Quotes by French Authors - Page 55

Even when she had to make some one a present of the kind called 'useful,' when she had to give an armchair or some table-silver or a walking-stick, she would choose 'antiques,' as though their long desuetude had effaced from them any semblance of utility and fitted them rather to instruct us in the lives of the men of other days than to serve the common requirements of our own.
Marcel Proust
I never allow myself to be influenced in the smallest degree either by atmospheric disturbances or by the arbitrary divisions of what is known as Time.
Marcel Proust
Swann, with that almost arrogant charity of a man of the world who, amid the dissolution of all his own moral prejudices, finds in another's shame merely a reason for treating him with a friendly benevolence...
Marcel Proust
Like language, books serve to express us, but also to complete us, furnishing, through a variety of excerpted and reworked fragments, the missing elements of our personality.
Pierre Bayard
I wanted to protect my professorial dignity and not lay myself open to laughter from the Americans, who when they do laugh, laugh raucously
Jules Verne
An excellent but an eccentric man in whom the least little thing would, it seemed, often check the flow of his spirits and divert the current of his thoughts.
Marcel Proust
Julien felt himself to be strong and resolute like a man who sees clearly into his own heart.
Stendhal
Ambition is a drug that turns it's addicts into potential madmen.
Emil M. Cioran
Theories cannot claim to be indestructible. They are only the plough which the ploughman uses to draw his furrow and which he has every right to discard for another one, of improved design, after the harvest. To be this ploughman, to see my labours result in the furtherance of scientific progress, was the height of my ambition, and now the Swedish Academy of Sciences has come, at this harvest, to add the most brilliant of crowns.
Paul Sabatier
Nothing becomes some women more than the prick of ambition. Love, on the contrary, may make them very dull.
Françoise Sagan
One of my objectives is learning more than is absolutely necessary.
Jules Verne
Men of great ambition have sought happiness . . . and have found fame.
Napoléon Bonaparte
I have an ambition to live 300 years. I will not live 300 years. Maybe I will live one year more. But I have the ambition. Why you will not have ambition? Why? Have the greatest ambition possible. You want to be immortal? Fight to be immortal. Do it. You want to make the most fantastic art or movie? Try. If you fail, is not important. We need to try.
Alejandro Jodorowsky
The first virtue of a young man today - that is, for the next fifty years perhaps, as long as we live in fear, and religion has regained its powers - is to be incapable of enthusiasm and not to have much in the way of brains.
Stendhal
When she closed her eyes she felt he had many hands, which touched her everywhere, and many mouths, which passed so swiftly over her, and with a wolflike sharpness, his teeth sank into her fleshiest parts. Naked now, he lay his full length over her. She enjoyed his weight on her, enjoyed being crushed under his body. She wanted him soldered to her, from mouth to feet. Shivers passed through her body.
Anaïs Nin
As I finished my rice, I sketched out the plot of a pornographic adventure film called The Massage Room. Sirien, a young girl from northern Thailand, falls hopelessly in love with Bob, an American student who winds up in the massage parlor by accident, dragged there by his buddies after a fatefully boozy evening. Bob doesn't touch her, he's happy just to look at her with his lovely, pale-blue eyes and tell her about his hometown - in North Carolina, or somewhere like that. They see each other several more times, whenever Sirien isn't working, but, sadly, Bob must leave to finish his senior year at Yale. Ellipsis. Sirien waits expectantly while continuing to satisfy the needs of her numerous clients. Though pure at heart, she fervently jerks off and sucks paunchy, mustached Frenchmen (supporting role for Gerard Jugnot), corpulent, bald Germans (supporting role for some German actor). Finally, Bob returns and tries to free her from her hell - but the Chinese mafia doesn't see things in quite the same light. Bob persuades the American ambassador and the president of some humanitarian organization opposed to the exploitation of young girls to intervene (supporting role for Jane Fonda). What with the Chinese mafia (hint at the Triads) and the collusion of Thai generals (political angle, appeal to democratic values), there would be a lot of fight scenes and chase sequences through the streets of Bangkok. At the end of the day, Bob carries her off. But in the penultimate scene, Sirien gives, for the first time, an honest account of the extent of her sexual experience. All the cocks she has sucked as a humble massage parlor employee, she has sucked in the anticipation, in the hope of sucking Bob's cock, into which all the others were subsumed - well, I'd have to work on the dialogue. Cross fade between the two rivers (the Chao Phraya, the Delaware). Closing credits. For the European market, I already had line in mind, along the lines of "If you liked The Music Room, you'll love The Massage Room.
