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"There are cancers so insidious in their nature that their very pulsation is invisible. Such cancers leave the ivory whiteness of the skin untouched, and marble not the firm, fair flesh, with their blue tints; the physician who bends over the patient's chest hears not, through he listens, the insatiable teeth of the disease grinding its onward progress through the muscles, as the blood flows freely on; the knife has never been able to destroy, and rarely even, temporarily, to discern the rage of these mortal scourges; their home is in the mind, which they corrupt; they fill the whole heart until it breaks. Such, madame, are the cancers, fatal to queens; are you, too, free from their scourge?"
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"She was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen, a tiny, bloody angel in the snow, and they were going to destroy her."

"Alone with everybody the flesh covers the bone and they put a mind in there and sometimes a soul,and the women break vases against the walls and them men drink too much and nobody finds the one but they keep looking crawling in and out of beds.flesh covers the bone and the flesh searches for more than flesh.there's no chance at all:we are all trapped by a singular fate.nobody ever finds the one.the city dumps fill the junkyards fill the mad houses fill the hospitals fill the graveyards fill nothing else fills."

"The sense of tragedy - according to Aristotle - comes, ironically enough, not from the protagonist's weak points but from his good qualities. Do you know what I'm getting at? People are drawn deeper into tragedy not by their defects but by their virtues....[But] we accept irony through a device called metaphor. And through that we grow and become deeper human beings."

"But what was there to say?Only that there were tears. Only that Quietness and Emptiness fitted together like stacked spoons. Only that there was a snuffling in the hollows at the base of a lovely throat. Only that a hard honey-colored shoulder had a semicircle of teethmarks on it. Only that they held each other close, long after it was over. Only that what they shared that night was not happiness, but hideous grief.Only that once again they broke the Love Laws. That lay down who should be loved. And how. And how much."

"Often it is the most deserving people who cannot help loving those who destroy them."

"There were sins whose fascination was more in the memory than in the doing of them, strange triumphs that gratified the pride more than the passions, and gave to the intellect a quickened sense of joy, greater than any joy they brought, or could ever bring, to the senses."

"Oh, the torment bred in the race, the grinding scream of deathand the stroke that hits the vein,the hemorrhage none can staunch, the grief,the curse no man can bear.But there is a cure in the house, and not outside it, no,not from others but from them,their bloody strife. We sing to you,dark gods beneath the earth.Now hear, you blissful powers underground - answer the call, send help.Bless the children, give them triumph now."
Explore more quotes by Alexandre Dumas

"Oh, Mercedes, I have spoken your name with sighs of melancholy, with groans of pain and with the croak of despair. I have spoken it frozen with cold, huddled on the straw of my dungeon. I have spoken it raging with heat and rolling around on the stone floor of my prison. Mercedes, I must have my revenge, because for fourteen years I suffered, fourteen years I wept and cursed. Now, I say to you, Mercedes, I must have my revenge!"

"After which, satisfied with the way he had conducted himself at Meung, free of remorse for the past, confident in the present, and full of hope for the future, he went to bed and slept the sleep of the just."

"There is something so awe-inspiring in great afflictions that even in the worst times the first emotion of a crowd has generally been to sympathise with the sufferer in a great catastrophe."

"Darling, has not the count just told us that all human wisdom is summed up in two words? Wait and hope."

"Unfortunately in this world of ours, each person views things through a certain medium, which prevents his seeing them in the same light as others."

"Until the day when God shall deign to reveal the future to man, all human wisdom is summed up in these two words,-Wait and hope."

"How is it that little children are so intelligent and men so stupid? It must be education that does it."
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