The Lady of the Camellias
Reviews
She has already so completely absorbed my thoughts, my heart, and my life.
“Poor souls! If it is not right to love them, is it not well to pity them? You pity the blind man who has never seen the daylight, the deaf who has never heard the harmonies of nature, the dumb who has never found a voice for his soul, and, under a false cloak of shame, you will not pity this blindness of heart, this deafness of soul, this dumbness of conscience, which sets the poor afflicted creature beside herself and makes her, in spite of herself, incapable of seeing what is good, of hearing the Lord, and of speaking the pure language of love and faith.”
Highlights
The child is small, and contains the man; the brain is a cramped space that houses all thought; the eye is only a dot, and encompasses miles.
Let us not despise the woman who is neither mother nor daughter nor wife. Let us not limit our esteem to family life, narrow our tolerance to simple egotism.
That heroine is so real that I feel as if I have known her.
These days, by the time you are twenty-five years old, tears come so rarely that you don’t want to waste them on just anybody. It’s more than enough to weep for the parents who have paid for the privilege of being mourned.
That eternal regret, not of the wrong road taken, but of bad planning and ill-spent money, is one of the saddest things a person can hear.
It is my opinion that you cannot create a convincing character until you have made a broad study of human nature, just as you cannot speak a foreign language until you have studied it thoroughly.
People have always associated the country with love, and they have done well ; nothing affords so fine a frame for the woman whom one loves as the blue sky, the odours, the flowers, the breeze, the shining solitude of fields, or woods.