Posted 11:35 AM by Blah blah

From The Count of Monte Cristo, by Alexandre Dumas. He is one of my favorite writers. I devoured The Three Musketeers in one night when I was a teen.

Chapter 16
The young man had never thought about escape. There are things that seem so impossible that one instinctively avoids them and doesn't even consider attempting them. To dig fifty feet beneath the ground, to spend three years on this task, only to arrive---if you were successful---at a sheer precipice above the sea; to descend fifty, sixty, perhaps a hundred feet, only to fall and crush your head against the rocks---if the sentries had not already shot you; and, even supposing you managed to evade all these dangers, to be faced with swimming a distance of a league---all this was too much for one not to resign oneself; and, as we have seen already, Dantes had almost resigned himself to the point of death.

But now that he had seen an old man clasping on to life with such energy and giving him the example of such desperate resolve, he started to reflect and to measure his courage. Another man had attempted to do something that he had not even thought of doing; another, less young, less strong and less agile that himself, had succeeded, by sheer skill and patience, in acquiring all the implements he needed for this incredible task, which had failed only because of a failure of measurement; someone else had done all this, so nothing was impossible for Dantes.

Chapter 17
"What might you not have done, had you been free?"

"Perhaps nothing: the overflowing of my brain might have evaporated in mere futilities. Misfortune is needed to plumb certain mysterious depths in the understanding of men; pressure is needed to explode the charge. My captivity concentrated all my faculties on a single point. They had previously been dispersed, now they clashed in a narrow space; and, as you know, the clash of clouds produces electricity, electricity produces lightning and lightning gives light."