Quotes by French Authors - Page 126

The magic beauty of simultaneity, to see the loved one rushing toward you at the same moment you are rushing toward him, the magic power of meeting, exactly at midnight to achieve union, the illusion of one common rhythm achieved by overcoming obstacles, deserting friends, breaking other bonds - all this was soon dissolved by his laziness, by his habit of missing every moment, of never keeping his word, of living perversely in a state of chaos, of swimming more naturally in a sea of failed intentions, broken promises, and aborted wishes
Anaïs Nin
His entire body was pleading for reassurance, and if her whole love was not enough what else could she give him to cure his doubt?
Anaïs Nin
No man and woman know what will be born in the darkness of their intermingling; so much besides children, so many invisible births, exchanges of soul and character, blossoming of unknown selves, liberation of hidden treasures, buried fantasies...
Anaïs Nin
The potion drunk by lovers is prepared by no one but themselves. The potion is the sum of one's whole existence.
Anaïs Nin
You are that to me, an oasis. You drug me and at the same time you give me strength.
Anaïs Nin
In this instant of danger they realized they were each other's reason for living, and into this instant they threw their whole being.
Anaïs Nin
So many broken promises, each day an aborted wish, a lost object, a misplaced unread book, cluttering the room like an attic with discarded possessions.
Anaïs Nin
Every word spoken in the past accumulated forms and colors in the self. What flows through the veins besides blood is the distillation of every act committed, the sediment of all the visions, wishes, dreams and experiences. All the past emotions converge to tint the skin and flavor the lips, to regulate the pulse and produce crystals in the eyes.
Anaïs Nin
And it is that which draws me to you, too, for you are the tropics, you have the sun in you, and the softness and the clarity...
Anaïs Nin
Let us not kid ourselves; let us remember that literature is of no use whatever, except in the very special case of somebody's wishing to become, of all things, a Professor of Literature.
Gustave Flaubert
Leaving behind books is even more beautiful — there are far too many children.
Marguerite Yourcenar
When you're in my arms, I know you're mine. But your feet are so swift, so swift, they carry you as lightly as wings, I never know where, too fast, too fast away from me.
Anaïs Nin
Love the great narcotic was the revealer in the alchemist's bottle rendering visible the most untraceable substances. Love the great narcotic was the agent provocateur exposing all the secret selves to daylight.
Anaïs Nin
We have no time to waste on insignificant books, hollow books, books that are there to please...We want books that cost their authors a great deal, books where you can feel the years of work, the backache, the writer's block, the author's panic at the thought that he might be lost: his discouragement, his courage, his anguish, his stubbornness, the risk of failure that he has taken.
Laurence Cossé
The spirits of the brain are directly connected to the testicles. This is why men who weary their imagination in books are less suitable for procreative functions...
Louis de la Forge
Criticism demands infinitely more culture than artistic creation.
Pierre Bayard
A library implies an act of faith which generations, still in darkness hid, sign in their night in witness of the
Victor Hugo
In the sort of screen dappled with different states of mind which my consciousness would simultaneously unfold while I read, and which ranged from the aspirations hidden deepest within me to the completely exterior vision of the horizon which I had, at the bottom of the garden, before my eyes, what was first in me, innermost, the constantly moving handle that controlled the rest, was my belief in the philosophical richness and beauty of the book I was reading, and my desire to appropriate them for myself, whatever that book might be.
Marcel Proust
No encounter occured that day, and I was glad of it; I took out of my pocket a little Homer I had not opened since leaving Marseilles, reread three lines of the Odyssey, learned them by heart; then, finding sufficient sustenance in their rhythm and reveling in them at leisure, I closed the book and remained, trembling, more alive than I had thought possible, my mind numb with happiness.
André Gide
On no days of our childhood did we live so fully perhaps as those we thought we had left behind without living them, those that we spent with a favourite book.
Marcel Proust
To limit the press is to insult a nation to prohibit reading of certain books is to declare the inhabitants to be either fools or slaves: such a prohibition ought to fill them with disdain.
Claude Adrien Helvétius
In reading, friendship is restored immediately to its original purity. With books there is no forced sociability. If we pass the evening with those friends—books—it’s because we really want to. When we leave them, we do so with regret and, when we have left them, there are none of those thoughts that spoil friendship: “What did they think of us?”—“Did we make a mistake and say something tactless?”—“Did they like us?”—nor is there the anxiety of being forgotten because of displacement by someone else. All such agitating thoughts expire as we enter the pure and calm friendship of reading.
Marcel Proust
I enjoy books as misers enjoy treasures, because I know I can enjoy them whenever I please.
Michel de Montaigne
Great novels are always a little more intelligent than their authors.
Milan Kundera
The greatest book is not the one whose message engraves itself on the brain, as a telegraphic message engraves itself on the ticker-tape, but the one whose vital impact opens up other viewpoints, and from writer to reader spreads the fire that is fed by the various essences, until it becomes a vast conflagration leaping from forest to forest.
Romain Rolland
We keep quiet about what we read. Our enjoyment of a book remains a jealously guarded secret. Perhaps because there`s no need to talk, or because it takes time to distill what we've read before we can say anything. Silence is our guarantee of intimacy. We might have finished reading but we`re still livingthe book.
