Julien Green Quotes

Perhaps the greatest consolation of the oppressed is to consider themselves superior to their tyrants.

I knew that we counted little in comparison with the universe, I knew that we were nothing; but to be so immeasurably nothing seems in some way both to overwhelm and at the same time to reassure. Those figures, those dimensions beyond the range of human thought, are utterly overpowering. Is there anything whatsoever to which we can cling? Amid that chaos of illusions into which we are cast headlong, there is one thing that stands out as true, and that is---love. All the rest is nothingness, an empty void. We peer down into a huge dark abyss. And we are afraid.

But nowadays my heart is empty and the boxwood has lost its magic scent; yes, absolutely and entirely. The creature that I was no longer exists. When I speak to her she does not understand me; I think of her, already, as of some one I have known but who no longer has any connection with myself.

This sort of death of part of oneself strikes terror into my heart.
Life presents itself to me as a progressive series of annihilations, until in time one arrives at the general destruction of all memory and the barren slumber of one's conscience.

I am probably exaggerating a little, but I owe my equilibrium to ink and paper.

The secret is to write just anything, to dare to write just anything, because when you write just anything, you begin to say what is important.

It has become somewhat trite, nowadays, to say that after so many years of destruction it is a kind of miracle that Paris is still standing, a miracle we thrill to every day. But if the beauty of Paris has survived wars, how extraordinary that it can do nothing against the pickaxes of the Parisians themselves when they make up their minds to demolish something, nor against the vagaries of their architects left to their own devices!

In growing older, we become our parents.

A novelist is like a scout commissioned to go and see what is happening in the depth of the soul. He comes back and reports what he has observed. He never lives on the surface but only inhabits the darkest regions

What is real is beyond all reach.

Anti-clericalism and non-belief, have their bigots just as orthodoxy does.

Faith means walking on the waters.

Copying is out of the question; only fools and impostors copy. No, the thing is to produce something as good, if possible, out of your own resources. And so begins the strange torture of the blank sheet of paper, where you must open a window that is not the one I spotted just now but one equally insistent in its truthfulness.

I have always thought that by observing things with a great deal of attention you eventually wrest some of their secrets from them, making them utter what they would most like to keep to themselves.

A child's fear is a world whose dark corners are quite unknown to grownup people; it has its sky and its abysses, a sky without stars, abysses into which no light can ever penetrate.

If people only knew what lies at the heart of my novels! What a tumult of desires these carefully written pages conceal! I sometimes have a loathing for the furious cravings that give me no peace except when I am working.

Our life is a book that writes itself and whose principal themes sometimes escape us. We are like characters in a novel who do not always understand what the author wants of them.

The greatest explorer on this earth never takes voyages as long as those of the man who descends to the depth of his heart.

Sometimes we do things, without thinking, that make no sense to us until much later, and yet appear to have been prompted by the most alert part of our being.

I am the road running through Paris," says the Seine. 'I have carried off many images since you were a child and reflected many clouds. I am changeable, but as people are: I have my moments of happiness in the June dawn and my sinister times some December evenings. Above all I am inquisitive - you call it being in flood. We have something in common, you everlasting passers-by and I, the fleeing water, which is that we never go back: your time is my space.

The man I am will always raise a protest against the man I wanted to be and the two will live together to the end, but the man I wanted to be will be the one on whom judgement will be passed.

The novelist is like a scout commissioned to go and see what is happening in the depth of the soul. He comes back and reports what he has observed.

A scrupulous man will never produce a great novel.

Let us hope that good authors who are bad Christians will find salvation through the books they write.

Thoughts fly and words go on foot. Therein lies all the drama of a writer.