Gaston Leroux Quotes

“You are crying! You are afraid of me! And yet I am not really wicked.”

“At one and the same time, he had learned what love meant, and hatred. He knew that he loved. He wanted to know whom he hated.”

“Love, jealousy, hatred, burst out around us in harrowing cries.”

“All I wanted was to be loved for myself.”

“I tore off my mask so as not to lose one of her tears... and she did not run away!...and she did not die!... She remained alive, weeping over me, weeping with me. We cried together! I have tasted all the happiness the world can offer.”

“Know that it is a corpse who loves you and adores you and will never, never leave you!...Look, I am not laughing now, crying, crying for you, Christine, who have torn off my mask and who therefore can never leave me again!...Oh, mad Christine, who wanted to see me!”

″‘Your soul is a beautiful thing, child.’ replied the grave man’s voice, ‘and I thank you. No emperor received so fair a gift. The angels wept to-night.”

“Now I want to live like everybody else. I want to have a wife like everybody else and to take her out on Sundays. I have invented a mask that makes me look like anybody. People will not even turn round in the streets. You will be the happiest of women. And we will sing, all by ourselves, till we swoon away with delight.”

“None will ever be a true Parisian who has not learned to wear a mask of gaiety over his sorrows and one of sadness, boredom or indifference over his inward joy.”

“Oh, to-night I gave you my soul, and I am dead!”

“Are people so unhappy when they love?” “Yes, Christine, when they love and are not sure of being loved.”

“They played at hearts as other children might play at ball; only, as it was really their two hearts that they flung to and fro, they had to be very, very handy to catch them, each time, without hurting them.”

“I can’t go on living like this, like a mole in a burrow!”

“I am dying of love.”

“How beautiful she was when she let me kiss her.”

“She looked as beautiful as if she had been dead!”

“Little Lotte thought of everything and nothing.”

“Most of all loved, when she went to sleep, to hear the Angel of Music.”

“She is singing to-night to bring the chandelier down!”

“Every great musician, every great artist received a visit from the Angel at least once in his life.”

“Sometimes the Angel leans over their cradle, as happened to Lotte, and that is how there are little prodigies who play the fiddle at six better than men at fifty, which, you must admit, is very wonderful.”

“Sometimes, the Angel comes much later, because the children are naughty and won’t learn their lessons or practise their scales. And sometimes, he does not come at all, because the children have a bad heart or a bad conscience.”

“No one ever sees the Angel; but he is heard by those who are meant to hear him.”

He often comes when they least expect him, when they are sad and disheartened.”

“Then their ears suddenly perceive celestial harmonies, a divine voice, which they remember all their lives.”

“Persons who are visited by the Angel quiver with a thrill unknown to the rest of mankind.”

“And they can not touch an instrument, or open their mouths to sing, without producing sounds that put all other human sounds to shame.”

“People who do not know that the Angel has visited those persons say that they have genius.”

“But when, at the Assize Court, he brought in the key to the whole case, he did not tell the whole truth. He only allowed so much of it to appear as sufficed to ensure the acquittal of an innocent man.”

“The more we think we know something, the further we are from knowing anything!”

″...murderers don’t leave traces behind them which tell the truth.”

“Criminal lawyers journalists are not enemies, the former need advertisement, the latter information.”

“His intelligence was so keen, and so original!- and he had a quality of thought such as I have never found in any other person.”

“It should not surprise us to find in the one man the perfection of two such lines of activity if we remember that the daily press was already beginning to transform itself and to become what it is to-day- the gazette of crime.”

“It was always repugnant to him to use for his own private gain that wonderful gift of invention he had received from nature.”

″...I saw that what he had previously said, and which had appeared to me void of meaning, was so thoroughly logical that I could not understand how it was I had not understood him sooner.”

“When people throw themselves into the arms of justice with the proofs of complicity on them, you can be sure they are not accomplices.”

“A mutton-bone in the hand of a skilled assassin is a frightful weapon...”