Michel Houellebecq
Every gesture was one of disorder and violence, as if a lioness had come into the room.
Anaïs Nin
I gathered poets around me and we all wrote beautiful erotica. As we were condemned to focus only on sensuality, we had violent explosions of poetry. Writing erotica became a road to sainthood rather than to debauchery.
Anaïs Nin
By appealing to his imagination, a pornographic novel brings the reader’s body into play; libertine fiction appeals only to his mind. The goal of the former is erotic pleasure, or rather the desire to experience erotic pleasure, which the pornographic novel, obviously, cannot satisfy by itself. It is in this regard merely an intermediary, a stimulant, a kind of literary pimp.With libertine fiction, the goal is that of overcoming the prejudices of some of the characters, which are assumed to be the same as those of the reader. The reader is somewhat the equivalent of the fictional object of seduction.
Jean-Marie Goulemot
Even when they did not look at each other or speak to each other, he could feel a powerful current between them.
Anaïs Nin
He never treated her as a wife. He wooed her over and over again, with presents, flowers, new pleasures.
Anaïs Nin
Fucking is an art. The mere fact of introducing the cock in the cunt and moving it in and out until the ejaculation of spunk is not art. True, it is fucking, but the difference between that way of doing it and the way it should be done, is like the difference between a child's first drawing and a picture by the world's greatest painter.
Anaïs Nin
Caroline, beside herself, dragged me down to her, her breast was against mine, and by a circular movement seemed to caress it. The pretty strawberries which crowned her breasts, jealous at meeting others as fair, endeavoured to engage them in combat.
Felicité de Choiseul-Meuse
I do not want to be the leader. I refuse to be the leader. I want to live darkly and richly in my femaleness. I want a man lying over me, always over me. His will, his pleasure, his desire, his life, his work, his sexuality the touchstone, the command, my pivot. I don’t mind working, holding my ground intellectually, artistically; but as a woman, oh, God, as a woman I want to be dominated. I don’t mind being told to stand on my own feet, not to cling, be all that I am capable of doing, but I am going to be pursued, fucked, possessed by the will of a male at his time, his bidding.
Anaïs Nin
No one is a good historian of the patent, visible, striking, and public life of peoples, if he is not, at the same time, in a certain measure, the historian of their deep and hidden life; and no one is a good historian of the interior unless he understands how, at need, to be the historian of the exterior also...True history being a mixture of all things, the true historian mingles in everything.
Victor Hugo
When it has finished saying it, it no longer is. The longer it is in saying it, the more it can say it at length, the more slowly it melts, the better quality it is.
Francis Ponge
metaphors are dangerous. Metaphors are not to be trifled with. A single metaphor can give birth to love
Milan Kundera
Time is a tease
André Breton
Those who complimented me were those who understood me the least.
André Gide
When I look at my life and at the secret color which it has, I feel as if tears were trembling in my heart. I am just as much the lips that I have kissed as the nights spent in the 'House before the World,' just as much the child brought up in poverty as this frenzied ambition and thirst for life which sometimes carry me away.
Albert Camus
...if the actor gave his performance without knowing that he was in a play, then his tears would be real tears and his life a real life. And whenever I think of this pain and joy that rise up in me, I am carried away by the knowledge that the game I am playing is the most serious and exciting there is.
Albert Camus
No one ever reads a book. He reads himself through books, either to discover or to control himself.
Romain Rolland
As I usually do when I want to get rid of someone whose conversation bores me, I pretended to agree.
Albert Camus
Travel is useful, it exercises the imagination. All the rest is disappointment and fatigue. Our journey is entirely imaginary. That is its strength.It goes from life to death. People, animals, cities, things, all are imagined. It's a novel, just a fictitious narrative. Littre says so and he's never wrong.And besides, in the first place, anyone can do as much. You just have to close your eyes.It's on the other side of life.
Louis-Ferdinand Céline
One recognizes one's course by discovering the paths that stray from it
Albert Camus
My thought is me: that's why I can't stop. I exist because I think...and I can't stop myself from thinking. At this very moment, it's frightful, if I exist, it is because I am horrified at existing. I am the one who pulls myself from the nothingness to which I aspire: the hatred, the disgust of existing, there are as many ways to make myself exist, to thrust myself into existence. Thoughts are born at the back of me, like sudden giddiness, I feel them being born behind my head...if I yield, they're going to come round in front of me, between my eyes, and I always yield, the thought grows and grows and there it is, immense, filling me completely and renewing my existence.
