Quotes by Mauritian Authors

[W]hat is one to say of the writer who lies when he writes that he is lying?
Jean-Marie G. Le Clézio
Anything is possible. You can be told that you have a 90-percent chance or a 50-percent chance or a 1-percent chance, but you have to believe, and you have to fight.
Pravinee Hurbungs
Sometimes those who challenge you most.. Teach you best.
Pravinee Hurbungs
Every expert was once an amateur.
Jeekeshen Chinnappen
If you are successful, you will win false friends and true enemies. Succeed anyway
Pravinee Hurbungs
If you never tasted a bad apple, you would not appreciate a good apple. If you were never sad, you would not know how it feels to be happy. If you never had negative thoughts, you would not learn the power of positive thinking. You have to experience life to understand life.
Jeekeshen Chinnappen
Most people don't know how to ask the right questions. Mondo knew how to ask questions, just at the right time, when you weren't expecting it. People paused for a few seconds, they stopped thinking about themselves and their own business, they thought, and their eyes seemed to blur, because they remembered asking those questions themselves, long ago.
Jean-Marie G. Le Clézio
A strong man can handle a strong woman. A weak man will say she has an attitude.
Pravinee Hurbungs
Perhaps I should explain to him that it has been my particular way of frustrating time's attrition, postponing death and sustaining the illusion that one can always erase everything and make a fresh start.
Nathacha Appanah
Monkeys are superior to men in this: when a monkey looks into a mirror, he sees a monkey.
Malcolm de Chazal
The earth is neither fabulous nor paradisal. And therefore it is not hell.
Jean-Marie G. Le Clézio
I aspire to inspire before I expire.
Pravinee Hurbungs
Thinking! Thinking! The process should no longer be merely this feeble flurry of hailstones that raises a little dust. It should be something quite different. Thinking should be a terrifying process. When the earth thinks, whole towns crumble to the ground and thousands of people die.Thinking: raising boulders, hollowing out valleys, preparing tidal waves at sea. Thinking like a town: that's to say: eight million inhabitants, twelve million rats, nine million pints of carbon dioxide, two billion tons. Grey light. Cathedral of light. Din. Sudden flashes. Low-lying blanket of black cloud. Flat roofs. Fire alarms. Elevators. Streets. Eighteen thousand miles of streets. 145 million electric light bulbs.
Jean-Marie G. Le Clézio
You can only live 'Life' when you stepped out from your comfort zone. Don't restrict yourself within a shell when you can actually be limitless.
Jeekeshen Chinnappen
Take pride in how far you have come and have faith in how far you can go.
Pravinee Hurbungs
Young men think old men fools, old men know young men to be so.
Pravinee Hurbungs
I am not a one in a million kind of girl. I am once in a lifetime kind of woman.
Pravinee Hurbungs
This is not about jealousy. It's all about loyalty, honesty and respect.
Pravinee Hurbungs
You don't mean to say that Hogan has turned into a woman? Why, yes, that's him all right, you can recognize him by the fact that he has two legs, two arms, and an indecipherable face. Man, woman, what difference does it make? Are they not all exactly the same, these little black insects with their rhythmic movements, the same eyes, the same thoughts?
Jean-Marie G. Le Clézio
Fear is an excellent motivator.
Jeekeshen Chinnappen
There is no such thing as self-awareness. Imagine thought retreating into itself to think about itself. It would be easier to imagine a revolver bullet extracting itself from its victim's wound and re-entering the barrel. Yes, it would be easier to imagine the universe's explosion suddenly halting its outflow of energy, so that the galaxies congeal once more, and the millions of light-years of their flight through space are immediately annulled.
Jean-Marie G. Le Clézio
Horror is not unimaginable, it has neither the face of a monster nor the bat-wings of a demon. It is calm and tranquil, and it is durable, lasting whole days and nights, months; years, perhaps. It is not mortal. It strikes at the eyes, only the eyes.
Jean-Marie G. Le Clézio
They were the men and the women of the sand, of the wind, of the light, of the night. They appeared as in a dream, at the crest of a dune, as if they were born of the cloudless sky.
Jean-Marie G. Le Clézio
The moment you blame life for who you are is that very moment you ignore your talents and inner abilities to change the world.