Daniel Pennac
The first time I read an excellent work, it is to me just as if I gained a new friend; and when I read over a book I have perused before, it resembles the meeting of an old one.
James Goldsmith
The world exists to end up in a book.
Stéphane Mallarmé
We human beings build houses because we're alive but we write books because we're mortal. We live in groups because we're sociable but we read because we know we're alone. Reading offers a kind of companionship that takes no one's place but that no one can replace either. It offers no definitive explanation of our destiny but links us inextricably to life. Its tiny secret links remind us of how paradoxically happy we are to be alive while illuminating how tragically absurd life is.
Daniel Pennac
The books that everybody admires are those that nobody reads.
Anatole France
The imaginary is not formed in opposition to reality as its denial or compensation; it grows among signs, from book to book, in the interstice of repetitions and commentaries; it is born and takes shape in the interval between books. It is the phenomena of the library.
Michel Foucault
I regained my soul through literature after those times I'd lost it to wild-eyed gypsy girls on the European streets.
Roman Payne
In Tereza’s eyes, books were the emblems of a secret brotherhood. For she had but a single weapon against the world of crudity surrounding her: the novels. She had read any number of them, from Fielding to Thomas Mann. They not only offered the possibility of an imaginary escape from a life she found unsatisfying; they also had a meaning for her as physical objects: she loved to walk down the street with a book under her arm. It had the same significance for her as an elegant cane from the dandy a century ago. It differentiated her from others.
Milan Kundera
I know many books which have bored their readers, but I know of none which has done real evil.
Voltaire
The flesh is sad, alas, and I have read all the books.
Stéphane Mallarmé
Yet if women are so flighty, fickle, changeable, susceptible, and inconstant (as some clerks would have us believe), why is it that their suitors have to resort to such trickery to have their way with them? And why don't women quickly succumb to them, without the need for all this skill and ingenuity in conquering them? For there is no need to go to war for a castle that is already captured.
Christine de Pizan
To prohibit the reading of certain books is to declare the inhabitants to be either fools or slaves.
Claude Adrien Helvétius
It is with books as with men: a very small number play a great part.
Voltaire
I had found my religion: nothing seemed more important to me than a book. I saw the library as a temple.
Jean-Paul Sartre
Books - the best antidote against the marsh-gas of boredom and vacuity
George Steiner
The one way of tolerating existence is to lose oneself in literature as in a perpetual orgy.
Gustave Flaubert
You forget everything. The hours slip by. You travel in your chair through centuries you seem seem to see before you, your thoughts are caught up in the story, dallying with the details or following the course of the plot, you enter into characters, so that it seems as if it were your own heart beating beneath their costumes.
Gustave Flaubert
The stupidity of people comes from having an answer for everything. The wisdom of the novel comes from having a question for everything....The novelist teaches the reader to comprehend the world as a question. There is wisdom and tolerance in that attitude. In a world built on sacrosanct certainties the novel is dead. The totalitarian world, whether founded on Marx, Islam, or anything else, is a world of answers rather than questions. There, the novel has no place.
Milan Kundera
There are perhaps no days of our childhood we lived so fully as those we believe we left without having lived them, those we spent with a favorite book.
Marcel Proust
I thought: pity the poor in spirit who know neither the enchantment nor the beauty of language.
Muriel Barbery
Never lend books, for no one ever returns them; the only books I have in my library are books that other folks have lent me.
Anatole France
Reading is that fruitful miracle of a communication in the midst of solitude.
Marcel Proust
When I am attacked by gloomy thoughts, nothing helps me so much as running to my books. They quickly absorb me and banish the clouds from my mind.
Michel de Montaigne
The reading of all good books is like conversation with the finest men of past centuries.
René Descartes
Fools have a habit of believing that everything written by a famous author is admirable. For my part I read only to please myself and like only what suits my taste.
Voltaire
Despite the enormous quantity of books, how few people read! And if one reads profitably, one would realize how much stupid stuff the vulgar herd is content to swallow every day.
Voltaire
A book is a garden, an orchard, a storehouse, a party, a company by the way, a counselor, a multitude of counselors.
Charles Baudelaire
The worst thing about new books is that they keep us from reading the old ones.
Joseph Joubert
We are of opinion that instead of letting books grow moldy behind an iron grating, far from the vulgar gaze, it is better to let them wear out by being read.
Jules Verne
Everything in the world exists in order to end up as a book.
Stéphane Mallarmé
If you would tell me the heart of a man, tell me not what he reads, but what he rereads.
François Mauriac
Words dazzle and deceive because they are mimed by the face. But black words on a white page are the soul laid bare.
Guy de Maupassant
A good book is an event in my life.
Stendhal
Reader's Bill of Rights1. The right to not read 2. The right to skip pages 3. The right to not finish 4. The right to reread 5. The right to read anything 6. The right to escapism 7. The right to read anywhere 8. The right to browse 9. The right to read out loud 10. The right to not defend your tastes
Daniel Pennac
All that happens in the human brain is but the result of electro-chemical reactions. Be it of love, hate, of pleasure, of suffering, of imagination, or all other states of mind, sentiment or sickness; the process depends in every case on the chemical reactions produced in the interior of the brain, and the resulting electrical impulses or messages, be they visual, auditory, based on memory, or an interpretation of new events based on elements that one has in the memory.
Raël