Phantom Quotes
"It's only one patch, really. If we put this rug over it, no one will ever know it's there."
"No one wants to live in a house that's perfect all their lives, least of all a small child."
"You must not be so suspicious of the scientific mind. I thought you trusted me."
"Insatiable curiosity is not a very attractive quality I'm afraid."
"Sometimes I think all you want from me is answers."
"If I choose to walk with a man it is no concern of yours!"
"I won't be seen... I won't be stared at... I won't... I won't!"
"Power came to me in many curious and unexpected ways."
"It wasn't enough to be the devil's apprentice, the star turn of an increasingly famous traveling show. All I wanted was to be like everyone else."
"I could live with cruelty and hatred; it was the happiness of others that I could no longer endure."
"Life is never ours to take, Erik. If you remember nothing else of what I have taught you, remember that."
"Murder and suicide, he had told me grimly, were equal crimes in the eyes of the Lord and brought an undiscriminating damnation upon the perpetrator."
"Stop that screaming or I shall do you all the harm you fear and more!"
"Lust was nothing special after all, simply a rush of blood, an animal instinct that I could contain and control."
"I felt curiously triumphant at having mastered it."
"Elation and relief surged through me at the thought."
"I am just like everyone else! Why should that seem so strange?"
"He promised to marry me, the Spanish pig... he promised!"
"Creation—and destruction—were the only lusts I would acknowledge henceforth."
"Death was the ultimate power and I his eager, willing apprentice."
"Memories are like fireflies darting across the surface of my mind."
"I would rather starve than build ugly houses!"
"The building is being erected to suit the specifications of a very rich and vulgar client."
"I felt intoxicated with power as I wiped the knife clean on Javert's shirt."
"I suddenly felt a deep urge to throw the rope that would pull him from that poisoned lake."
"I trusted his common sense sufficiently to be reasonably certain that he was not about to blow my home off the face of the earth."
"She burst into tears and ran below, and suddenly there was silence in the garden."
"I watched him change in response to this unspoken threat."
"Much good it was to hold forth on the ancient Masonic values of manhood, when I was quite plainly incapable of controlling my daughter and maintaining order in my own household."
"Indeed, almost everything that happened seemed to confirm my growing impression that I was simply a foolish, rather incompetent old man."
"Erik had withdrawn so deeply into himself that it was impossible to approach him on any subject that did not pertain to work."
"He doesn't hate you, child. He only hates himself."
"The senseless futility of everything overwhelmed me and took away my anger, leaving me feeling very old and tired."
"I realized then the enormity of the crime that I had committed."
"You were the child of my imagination, the son that God withheld, and I learned to love you."
"There was so much beauty in your soul, Erik, so much beauty that I fear now, because of one old man's folly, will never see the light of day."
"Friendship intruded uneasily on his existence, demanding responsibility, accountability, and loyalty."
"Take care of yourself, Nadir," he said softly. "Take very great care... Your tiresome health has become very dear to me."
"There is no knowledge beyond my comprehension, no art or skill upon this entire planet that lies beyond the mastery of my hand."
"I have let them all go, one by one, and I am as content as I shall ever be on this earth, in my peaceful solitude."
"Darkness and silence have been my companions since the day I chose to turn my back upon the world of men."
"But it took me more than forty years to accept that harsh and unrelenting fact—to understand where peace and resignation lay."
"The child is intelligent and deserves to be educated."
"You have a fine family. Take whatever you require for their welfare and there will be no questions asked of you."
"I would have placed the Opera in the very center of Paris, as befitted a great monument which would inevitably become the social hub of the city."
"I wheeled around on Marie. 'What do you know of this?' I demanded, taking an aggressive step toward her."
"I was prepared to pay for the best and I rejected ruthlessly until I found it."
"Music was the secret sanctuary of my soul; music was my god, the only master I would ever serve again."
"The sight of the giant Corinthian columns that supported the arches of the auditorium dome made me feel like a Druid priest at Stonehenge."
"The Opera House had been requisitioned as an arsenal and a warehouse for vital food supplies, and I lived in perpetual terror of fire breaking out."
"The Opera is my home," I observed with a flippancy that did not quite conceal the grim truth of my statement.
"I had spent the best part of forty years banging my head against the walls of reality till I was bloody and bemused by my failure."
"I had relinquished the outer world for good."
"The urge to create had been burned out of me during those fifteen years of ceaseless labor, and in its place there was only the need to possess."
"It was only later that I began to see certain possibilities for myself."
"A really efficient ghost is hard to come by these days."
"There is no legend without artistic license, no tale that will not benefit from the fertile imagination of the storyteller."
"Survival of the fittest is only the process of natural selection."
"I listened to endless operas and studied voice with cool composure."
"All emotion and regret was behind me now that I had willingly embraced the existence of the living dead."
"I saw him so many times at the Opera after that evening that I wondered how I could possibly have overlooked his presence all these years."
"Once the pattern of my life was set, my existence proceeded with ceaseless regularity along a bleak and empty continuum entirely untroubled by emotion."
"I felt very strongly that somewhere beyond the lake a knife was being sharpened, honed to a gleaming point in readiness for me to run upon it in the blinding light of day."
"Hell is not a place, it's a state of mind and body; hell is obsession with a voice, a face, a name."
"I had never heard a voice so sweet and true, nor one as utterly negative."
"I wanted to plant her safely in the labyrinth beneath the Opera House, to hide her from the world so that no one else should ever find her, hurt her."
"I could not be sure that Poligny's successors would prove one half as gullible and malleable as he; and should they prove obstinate, my allowance could very quickly come to an untimely end."
"There is no Angel of Music. There is only Erik!"
"He's so real! No longer an illusion or a vision, but someone I could reach out and embrace, if only I dared."
"I just want to stay here with Erik and pretend that nothing's ever going to change."
"I appear to have acquired a nurse! Not the lover I craved beyond all reason but a gentle, attentive little nurse!"
"Rude health is one thing I've always been blessed with . . . infernal irony that it should desert me now!"
"I can't speak those words which Raoul so badly needs for reassurance; and even as we cling together, I feel we have been torn apart."
"Nadir no longer exists. I have washed friendship from my heart, just as I have purged myself of love."
"I am filled with the power of hate, and hate gives me the strength to cut free from the shackles of humanity at last."
"How can I go back to Erik too frightened to say yes and yet unable to say no?"
"No woman in this world has been ever been loved as you have loved me."
"I love you, Erik, I love you in so many different ways... but my love is the love of a child afraid to grow up."
"I think he might now be equally surprised to find that no one who walks through fire can hope to emerge unscathed."
"You've waited a long time for this, have you not, and at last your long persistence has been rewarded."
"It's really very difficult to be a murderer without killing people from time to time, you know."
"I'm laughing at you, my dear... at your truly remarkable incompetence."
"I trusted you to treat me like a civilized human being and come back with your answer."
"There's someone I hate, too, someone I've been afraid of for a long, long time, and tonight I'm going to kill him."
"I don't want to remember how he took you away from me, Christine, so I'm simply going to take him away instead."
"The music had been nothing less than a violent physical assault."
"Don't cry for my loss, Erik... I've never been worthy of your tears."
"I remember her throwing a pile of clothes at me one day in a temper—'Do it yourself!' she snapped."
"I did the chandelier... the chandelier, that was good, wasn't it, that showed promise?"