Jeekeshen Chinnappen
Our expression and our words never coincide, which is why the animals don't understand us.
Malcolm de Chazal
I wanted to write an adventure story, not, it's true, I really did. I shall have failed, that's all. Adventures bore me. I have no idea how to talk about countries, how to make people wish they had been there. I am not a good travelling salesman. Countries? Where are they , whatever became of them.When I was twelve I dreamed of Hongkong. That tedious, commonplace little provincial town! Shops sprouting from every nook and cranny! The Chinese junks pictured on the lids of chocolate boxes used to fascinate me. Junks: sort of chopped-off barges, where the housewives do all their cooking and washing on deck. They even have television. As for the Niagara Falls: water, nothing but water! A dam is more interesting; at least one can occasionally see a big crack at its base, and hope for some excitement.When one travels, one sees nothing but hotels. Squalid rooms, with iron bedsteads, and a picture of some kind hanging on the wall from a rusty nail, a coloured print of London Bridge or the Eiffel Tower.One also sees trains, lots of trains, and airports that look like restaurants, and restaurants that look like morgues. All the ports in the world are hemmed in by oil slicks and shabby customs buildings. In the streets of the towns, people keep to the sidewalks, cars stop at red lights. If only one occasionally arrived in a country where women are the colour of steel and men wear owls on their heads. But no, they are sensible, they all have black ties, partings to one side, brassières and stiletto heels. In all the restaurants, when one has finished eating one calls over the individual who has been prowling among the tables, and pays him with a promissory note. There are cigarettes everywhere! There are airplanes and automobiles everywhere.
Jean-Marie G. Le Clézio
Nights are long when it's cold and you're waiting for a train.
Jean-Marie G. Le Clézio
Life is like a camera... Focus on what's important capture the good times and develop from the negative.
Pravinee Hurbungs
All words are possible, then, all names. They rain down, all these words, they disintegrate into a powdery avalanche. Belched from the volcano's mouth, they spurt in to the sky, then fall again. In the quivering air, like gelatine, the sounds trace their bubble paths. Can you imagine that?
Jean-Marie G. Le Clézio
Don't kill the Genius in you by doubting your abilities to create impact in the world.
Jeekeshen Chinnappen
He who writes books that aim to convince is a comedian, too, just a comedian. What has he got to offer others, apart from chains, still more chains? Fiction never liberated anyone. No one ever brought anything back from voyages through dream worlds.
Jean-Marie G. Le Clézio
The world was a sick animal, a sort of huge cancerous tumour, a thing of bubbling liquids, whitish patches, dribbling pus, fantastic pimples of dead skin that grew in all directions, swelled up, became more and more like fuzzy hair. The right thing would be to go away, to vanish for ever from the face of the sun.
Jean-Marie G. Le Clézio
The glance embroiders in joy, knits in pain, and sews in boredom.When indifferent, the eye takes stills, when interested, movies.Laughter is regional: a smile extends over the whole face.
Malcolm de Chazal
[M]ay not literature (and, in particular, fiction) be considered a desperate and permanently thwarted effort to produce a unique form of expression? Something like a cry, perhaps, a cry that, somehow, inexplicably contains all the millions of words that have ever existed, anywhere, in any age. In contrast with the spoken word and its classifying function, the purpose of writing seems, rather, to be a quest for the egg, the seed, nothing more.
Jean-Marie G. Le Clézio
Real lives have no end. Real books have no end.
Jean-Marie G. Le Clézio
I thought that to get to know a desert it was enough to have been there. I thought that to have seen the dogs dying along the Cholula road, or to have seen the eyes of the lepers at Chiengmai gave me the right to talk about it. To have seen! To have been there! Rubbish! The world is not a book, it proves nothing. The spaces one has crossed were dark corridors with closed doors. The faces of the women to whom one gave oneself up completely: did they speak for anyone but themselves? The cities of man are secret. One walks along their streets, one sees them shine under one's feet, but one is not there, one never enters them. The dusty fields inhabited by people who are hungry, who wait patiently, are paradises of luxury and nourishment; shining at a vast distance from intelligence, at a vast distance from reason. They are not to be subjugated.
Jean-Marie G. Le Clézio