Andrei Makine Quotes

The loudspeaker on the wall crackles, hisses, and suddenly announces, in astonishingly soothing tones, that a train is going to be delayed. An ocean swell of sighs ripples through the waiting room.

All of this seemed equally trifling to him now. And when he thought again about the world of free people, the difference between it and the miseries and joys of this place seemed minimal. If three tiny fragments of tea leaf chanced to fall into a prisoner's battered cup, he relished them. In Leningrad during the interval at the opera a woman sipped champagne with the same pleasure. Their sufferings were also comparable. Both the prisoner and the woman had painful shoes. Hers were narrow evening shoes which she took off during the performance. The prisoner suffered from what they wore in the camp, section of tyres into which you thrust your foot wrapped in rags and fastened with string. The woman at the opera knew that somewhere in the world there were millions of beings transformed into gaunt animals, their faces blackened by the polar winds. But this did not stop her drinking her glass of wine amid the glittering of the great mirrors. The prisoner knew that a warm and brilliant life was lived elsewhere in tranquility but this did not spoil his pleasure as he chewed those fragments of tea leaf....

Love is in essence subversive.

That apple orchard is still in flower," I told myself. "Time has passed it by, leaving it behind in a moment that does not pass. An idea that seems as insane as the beauty of those flowering trees that will never bear fruit. But to believe in it gives a supreme meaning to our lives, our encounters, our loves."
Then I caught myself mentally addressing Kira, as on so many occasions during these last twenty years.
The truth is, I have never stopped walking beside her along an endless corridor lined with snow-clad boughts.

Volsky once more had the feeling that the bond between them was indifferent to the demise of bodies.

As his hands fell upon the keyboard, it was still possible to believe a beautiful harmony had been formed at random, in spite of him. But a second later the music came surging out, the power of it sweeping away all doubts, voices, sounds, wiping away the fixed grins and exchanged glances, pushing back the walls, dispersing the light of the reception room out into the nocturnal immensity of the sky beyond the windows.

He did not feel as if he were playing. He was advancing through a night, breathing in its delicate transparency, made up as it was of an infinite number of facets of ice, of leaves, of wind. He no longer felt any pain. No fear about what would happen. No anguish or remorse. The night through which he was advancing expressed this pain, this fear, and the irremediable shattering of the past, but this had all become music and now only existed through its beauty.

She studies to be equal in a world that is no longer surprised at anything

Men can be pitiless towards a woman whose body has eluded them, particularly if this is thanks to their own cowardice.

Then, with all my being I felt I was wildly, desperately in love. Not only with Maya and her dark locks flying in the wind as she ran. But also with the plants that swayed as she passed, and with that grey, sad sky and the air that smelled of rain. I was even in love with that old piece of farm machinery with flat tyres, sensing that it was quite essential to the harmony that had just been created before my eyes ...

The fatal mistake we make is looking for a paradise that endures ... This obsession with what lasts causes us to overlook many a fleeting paradise.

Tilting her head back, she plunged in among the stars for a long time. A silent, unflagging wind descended from these nocturnal depths. . . . The shadow of the wood, the dark reflection of the water, the dim fields on the opposite bank. The sky from which spilled the powerful and constant wind. All this lived, breathed, and seemed to see her, to be focusing some kind of infinite gaze upon her. A gaze that understood everything but did not judge. It was there, facing her, about her, within her. Everything was said by this immense wordless, motionless presence. . . . The wind was still blowing from the summit of the sky, from its dark reaches scarcely marked with the buoys of stars. She was responding to the eyes staring at her, impassive eyes, but whose absolute compassion she sensed. . . .

( ... ) the translator of prose is the slave of the author and the translator of poetry is his rival.

Once again, without explaining anything, they understood that they must leave. Go away before this world woke up and continued with a life from which they were forever excluded.

This happiness rendered absurd men's desire to dominate, to kill, to possess, thought Volsky. For neither Mila nor he possessed anything. Their joy came from the things one does not possess, from what other people had abandoned or scorned. But, above all, this sunset, this scent of warm bark, these clouds above the young trees in the graveyard, these belonged to everybody!

This sacrifice, which saved his life, reminded him again that the evil of this world could be put to rout by the will of a single human being.

The life these words speak of is not worth the ink they are written in ... He now knows that the only words worth writing down arise when language is impossible.

He should have told Vlad that in the old days a collection of poems could change your life, but a single poem could also cost the life of its author.