Quotes by Belgian Authors - Page 2

Is it a world in the makingthat turns as it whistles to the depths of my beingIt is burningSuppose it were to appearA bleeding rosary at the windowa sun setting on the marshlands("Silver Clasp")
Paul Dermée
The most valuable thing we can do for the psyche, occasionally, is to let it rest, wander, live in the changing light of room, not try to be or do anything whatever.
May Sarton
If I can't have your babies, I'll damn sure deliver them!
Frouwkje Denoo
Don't be sad because i'm dying, be happy because very second another great human being is born, another great person who gets the chance to do better things than i did.
Emma Claeys
What is a flower? A giant sexual organ in its Sunday best. The truth has been known for a long time, yet, over-aged adolescents that we are, we persist in speaking sentimental drives about the delicacy of flowers. We construct idiotic phrases like "So-and-so is in the flower of his youth", which is as absurd as saying "in the vagina of his youth".
Amélie Nothomb
When one has come to explore the ' instant moment ' and one has chosen to savor the delights of life, which are hidden behind the curtain of haste and superficiality, then ' mental time ' is replacing ' sequential time '. So ' here ' and ' now ' are keeping hustle and impatience in check. (" Just for a moment ")
Erik Pevernagie
...I've had a lot of time to think about this, and yes, we could go down your route. The difficult, painful one, because, let's face it, Ellie, you're a fan of the hard way through. Or, we could, slowly but surely, try to forgive each other for all the mistakes we've made and the hurt we've caused each other. None of us sitting here is innocent...
Harper Bliss
When love becomes a play of squirming mindgames or a tinderbox of mental conflicts, emotional benchmarks need an unremitting reset. ("Another empty room")
Erik Pevernagie
Once the dust of volcanic love has settled and the harshness of a new reality has become oppressive, disillusionment may have to be mended, wounds to be healed and emotional fallouts to be taken care of, mindfully ( "Is that all there is ?")
Erik Pevernagie
Emotional illiterates, who don’t recognize the sound of a broken heart, will never be able to hear the subtle vibrations of love reverberating through the rustling flora of life. ("Love as dizzy as a cathedral”)
Erik Pevernagie
We are sometimes astounded by the behavior of emotional outlaws, as they act in line with their own standards, but proceed like bulls-in-a-china-shop, create one heck of a mess in their living environment and bring about shocking disturbing dissensions, ever since their inner construction clashes with our emotional architecture. (“Disruption”)
Erik Pevernagie
Be aware of the abundance of life right now. If you remain stuck in the past, clinging to the baggage of old disappointments or relationships, you block yourself off from the riches of the present. If you worry too much about tomorrow, you can't hear your heart today.
Baptist de Pape
You sanctimonious philistines, who scoff at me!What has your politics fed onsince you've been ruling the world?On butchery and murder!
Charles de Coster
Between words and objects one can create new relations and specify characteristics of language and objects generally ignored in everyday life.
René Magritte
The African continent has always been more queer than generally acknowledged.
Chantal Zabus
It always bothers me when I hear Rwanda's genocide described as a product of "ancient tribal hatreds." I think this is an easy way for Westerners to dismiss the whole thing as a regrettable but pointless bloodbath that happens to primitive brown people.
Paul Rusesabagina
Belgium is the best remedy against patriotism.
Geert van Istendael
Always seeing something, never seeing nothing, being photographer
Walter De Mulder
Between shortage and absolute poverty an ocean of shades and gradations do emerge on the scale of deficiency. Be that as it may, each stage must find a mode to leave a door ajar for the sun to peer in and human warmth to radiate. ( " Homeless down in the corner")
Erik Pevernagie
By confusing strategy with tactics and mixing up “what” and “how”, we may have a hard time staying on point. ”What” we want, on the one hand, and “how” we want to achieve it, on the other, needs a careful reading and a singular approach. (“When the bar is set too high”)
Erik Pevernagie
At five-thirty the rain began to fall in great, heavy drops which bounced off the pavement before they spread out into black spots. At the same time thunder rumbled from the direction of Charenton and an eddy of wind lifted the dust, carried away the hats of passers-by who took to their heels and who, after a few confused moments, were all in the shelter of doorways or under the awnings of cafe terraces. Street pedlars of the Faubourg Saint-Antoine scurried about with an apron or a sack over their heads, pushing their carts as they tried to run. Rivulets already began to flow along the two sides of the street, the gutters sang, and on every floor you could see people hurriedly closing their windows.
Georges Simenon
fashion has a right to exist, because it permits people to define themselves over and over again.
