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"It is the creator of fiction's point of view; it is the character who interests him. Sometimes he wants to convince the reader that the story he is telling is as interesting as universal history."
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"There was something melancholic about that symbol of their nation's promise of freedom, a bell with a chipped mouth and cleft body."

"That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons of history."

"Those who stand for different causes during different generations often experience the same oppositions and the same difficulties as those of the previous and the next generations. That is the basis of history repeating itself."

"There is some awe mixed with the joy of our surprise, when this poet, who lived in some past world, two or three hundred years ago, says that which lies close to my own soul, that which I also had wellnigh thought and said."

"And then the queen wept with all her heart. Not for the cruel and greedy man who had warred and killed and savaged everywhere he could. But for the boy who had somehow turned into that man, the boy whose gentle hand had comforted her childhood hurts, the boy whose frightened voice had cried out to her at the end of his life, as if he wondered why he had gotten lost inside himself, as if he realized that it was too, too late to get out again."
Explore more quotes by Raymond Queneau

"One can easily classify all works of fiction either as descendants of the Iliad or of the Odyssey."

"The Odyssey is the story of someone who, in the course of diverse experiences, acquires a personality or affirms and recovers his personality."

"Many novelists take well-defined, precise characters, whose stories are sometimes of mediocre interest, and place them in an important historical context, which remains secondary in spite of everything."

"It seems to me that an author who has determined very new domains in literature is Gertrude Stein."

"To have one's own story told by a third party who doesn't know that the character in question is himself the hero of the story being told, that's a technical refinement."

"When Ulysses hears his own story sung by an epic poet and then he reveals his identity and the poet wants to continue singing, Ulysses isn't interested any longer. That's very astonishing."

"There have been only rare moments in history where individual histories were able to run their course without wars or revolutions."
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