18 Quotes by Alexandre Dumas fils

Then I met you, young, ardent, happy, and I tried to make you the man I had longed for in my noisy solitude. What I loved in you was not the man who was, but the man who was going to be. You do not accept the position, you reject it as unworthy of you; you are an ordinary lover. Do like the others; pay me, and say no more about it.

In my opinion, it is impossible to create characters until one has spent a long time in studying men, as it is impossible to speak a language until it has been seriously acquired. Not being old enough to invent, I content myself with narrating, and I beg the reader to assure himself of the truth of a story in which all the characters, with the exception of the heroine, are still alive.

One finds pleasure in childish enough things, and it is too bad to destroy such a pleasure when, by simply leaving it alone, one can make somebody so happy.

The more I reflected the more I said to myself that Marguerite had no reason for feigning a love which she did not feel, and I said to myself also that women have two ways of loving, one of which may arise from the other: they love with the heart or with the senses. [...] often a girl who has sought in marriage only the union of two pure affections receives the sudden revelation of physical love, that energetic conclusion of the purest impressions of the soul.

One day, as I was going to the Prefecture for a passport, I saw in one of the neighbouring streets a poor girl who was being marched along by two policemen. I do not know what was the matter. All I know is that she was weeping bitterly as she kissed an infant only a few months old, from whom her arrest was to separate her. Since that day I have never dared to despise a woman at first sight.

If men knew what they can have for a tear, they would be better loved and we should be less ruinous to them.

We men are built like that, and it is very fortunate that the imagination lends so much poetry to the senses, and that the desires of the body make thus much concession to the dreams of the soul.

Manon died in the desert, but in the arms of the man who loved her with the the entire brilliance of his soul, who, when she was dead, dug a grave for her, and watered it with his tears, then buried his own heart within it..While Marguerite, a Sinner like Manon, had died in a sumptuous bed...But in that desert of the heart, a more barren, a vaster, a more merciless desert, than that in which Manon had found her last resting place.

It is my considered view that no one can invent fictional characters without first having made a lengthy study of people, just as it is impossible for anyone to speak a language that has not been properly mastered. Since I am not yet of an age to invent, I must make do with telling a tale.