Sydney Carton Quotes

Tess, Tess, Tessa. Was there ever a more beautiful sound than your name? To speak it aloud makes my heart ring like a bell. Strange to imagine that, isn’t it – a heart ringing – but when you touch me that is what it is like: as if my heart is ringing in my chest and the sound shivers down my veins and splinters my bones with joy. Why have I written these words in this book? Because of you. You taught me to love this book where I had scorned it. When I read it for the second time, with an open mind and heart, I felt the most complete despair and envy of Sydney Carton. Yes, Sydney, for even if he had no hope that the woman he loved would love him, at least he could tell her of his love. At least he could do something to prove his passion, even if that thing was to die. I would have chosen death for a chance to tell you the truth, Tessa, if I could have been assured that death would be my own. And that is why I envied Sydney, for he was free. And now at last I am free, and I can finally tell you, without fear of danger to you, all that I feel in my heart. You are not the last dream of my soul. You are the first dream, the only dream I ever was unable to stop myself from dreaming. You are the first dream of my soul, and from that dream I hope will come all other dreams, a lifetime’s worth. With hope at least, Will Herondale

I am the resurrection, and the life: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live: And whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die. (John 11:25-26)

I care for no man on earth, and no man on earth cares for me.

But you are not,” Magnus said. “He is not dead, Will. He lives because you let him go. He would have stayed with you and died, if you had asked it, but you loved him enough to prefer that he live, even if that life is separate from yours. And that above all things proves that you are not Sydney Carton, Will, that yours is not the kind of love that can be redeemed only through destruction. It is what I saw in you, what I have always seen in you, what made me want to help you. That you are not despairing. That you have in you an infinite capacity for joy.” He put one gloved hand under Will’s chin and lifted Will’s face. There were not many people Will had to raise his head to look in the eye, but Magnus was one. “Bright star,” Magnus said, and his eyes were thoughtful, as if he were remembering something, or someone. “Those of you who are mortal, you burn so fiercely. And you fiercer than most, Will. I will not ever forget you.

For you, and for any dear to you, I would do anything. I would embrace any sacrifice for you and for those dear to you. And when you see your own bright beauty springing up anew at your feet, think now and then that there is a man who would give his life, to keep a life you love beside you.

It had been June, the bright hot summer of 1937, and with the curtains thrown back the bedroom had been full of sunlight, sunlight and her and Will's children, their grandchildren, their nieces and nephews- Cecy's blue eyed boys, tall and handsome, and Gideon and Sophie's two girls- and those who were as close as family: Charlotte, white- haired and upright, and the Fairchild sons and daughters with their curling red hair like Henry's had once been. The children had spoken fondly of the way he had always loved their mother, fiercely and devotedly, the way he had never had eyes for anyone else, and how their parents had set the model for the sort of love they hoped to find in their own lives. They spoke of his regard for books, and how he had taught them all to love them too, to respect the printed page and cherish the stories that those pages held. They spoke of the way he still cursed in Welsh when he dropped something, though he rarely used the language otherwise, and of the fact that though his prose was excellent- he had written several histories of the Shadowhunters when he's retired that had been very well respected- his poetry had always been awful, though that never stopped him from reciting it. Their oldest child, James, had spoken laughingly about Will's unrelenting fear of ducks and his continual battle to keep them out of the pond at the family home in Yorkshire. Their grandchildren had reminded him of the song about demon pox he had taught them- when they were much too young, Tessa had always thought- and that they had all memorized. They sang it all together and out of tune, scandalizing Sophie. With tears running down her face, Cecily had reminded him of the moment at her wedding to Gabriel when he had delivered a beautiful speech praising the groom, at the end of which he had announced, "Dear God, I thought she was marrying Gideon. I take it all back," thus vexing not only Cecily and Gabriel but Sophie as well- and Will, though too tired to laugh, had smiled at his sister and squeezed her hand. They had all laughed about his habit of taking Tessa on romantic "holidays" to places from Gothic novels, including the hideous moor where someone had died, a drafty castle with a ghost in it, and of course the square in Paris in which he had decided Sydney Carton had been guillotined, where Will had horrified passerby by shouting "I can see the blood on the cobblestones!" in French.

