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Quotes by French Authors
"Think? Why think! We have computers to do that for us."
"Have you really not noticed, then, that here of all places, in this private, personal solitude that surrounds me, I have turned to you? All the memories of my youth speak to me as I walk, just as the sea shells crunch under my feet on the beach. The crash of every wave awakens far-distant reverberations within me... I hear the rumble of bygone days, and in my mind the whole endless series of old passions surges forward like the billows. I remember my spasms, my sorrows, gusts of desire that whistled like wind in the rigging, and vast vague longings that swirled in the dark like a flock of wild gulls in a stormcloud... On whom should I lean, if not on you? My weary mind turns for refreshment to the thought of you as a dusty traveler might sink onto a soft and grassy bank..."
"This sometimes happened: from time to time, DantA s, driven out of solitude into the world, felt an imperative need for solitude. And what solitude is more vast and more poetic than that of a ship sailing alone on the sea, in the darkness of night and the silence of infinity, under the eye of the Lord?"
"A film based on a jolly good John Grisham book is fine, but I like to get a bit under the skin."
"Society cares for the individual only so far as he is profitable."
"I have only made this letter rather long because I have not had time to make it shorter."
"It is, no doubt, an immense advantage to have done nothing, but one should not abuse it."
"An individual voice can be heard in a choir that otherwise sings in unison. This is something that is not excused."
"The heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing."
"Solitude is fine, but you need someone to tell you that solitude is fine."
"I am first of all from La Castellane and Marseille."
"The poet never asks for admiration; he wants to be believed."
"The dark outside world of Paris under German occupation exerted a strong containing pressure."
"Our entire life - consists ultimately in accepting ourselves as we are."
"All evil comes from the old.They grow fat on ideas and young men die of them."
"Nothing leads the scientist so astray as a premature truth."
"Maybe it's because my mother divorced and my grandmother divorced, so maybe I'm frightened deep down. But then I also feel there is no real need. Why do I need to get married? To reassure me? No I don't need reassurance."
"I belong to a nation which for the past four years has begun to relive the course of her entire history and which is calmly and surely preparing out of the ruins to make another history. Your nation, on the other hand, has received from its sons only the love it deserved, which was blind. A nation is not justified by such love. That will be your undoing. And you who were already conquered in your greatest victories, what will you be in the approaching defeat?"
"You know what charm is: a way of getting the answer yes without having asked any clear question."
"A great artist is a great man in a great child."
"Electronic music used pure sounds, completely calibrated. You had to think digitally, as it were, in a way that allowed you to extend serial ideas into other parameters through technology."
"Psychology is action not thinking about oneself."
"The less men think, the more they talk."
"From the pavement, I could see the window of Albertine's room, that window, formerly quite black, at night, when she was not staying in the house, which the electric light inside, dissected by the slats of the shutters, striped from top to bottom with parallel bars of gold."
"Covetousness is both the beginning and the end of the devil's alphabet - the first vice in corrupt nature that moves, and the last which dies."
"I know not what quintessence of all this mixture, which, seizing my whole will, carried it to plunge and lose itself in his, and that having seized his whole will, brought it back with equal concurrence and appetite to plunge and lose itself in mine."
"Painting is the representation of visible forms. The essence of realism is its negation of the ideal."
"They were silent, humiliated by this return of the defeated, furious at their own silence, but the more it was prolonged the less capable they were of breaking it."
"Nature gives you the face you have at twenty; it is up to you to merit the face you have at fifty."
"When the weather changes, nobody believes the laws of physics have changed. Similarly, I don't believe that when the stock market goes into terrible gyrations its rules have changed."
"Man cannot do without beauty, and this is what our era pretends to want to disregard."
"For there is no one so great or mighty that he can avoid the misery that will rise up against him when he resists and strives against God."
"My pessimism extends to the point of even suspecting the sincerity of other pessimists."
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