File No. 113 Quotes

“A father is the one friend upon whom we can always rely. In the hour of need, when all else fails, we remember him upon whose knees we sat when children, and who soothed our sorrows; and even though he may be unable to assist us, his mere presence serves to comfort and strengthen us.”
― Émile Gaboriau, File No. 113

“Alas! we must suffer ourselves before we can feel for others.”
― Émile Gaboriau, File No. 113

“Vengeance is a delicious fruit, which must be allowed to ripen in order that it may be fully enjoyed.”
― Émile Gaboriau, File No. 113

“...chance is sometimes a wonderful accomplice in crime.”
― Émile Gaboriau, File No. 113

“Like those imperceptible insects which, having once penetrated the root of a tree devour it in a single night, suspicion, when it invades our minds, soon develops itself and destroys our firmest beliefs.”
― Émile Gaboriau, File No. 113

“I have watched him as only a woman can watch a man upon whom her fate depends, but it has always been in vain.”
― Émile Gaboriau, File No. 113

“He was as yet not sufficiently experienced in ruffianism to know that one villain always sacrifices another to advance his own project; he was credulous enough to believe in the old adage of 'honor amongst thieves.”
― Émile Gaboriau, File No. 113

“You say she loves him? No one but a coward would be defrauded of the woman he loved and who loved him. Ah, if I had once felt Madeleine's hand tremble in mine, if her rosy lips had pressed a kiss upon my brow, the whole world could not take her from me.”
― Émile Gaboriau, File No. 113

“There are some people who must be saved without warning, and against their will.”
― Émile Gaboriau, File No. 113

“When an honorable man yields, in an hour of weakness, to temptation, his first step toward atonement is confession.”
― Émile Gaboriau, File No. 113

“...a statement from you is more convincing than all the proofs in the world.”
― Émile Gaboriau, File No. 113

“It is at the family fireside, often under the shelter of the law itself, that the real tragedies of life are acted; in these days traitors wear gloves, scoundrels cloak themselves in public esteem, and their victims die broken-hearted, but smiling to the last. What I have just related to you is almost an every-day occurrence; and yet you profess astonishment.”
― Émile Gaboriau, File No. 113

“Excessive suffering brings with it a kind of dull insensibility and stupor....”
― Émile Gaboriau, File No. 113

“As to acknowledging that he was about to obtain a triumph with the ideas of another man, he never thought of such a thing. It is generally in perfect good faith that the jackdaw struts about in the peacock's feathers.”
― Émile Gaboriau, File No. 113

“Fools sit down and wait for an opportunity; sensible men make one.”
― Émile Gaboriau, File No. 113

“it is of no use to mourn over the past. All the memories in the world, good or bad, are not worth one slender hope for the future;”
― Émile Gaboriau, File No. 113

“She had reached the perfidious age when a woman’s beauty, like a full-blown rose, fades in a day.”
― Émile Gaboriau, File No. 113

“As a general thing, a first fault draws many others in its train. As an impalpable flake is the beginning of an avalanche, so an imprudence is often the prelude to a great crime.”
― Émile Gaboriau, File No. 113

“In romance we meet with heroines of lifelong constancy: real life produces no such miracles.”
― Émile Gaboriau, File No. 113

“In a swollen river the current is unequal, being much stronger in some places than in others; hence the great danger.”
― Émile Gaboriau, File No. 113

“He began at once to write out one of these terrible decisions of “Not proven,” which restores liberty, but not honor, to the accused man; which says that he is not guilty, but does not say he is innocent.”
― Émile Gaboriau, File No. 113

“Gambling generally leads to stealing.”
― Émile Gaboriau, File No. 113

“Man calculates, while woman follows the inspirations of her heart.”
― Émile Gaboriau, File No. 113

“There are some inordinate desires before which the firmest principles must give way, and which so pervert our moral sense as to render us incapable of judging between right and wrong.”
― Émile Gaboriau, File No. 113