I could not better testify my respect for your sister than by finally relieving her of her brother,” said Sydney Carton.

although Sydney Carton would never be a lion, he was an amazingly good jackal,

I know how hard it has grown for me, the wearer of this, to support life in myself; but do you know how easy it has grown for me, the wearer of this, to destroy life in you?

Both this saint and this sinner, then, see proportionality as a pathway. For Augustine, it shows rulers, however deeply into iniquity they may have descended, the way back from the City of Man to the City of God. Machiavelli doesn’t imagine communities “that have never been seen or known to exist,” 52 but he does seek virtù, by which he means doing what’s required when facing necessity but not in all respects at its mercy. It’s here that he’s most original—and most brave. As Machiavelli’s finest translator has put it: “[ J] ustice is no more reasonable than what a person’s prudence tells him he must acquire for himself, or must submit to, because men cannot afford justice in any sense that transcends their own preservation.” 53 The cagey Florentine might have appreciated, for its literary qualities, Charles Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities. But he’d have thought it careless in the extreme for Sydney Carton, that novel’s hero, to submit so gallantly at the end, to the sound of knitting, to his own disassembly. 54

I read Dickens and Shakespear without shame or stint; but their pregnant observations and demonstrations of life are not co-ordinated into any philosophy or religion: on the contrary, Dickens's sentimental assumptions are violently contradicted by his observations; and Shakespear's pessimism is only his wounded humanity. Both have the specific genius of the fictionist and the common sympathies of human feeling and thought in pre-eminent degree. They are often saner and shrewder than the philosophers just as Sancho-Panza was often saner and shrewder than Don Quixote. They clear away vast masses of oppressive gravity by their sense of the ridiculous, which is at bottom a combination of sound moral judgment with lighthearted good humor. But they are concerned with the diversities of the world instead of with its unities: they are so irreligious that they exploit popular religion for professional purposes without delicacy or scruple (for example, Sydney Carton and the ghost in Hamlet!): they are anarchical, and cannot balance their exposures of Angelo and Dogberry, Sir Leicester Dedlock and Mr Tite Barnacle, with any portrait of a prophet or a worthy leader: they have no constructive ideas: they regard those who have them as dangerous fanatics: in all their fictions there is no leading thought or inspiration for which any man could conceivably risk the spoiling of his hat in a shower, much less his life. Both are alike forced to borrow motives for the more strenuous actions of their personages from the common stockpot of melodramatic plots; so that Hamlet has to be stimulated by the prejudices of a policeman and Macbeth by the cupidities of a bushranger. Dickens, without the excuse of having to manufacture motives for Hamlets and Macbeths, superfluously punt his crew down the stream of his monthly parts by mechanical devices which I leave you to describe, my own memory being quite baffled by the simplest question as to Monks in Oliver Twist, or the long lost parentage of Smike, or the relations between the Dorrit and Clennam families so inopportunely discovered by Monsieur Rigaud Blandois. The truth is, the world was to Shakespear a great "stage of fools" on which he was utterly bewildered. He could see no sort of sense in living at all; and Dickens saved himself from the despair of the dream in The Chimes by taking the world for granted and busying himself with its details. Neither of them could do anything with a serious positive character: they could place a human figure before you with perfect verisimilitude; but when the moment came for making it live and move, they found, unless it made them laugh, that they had a puppet on their hands, and had to invent some artificial external stimulus to make it work.

Pragnę, by się pani dowiedziała, że była ostatnim marzeniem mojej duszy. Mimo zupełnego upadku nie upadłem tak nisko, by widok pani opiekującej się ojcem i widok domu, z którego pani uczyniła taki dom, nie poruszył we mnie czegoś, co uważałem za umarłe. Od chwili, kiedy panią poznałem, dręczą mnie wyrzuty sumienia, których już wcale nie oczekiwałem. Od chwili, kiedy panią poznałem, słyszę dawne, wzywające mnie ku górze głosy, które w moim mniemaniu umilkły na zawsze. Do głowy zaczęły mi przychodzić myśli, aby odrodzić się, rozpocząć od nowa, zrzucić z ramio brzemię namiętności i grzechu. Naturalnie to tylko marzenia senne, co przemijają i śpiocha zostawiają na miejscu, gdzie leży. Gorąco jednak pragnę, by dowiedziała się pani, że była natchnieniem takich marzeń.