Jean-Paul Sartre
Doctrines are meant to serve man, not the other way around.
Amin Maalouf
Poverty makes a slave out of men. In order to eat he will accept work that gives no pleasure.
André Gide
The fact is, that what de Sade was trying to bring to the surface of the conscious mind was precisely the thing that revolted that mind . . . From the very first he set before the consciousness things which it could not tolerate.
Georges Bataille
Every bird that flies has the thread of the infinite in its claw.
Victor Hugo
It is better to burn than to disappear.
Albert Camus
If there were no thunder, men would have little fear of lightning.
Jules Verne
Aures habent et non audient` - `They have ears but hear not
Jules Verne
Deep down, all the while, she was waiting for something to happen. Like a sailor in distress, she kept casting desperate glances over the solitary waster of her life, seeking some white sail in the distant mists of the horizon. She had no idea by what wind it would reach her, toward what shore it would bear her, or what kind of craft it would be – tiny boat or towering vessel, laden with heartbreaks or filled to the gunwhales with rapture. But every morning when she awoke she hoped that today would be the day; she listened for every sound, gave sudden starts, was surprised when nothing happened; and then, sadder with each succeeding sunset, she longed for tomorrow.
Gustave Flaubert
The most important thing you do everyday you live is deciding not to kill yourself.
Albert Camus
The comfort of the rich depends upon an abundant supply of the poor.
Voltaire
And you dare to wear the golden spurs of a knight? You dare to call yourself a Marshal of France and carry the fleur-de-lis on your coat of arms? The meanest lackey in this hall knows more of honour and loyalty than you! Hang and burn my servants and kill me - kill too, now that you have handed your companion-in-arms Arnaud de Montsalvy, to your cousin. With my last breath, I shall call on Heaven to witness that Gilles de Rais is a traitor and a felon!
Juliette Benzoni
The tyranny of maternal duty is not new, but it has become considerably more pronounced with the rise of naturalism, and it has thus far produced neither a matriarchy nor sexual equality, but rather a regression in women's status.
Élisabeth Badinter
The message is clear: a good mother breast feeds. Significantly, this good mother shares a sociocultural profile with women in other developed countries: she is over thirty, is a high earning professional, does not smoke, takes prenatal classes, and benefits from a long maternity leave.
Élisabeth Badinter
Mothers with high ideals for child-rearing must pay the price for those ideals.
Élisabeth Badinter
An unemployed father is always considered more detrimental to the family than an unemployed mother, and at the same time, child psychologists kept coming up with new responsibilities for parents that seemed to fall to the mother alone.
Élisabeth Badinter
Motherhood is a vocation like any other. It should be freely chosen, not imposed upon woman.
Anaïs Nin
The love between man and woman is a voluntary pact in which the one who falls short is only guilty of perfidy, but when a woman has become a mother her duty is greater because nature has entrusted the human species to her. If she fails then she is a coward, unworthy and infamous.
Guy de Maupassant
I believe in Supreme Being, a Creator, whoever he may be, it's of no importance to me, who put us here on earth to do our duty as citizens and fathers; but I don't need to go to church and kiss silver platters and dig into my pocket to fatten up a lot of humbugs who eat better than you or I do! Because he can be worshiped just as well in a wood, a field, or even just gazing at the ethereal vault, like the ancients.
Gustave Flaubert
Here’s one secret no one will tell you about getting laid after a date. DON’T TALK. Most girls blame either their looks or excessive timidity for their virginity. This is only true to an extent. These girls are also horribly annoying.”—Aurelia Nichols & Jillie Bean, 101 Tips to Lose Your Virginity after 25
Camilla Monk
He was a great patriot, a humanitarian, a loyal friend- provided of course he really is dead.
Voltaire
It is proved...that things cannot be other than they are, for since everything was made for a purpose, it follows that everything is made for the best purpose.
Voltaire
I have never made but one prayer to God, a very short one: Oh Lord, make my enemies ridiculous. And God grante
Voltaire
I’ll be as loving as you will be, as stubborn as I know you are, as passionate as I’m thankful you are and as supportive and understanding as I’ve known you to be. You are my best friend and I love you
Danielle-Claude Ngontang Mba
Nothing to say. I used to be a ghostwriter for a publisher.’‘Medieval stuff?’‘Eighty-page love stories. You have this guy, untrustworthy but good in bed, and this girl, radiant but innocent. In the end they fall madly in love and it’s incredibly boring. The story doesn’t say when they split up.’‘Of course not,’ said Mathias
Fred Vargas