Muriel Barbery Quotes and Sayings - Page 1
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“Colombe Josse is the older Jesse daughter. Colombe Jesse is also a sort of tall blonde leek who dresses like a penniless Bohemian. If there is one thing I despise, it is the perverse affectation of rich people who go around dressing as if they were poor, in second-hand clothes, ill-fitting gray bonnets, socks full of holes, and flowered shirts under threadbare sweaters. Not only is it ugly, it is also insulting: nothing is more despicable than a rich man's scorn for a poor man's longing.”
-- Muriel Barbery -
“People aim for the stars, and they end up like goldfish in a bowl. I wonder if it wouldn't be simpler just to teach children right from the start that life is absurd.”
-- Muriel BarberySource : Muriel Barbery (2013). “The Elegance of the Hedgehog”, p.15, Gallic Books
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“There's so much humanity in a love of trees, so much nostalgia for our first sense of wonder, so much power in just feeling our own insignificance when we are surrounded by nature,”
-- Muriel Barbery -
“Personally I think that grammar is a way to attain beauty.”
-- Muriel BarberySource : "The Elegance of the Hedgehog". Book by Muriel Barbery, September 2, 2013.
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“The real ordeal is not leaving those you love but learning to live without those who don't love you.”
-- Muriel Barbery -
“In our world, that's the way you live your grown-up life: you must constantly rebuild your identity as an adult, the way it's been put together it is wobbly, ephemeral, and fragile, it cloaks despair and, when you're alone in front of the mirror, it tells you the lies you need to believe.”
-- Muriel Barbery -
“I thought: pity the poor in spirit who know neither the enchantment nor the beauty of language.”
-- Muriel BarberySource : "The Elegance of the Hedgehog". Book by Muriel Barbery, August 31, 2006.
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“With the exception of love, friendship and the beauty of art, I don't see much else that can nurture human life.”
-- Muriel BarberySource : "The Elegance of the Hedgehog". Book by Muriel Barbery, August 31, 2006.
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“When someone that you love dies..it's like fireworks suddenly burning out in the sky and everything going black.”
-- Muriel Barbery -
“Sashimi is velvet dust, verging on silk, or a bit of both, and the extraordinary alchemy of its gossamer essence allows it to preserve a milky density unknown even by clouds.... my cheeks recalled the effects of its profound caress.”
-- Muriel Barbery -
“But many intelligent people have a sort of bug: they think intelligence is an end in itself. They have one idea in mind: to be intelligent, which is really stupid. And when intelligence takes itself for its own goal, it operates very strangely: the proof that it exists is not to be found in the ingenuity or simplicity of what it produces, but in how obscurely it is expressed.”
-- Muriel BarberySource : "The Elegance of the Hedgehog". Book by Muriel Barbery, September 2, 2013.
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“...we have to surpass ourselves every day, make every day undying. Climb our own personal Everest and do it in such a way that every step is a little bit of eternity. That's what the future is for: to build the present, with real plans, made by living people.”
-- Muriel BarberySource : "The Elegance of the Hedgehog". Book by Muriel Barbery, August 31, 2006.
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“Talent consists not in inventing shapes but in causing those that were invisible to emerge.”
-- Muriel Barbery -
“Entrusting one's life is not the same as opening up one's soul.”
-- Muriel Barbery -
“We think we can make honey without sharing in the fate of bees, but we are in truth nothing but poor bees, destined to accomplish our task and then die.”
-- Muriel Barbery -
“When tea becomes ritual, it takes place at the heart of our ability to see greatness in small things.”
-- Muriel Barbery -
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“I won't get any better by punishing the people I can't heal.”
-- Muriel Barbery -
“They didn't recognize me," I repeat. He stops in turn, my hand still on his arm. "It is because they have never seen you," he says. "I would recognize you anywhere.”
-- Muriel Barbery -
“Beautiful things should belong to beautiful souls.”
-- Muriel Barbery -
“When something is bothering me, I seek refuge. No need to travel far; a trip to the realm of literary memory will suffice. For where can one find more noble distraction, more entertaining company, more delightful enchantment than in literature?”
-- Muriel Barbery -
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“There's so much humanity in a love of trees, so much nostalgia for our first sense of wonder, so much power in just feeling our own insignificance when we are surrounded by nature...yes, that's it: just thinking about trees and their indifferent majesty and our love for them teaches us how ridiculous we are - vile parasites squirming on the surface of the earth - and at the same time how deserving of life we can be, when we can honor this beauty that owes us nothing.”
-- Muriel Barbery -
“Live or die: mere consequences of what you have built. What matters is building well.”
-- Muriel Barbery -
“Civilization is the mastery of violence, the triumph, constantly challenged, over the aggressive nature of the primate. For primates we have been and primates we shall remain, however often we learn to find joy in a camellia on moss. This is the very purpose of education.”
-- Muriel Barbery -
“I witness the birth on paper of sentences that have eluded my will and appear in spite of me on the sheet, teaching me something that I neither knew nor thought I might want to know. This painless birth, like an unsolicited proof, gives me untold pleasure, and with neither toil nor certainty but the joy of frank astonishment I follw the pen that is guiding and supporting me.”
-- Muriel Barbery -
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“Some people are incapable of perceiving in the object of their contemplation the very thing that gives it its intrinsic life and breath, and they spend their entire lives conversing about mankind as if they were robots, and about things as if they have no soul and must be reduced to what can be said about them -- all at the whim of their own subjective inspiration.”
-- Muriel Barbery -
“Maybe that's what being alive is about: so we can track down those movments that are dying.”
-- Muriel Barbery -
“The raw tomato, devoured in the garden when freshly picked, is a horn of abundance of simple sensations, a radiating rush in one's mouth that brings with it every pleasure. . . . a tomato, an adventure.”
-- Muriel Barbery -
“A man who farts in bed . . . is a man who loves life.”
-- Muriel Barbery -
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“boredom was born on a day of uniformity.”
-- Muriel Barbery -
“Elsewhere the world may be blustering or sleeping, wars are fought, people live and die, some nations disintegrate, while others are born, soon to be swallowed up in turn - and in all this sound and fury, amidst eruptions and undertows, while the world goes its merry way, bursts into flames, tears itself apart and is reborn: human life continues to throb.”
-- Muriel Barbery
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