Ann Demeulemeester
When some claim demarcation and “regulation”, others fancy “deregulation”, preferring foxes guarding the henhouse or chicken yards with free chickens and free foxes. Friend or foe, hen or fox, anyone can have a go. (“This far”)
Erik Pevernagie
Oh, the joy of the arrival of a child, which is both the one and the other, a mirror in which husband and wife, who love each other, can see each other in one single face.
Georges Rodenbach
Jealousy appears to be a redoubtable pitfall for love, on the toll road of self-absorption and unshareability. When love has to remain cloistered and ostentatiously exclusionary, envy may show its pernicious power, cause wounding harms and unchain emotional twisters. ("Why has Shé got stars in the sky?")
Erik Pevernagie
That was the day I knew. It was as if Rolls met Royce, Black met Decker, Oliver met Stan, TinTin met Snowy, Marks met Spencer... he was to me what Patracolus was to Achilles, Hylas to Hercules, Enkidoe to Gilgamesh, Jonathan to David, Bosie to Oscar Wilde, Rimbaud to Verlaine. He was my Billy Budd, all the holy multitude of Thebes, Jasjoe mixed with Tadzio...
Tom Bouden
I've never really addressed those rumors because I figured, 'Why defend yourself against something that is not offensive'?
Johnny Galecki
The human in what it is objectively ever since its beginning is two, two who are different. Each part of what constitutes the unity of the human species corresponds to a proper being and a proper Being, to an identity of one's own. In order to carry out the destiny of humanity, the man-human and the woman-human each have to fulfill what they are and at the same time realize the unity that they constitute.
Luce Irigaray
We can give happiness a chance: happiness is learnable. Life is a choice and happiness is a question of focusing, hearing and seeing the right things behind the appearances. It is a matter of finding out, differencing worthiness and irrelevance, connectedness and distantness, warmth and aloofness, brightness and dimness. Happiness is the lucky potential to steer friskily along the cliffs of the unknown avoiding the obstacles of narcissism and conceit. ( " Happiness blowing in the wind. " )
Erik Pevernagie
A Voltairian of good stock,” he murmured.“What is that supposed to mean?” I growled.“To believe a little in God and much in the devil!”“Well, yes, Mister Hilmacher, and if the devil is not a part in this business, let him take me to Hell!” “Mister Burgomaster, you insult the devil. He who undervalues the devil belittles God. I fail to see why the Almighty would occupy Himself with our most insignificant actions and thoughts, like a good old woman during the endless tea hours, and I would find the role of Old Nick singularly petty indeed should he amuse himself with a giant pleasantry that sends a herd and its guardians into the mortal mud of the swamp.
Jean Ray
Love assumes expectation and hope. All actors of the hazardous pursuit of love eagerly look forward to passing a significant cape without injuries or aching scratches: "the Cape of good Hope". ( " Those journeys of love" )
Erik Pevernagie
No more Guernicas, no more Auschwitzes, no more Hiroshimas, no more Setifs. Hooray! But what about the impossibility of living, what about this stifling mediocrity and this absence of passion? What about the jealous fury in which the rankling of never being ourselves drives us to imagine that other people are happy? What about this feeling of never really being inside your own skin?
Raoul Vaneigem
What he imagines evokes nothing imaginary, it evokes the reality of the world that experience and reason treat in a confused manner.
René Magritte
To learn to love, one must first learn to see.
Maurice Maeterlinck
Wrinkles here and there seem unimportant compared to the Gestalt of the whole person I have become in this past year.
May Sarton
For after all we make our faces as we go along...
May Sarton
Do not deprive me of my age. I have earned it.
May Sarton
For the painful essence of withdrawal does not reside in the present suffering it brings - withdrawal is painless on the level of the immediate moment - but in the prospect of suffering to come, the rich future that one can imagine one's torture enjoying.
Jean-Philippe Toussaint
There is only one way to overcome the difficulty of writing, and that is to write. Thought only becomes effective and productive at the time of writing.
Amélie Nothomb
If a writer manages to be fascinating about his own novels, then there are only two possibilities: either he is merely voicing out loud what he wrote in his book, and he is a parrot; or he is explaining interesting things that he didn't discuss in his book, in which case the book in question is a failure since it does not live up to its claims.
Amélie Nothomb
Life can be generous, but leaves us with a trilemma: How can we reconcile three diverse features: ‘I’, 'me' and the 'others'. Since the “I” entails what I want; the “me” what others expect of me and the “others” what others themselves want. The bridges between "individuality", “surroundings” and "otherness" can be abysmal and very often waiting to be restored. (“I am on my own side, but I can listen “ )
Erik Pevernagie
And yet that's the best way to watch television actively: with your eyes closed.
