabeth

“A room without books is like a body without a soul.”
― Marcus Tullius Cicero

“You ask me what forces me to speak? a strange thing; my conscience.”
― Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

“The ghosts of Manhattan are not the spirits of the propertied classes; these are entombed in their names, their works, their constructions. New York's ghosts are the unresting souls of the poor, the marginal, the dispossessed, the depraved, the defective, the recalcitrant. They are the guardian spirits of the urban wilderness in which they lived and died. Unrecognized by the history that is common knowledge, they push invisibly behind it to erect their memorials in the collective unconscious.”
― Lucy Sante

“Humanity is not perfect in any fashion; no more in the case of evil than in that of good. The criminal has his virtues, just as the honest man has his weaknesses.”
― Pierre Choderlos de Laclos, Les Liaisons dangereuses