LilaBeth > Recent Status Updates

Reform schools are supposed to teach viciousness and criminality but Hazel didn’t pay enough attention. He came out of reform school as innocent of viciousness as he was of fractions and long division.

"The brother....had been a peaceable skinflint who, being a priest, felt it his duty to give alms to such of the poor as he encountered; but the coins he gave them were always obsolete currency, and thus he found means of going to Hell by way of Paradise."

I’m still not over the fact that Hugo spent so many chapters giving a detailed narrative of the Battle of Waterloo even after he said he would leave it to historians to tell it. All so he could just mention that Thenardier was there one night scavenging among the bodies. Like, couldn’t he have just said so? Nevertheless, it was very fascinating. I enjoyed it.

An army is a strange contrivance in which power is the sum of a vast total of impotence. That is the explanation of war, an outrage by humanity upon humanity in despite of humanity.

I love Bishop Bienvenu (Bishop Welcome). “He did not study plants, he merely loved flowers. He had great respect for men of learning but even more respect for the ignorant, and without forfeiting either loyalty he watered his beds every summer evening with a green watering-can.”

As long as you are proud you cannot know God. A proud man is always looking down on things and people: and, of course, as long as you are looking down, you cannot see something that is above you.

This is how dreams were told….”It was brown and had a shell, a creeping reptile, about seven inches long, about two fingers thick at the head, gradually tapering towards the tail, so that the very tip of the tail was no more than one-fifth of an inch thick. About two inches from the head, a pair of legs came out of the body, at a forty-five-degree angle….” And so on. How does one remember all these details?

"But even so, what a nasty and all-satisfied little pimple that nephew of Lebedev's is!" What a nice little analogy! My brain is actually envisioning a nasty little pimple that is somehow very satisfied with itself. And a person at the same time....