Pragnę, by się pani dowiedziała, że była ostatnim marzeniem mojej duszy. Mimo zupełnego upadku nie upadłem tak nisko, by widok pani opiekującej się ojcem i widok domu, z którego pani uczyniła taki dom, nie poruszył we mnie czegoś, co uważałem za umarłe. Od chwili, kiedy panią poznałem, dręczą mnie wyrzuty sumienia, których już wcale nie oczekiwałem. Od chwili, kiedy panią poznałem, słyszę dawne, wzywające mnie ku górze głosy, które w moim mniemaniu umilkły na zawsze. Do głowy zaczęły mi przychodzić myśli, aby odrodzić się, rozpocząć od nowa, zrzucić z ramion brzemię namiętności i grzechu. Naturalnie to tylko marzenia senne, co przemijają i śpiocha zostawiają na miejscu, gdzie leży. Gorąco jednak pragnę, by dowiedziała się pani, że była natchnieniem takich marzeń

I care for no man on earth, and no man on earth cares for me.

Under the condition of biblical embodiment, we can read everything else and find where the image of Jesus Christ is reflected. “Christ plays in ten thousand places,” and it is our joy to find where he is and disclose his presence to the world. When I was in college at a Christian university, we sometimes sought the Christ figure in literature: Uncle Tom in Uncle Tom’s Cabin or Sydney Carton in A Tale of Two Cities. We looked for those characters that best imitated Christ in their meekness, sacrifice, or charity. After Christians fell in love with The Lord of the Rings, they identified several characters as Christ figures: Aragorn the king, Gandalf who dies and is resurrected, the hobbits in their humility. In reality, the most lovely stories will show us thousands of reflections of Christ in the faces of dozens of characters. The truthfulness by which the author depict the human beings in their work determines how much we will be able to see the Human One in the story. We should look for him everythere. However, I caution readers against two fallacies of reading with a biblical lens: first, prioritizing message over narrative, and second, so-called Christian literature that fronts as biblically informed.(p. 43)

Tess, Tess, Tessa. É mai esistito un suono più bello del tuo nome? Pronunciarlo ad alta voce mi fa tintinnare il cuore come un campanello d’argento… Ma quando mi pochi è così che succede: ho la sensazione che il cuore mi si metta a suonare nel petto e che il tintinnio scorra fremendo nelle vene e vada a infrangersi gioiosamente contro le ossa. Perchè ho scritto queste parole qui, in questo libro? Per te… grazie a te. Mi hai insegnato ad amarlo quando lo disprezzavo. L’ho letto una seconda volta, con la mente e il cuore aperti, e sono sprofondato nella disperazione e nell’invidia per Sydney Carton. Certo, Sydney, perchè nonostante non avesse la minima speranza che la donna amata potesse ricambiarlo, alla fine riuscì a parlarle del proprio amore. E potè fare qualcosa per dimostrarle la passione che nutriva, benché questo qualcosa sia stato morire. Anch’io avrei scelto la morte in cambio della possibilità di confessarti la verità, Tessa, se avessi avuto la certezza che si sarebbe trattato solo della mia morte. Ed è questo il motivo dell’invidia per Sydney: lui almeno era libero. Ora finalmente sono libero anch’io e posso dirti, senza il timore di metterti in pericolo, tutto ciò che sento nel cuore. Non sei l’ultimo sogno della mia anima. Sei il mio sogno più bello, il primo, l’unico. Non sono mai stato capace di smettere di sognare. Sei il sogno più bello della mia anima, e da questo ne nasceranno altri, spero. Sogni lunghi una vita. Con tanta speranza, finalmente Will Herondale

Non è morto, Will. É vivo, perchè l’hai lasciato andare. Sarebbe rimasto con te e sarebbe morto, se glielo avessi chiesto, ma tu lo amavi abbastanza da preferire che vivesse, anche se in una vita separata dalla tua. E questo prova al di sopra di tutto che non sei Sydney Carton: il tuo non è il tipo di amore che può essere redento solo attraverso la distruzione. É ciò che ho visto in te, ciò che ho sempre visto in te, ciò che mi ha fatto venire voglia di aiutarti. Non sei un caso disperato. Hai in te un’infinita capacità di gioire.’’ Lo stregone mise una mano inguantata sotto il mento del Nephilim e gli sollevò il viso. ‘‘Stella luminosa’’ disse lo stregone, e i suoi occhi erano pensierosi, quasi stesse ricordando qualcosa, o qualcuno. ‘‘Voi mortali ardete così impetuosamente. E tu più impetuosamente di altri, Will. Non ti dimenticherò mai.