Jean-Philippe Toussaint
The angels that dry our eyes bear the form and the features of all we have said and thought—above all, of what we have done, prior to the hour of misfortune.
Maurice Maeterlinck
For some, life may be a playground to undermine the brainwaves of others or simply a vainglorious game with an armory of theatrics, illustrating only bleak self-deception, haughty narcissism and dim deficiency in empathy. ("Another empty room")
Erik Pevernagie
There is a leader in every manager, there is not a manager in every leader.
Gert Van Mol
Postmen have a legendary aura. A ring at the doorbell may inflame a sense of expectation, suspense, secrecy, hazard or even intrigue. Ringing twice may imply a warning that trouble is on the way or an appeal to make the coast clear. Not all mailmen, though, will ring twice and await an eye-catching Lana Turner, whom they can whisper: "With my brains and your looks, we could go places.” ("The postman always rings twice")
Erik Pevernagie
Love is illiterate. Whether we write it big or small, we cannot read it. We might only guess. ( "I seek you" )
Erik Pevernagie
And how long would the life in me stay alive if it did not find new roots?I behaved like a starving man who knows there is foot somewhere if he can only find it. I did not reason anything out. I did not reason that part of the food I needed was to become a member of a community richer and more various, humanly speaking, than the academic world of Cambridge could provide: the hunger of the novelist. I did not reason that part of the nourishment I craved was all the natural world can give - a garden, woods, fields, brooks, birds: the hunger of the poet. I did not reason that the time had come when I needed a house of my own, a nest of my own making: the hunger of the woman.
May Sarton
And how long would the life in me stay alive if it did not find new roots?I behaved like a starving man who knows there is food somewhere if he can only find it. I did not reason anything out. I did not reason that part of the food I needed was to become a member of a community richer and more various, humanly speaking, than the academic world of Cambridge could provide: the hunger of the novelist. I did not reason that part of the nourishment I craved was all the natural world can give - a garden, woods, fields, brooks, birds: the hunger of the poet. I did not reason that the time had come when I needed a house of my own, a nest of my own making: the hunger of the woman.
May Sarton
My mind was not that of a conqueror, but that of a cow that spends its life chewing contentedly in the meadow of invoices, waiting for the train of eternal grace to pass by. How good it felt to exist without pride of ambition. To live in hibernation.
Amélie Nothomb
Love can crystallize things. When love is in the air, distressing rain can become a wonderful avalanche of shimmering diamonds. Raindrops are transformed into a flood of sparkling crystal pearls. The power of love can convert rain into a multitude of glittering prisms. The mental seduction of love and a boundless illusion, inflamed by a profound uprising emotion, can change any ordinary incident into a radiant, luminous voyage. ( "Crystallization under an umbrella" )
Erik Pevernagie
Much else than liberalization has happened in the nineties (in India)
Jean Drèze
Modern relationships are cauldrons of contradictory longings: safety and excitement, grounding and transcendence, the comfort of love and the heat of passion We want it all, and we want it with one person. Reconciling the domestic and the erotic is a delicate balancing act that we achieve intermittently at best. It requires knowing your partner while remaining open to the unknown, cultivating intimacy that respects privacy. Separateness and togetherness alternate, or proceed in counterpoint. Desire resists confinement, and commitment mustn't swallow freedom whole.
Esther Perel
While many find the new clothes of the emperor magnificent, some dare to say out loud, he is simply naked. If the clear sighted are constrained by the credulous and when the “followers” are browbeating the "knowers", the cat is among the pigeons and the age of obscuration is under way. Obviously "something wicked this way comes…" ("His master's voice" )
Erik Pevernagie
We have access to practical, ethical and scientifically established methods of birth control. So I think that is the most ethical way to reduce our population.
Christian de Duve
Even if only one person’s respect for animals increases, then writing Talon would have been worthwhile.
Christopher Gérard
Have pity on them all, for it is we who are the real monsters.
Bernard Heuvelmans
Bad is that often wildlife trafficking is described as a “victimless” crime. Nothing could be further from the truth. Many of the trafficked items come from murdered animals; Rhinoceros Horn, Ivory and Tiger skins; and hundreds of thousands of birds and animals die in transit in the most horrible circumstances imaginable. Just because they cannot communicate with us does not mean they are not victims. They feel, fear and die, just like humans.
Christopher Gérard
Animals and nature are known to open our hearts, calm us, and reduce blood pressure and stress.
Baptist de Pape
Once again, it seemed, I was discovering the truth of the rule, a rule I'd never explicitly formulated to myself, but whose veracity I'd quite often sensed in a vague sort of way, which was that the chances of seeing an idea through to completion are inversely proportional to the time you've spent talking about it beforehand.
Jean-Philippe Toussaint