No ambition is fully realized, not in this world, at least. There is no heaven on earth in the age in which we live.

[...] for there are things that sound bizarre and yet are strictly correct, and just as it is true to say that in big cities the sun causes the façades of houses facing south to vegetate and grow, it is a fact that the frequent passage of vehicles widens streets.

Cosette was standing in her own shadow, as Marius was in his, all ready to take fire and blaze. Destiny, with its mysterious and fateful patience, was slowly bringing together these two beings all fired up and languishing from the stormy electrical charges of passion; these two souls that carried love like two clouds carrying lightning were about to approach each other and fuse in a glance like clouds in a flash of lightning.

The glance has been so abused in love stories that we have ended up discounting it. Hardly anyone ever dares now say that two beings fell in love because their eyes met. And yet that is the way you fall in love and it is the only way you fall in love. The rest is simply the rest and comes after. Nothing is more real than those great seismic shocks that two souls give each other in exchanging that spark.

So he asked himself where he stood. He put himself through the third degree over this "decision reached." He confessed to himself that everything he had just managed to get into order in his mind was monstrous, that "to let things alone," "to let God's will be done," was quite simply horrible. To let this mistake of fate and of men be perpetrated, not to stop it, to have a hand in the process through his silence, in a word, to do nothing, was to do everything! It was the final degree of hypocritical vileness! It was a crime - a low, cowardly, sly, abject, hideous crime!