Attaccare briga con il capo del Praetor Lupus…’’ Magnus scosse la testa. ‘‘Sai bene cosa ti farebbe il suo branco, se solo avesse un minimo pretesto. Cos’è, vuoi morire?’’ ‘‘No’’ rispose Will, sorprendendo un po’ perfino se stesso. ‘‘Non so proprio perchè io ti abbia aiutato.’’ ‘‘Ti piacciono i casi disperati.’’ Magnus fece due grandi passi attraverso la stanza e prese il viso di Will tra le lunghe dita, costringendolo a sollevare il mento. ‘‘Non sei Sydney Carton. A cosa ti servirà morire per James Carstairs, visto che sta morendo comunque?’’ ‘‘Perchè se lo salvo, ne vale la pena…’’ ‘‘Dio!’’ Gli occhi di Magnus si socchiusero. ‘‘Di cosa potrà mai valere la pena?’’ ‘‘Di aver perso tutto!’’ gridò Will. ‘‘Tessa!’’ Magnus lasci ricadere la mano dal viso nel Nephilim. Indietreggiò di parecchi passi, quindi inspirò ed espirò adagio, che se stesse contando mentalmente fino a dieci. ‘‘Mi dispiace, per quello che ha detto Woolsey’’ disse infine. ‘‘Se Jem muore, non potrò stare con Tessa’’ affermò Will. ‘‘Sarebbe come se avessi aspettato che morisse, o se mi rallegrassi della sua morte. E non voglio essere quel tipo di persona. Non voglio approfittare della sua morte. Perciò deve vivere.’’ Abbassò il braccio con la manica insanguinata. ‘‘È l’unico modo perchè tutto ciò possa significare qualcosa. Altrimenti è soltanto… ‘‘Sofferenza e dolore assurdi, inutili? Non credo che sarebbe d’aiuto se ti dicessi che così va la vita. I buoni soffrono, i cattivi prosperano, e tutto ciò che è mortale passa.’’ ‘‘Voglio più di questo.’’ dichiarò Will. ‘‘Tu hai fatto sì che volessi più di questo. Mi hai mostrato che ero maledetto solo perchè avevo scelto di credermi tale. Mi hai detto che c’era una possibilità, un senso. E adesso vorresti girare le spalle a ciò che hai creato.’’ Magnus rise brevemente. ‘‘Sei incorreggibile.’’ ‘‘Questa l’ho già sentita.’’ Will si allontanò dal divano. ‘‘Mi aiuterai, allora?’’ ‘‘Ti aiuterò

Overlooked by her parents, and ignored by her brother Theo, who had spent most of his short life at boarding schools or in London, Helen had turned to her inner world of books and imagination. Her suitors had been Romeo, Heathcliff, Mr. Darcy, Edward Rochester, Sir Lancelot, Sydney Carton, and an assortment of golden-haired fairy tale princes.

Tess, Tess, Tessa. Was there ever a more beautiful sound than your name? To speak it aloud makes my heart ring like a bell. Strange to imagine that, isn’t it – a heart ringing – but when you touch me that is what it is like: as if my heart is ringing in my chest and the sound shivers down my veins and splinters my bones with joy. Why have I written these words in this book? Because of you. You taught me to love this book where I had scorned it. When I read it for the second time, with an open mind and heart, I felt the most complete despair and envy of Sydney Carton. Yes, Sydney, for even if he had no hope that the woman he loved would love him, at least he could tell her of his love. At least he could do something to prove his passion, even if that thing was to die. I would have chosen death for a chance to tell you the truth, Tessa, if I could have been assured that death would be my own. And that is why I envied Sydney, for he was free. And now at last I am free, and I can finally tell you, without fear of danger to you, all that I feel in my heart. You are not the last dream of my soul. You are the first dream, the only dream I ever was unable to stop myself from dreaming. You are the first dream of my soul, and from that dream I hope will come all other dreams, a lifetime’s worth. With hope at least, Will Herondale