Muriel Barbery Quotes

This is the first time I have met someone who seeks out people and who sees beyond ... We never look beyond our assumptions and, what's worse, we have given up trying to meet others; we just meet ourselves. We don't recognize each other because other people have become our permanent mirrors. If we actually realized this, if we were to become aware of the fact that we are alone in the wilderness, we would go crazy ... As for me, I implore fate to give me the chance to see beyond myself and truly meet someone.

Truth loves nothing better than simplicity of truth: that is the lesson Columbe Josse ought to have learned from her medieval readings. But all she seems to have gleaned from her studies is how to make a conceptual fuss in the service of nothing. It is a sort of endless loop, and also a shameless waste of resources, including the courier and my own self.

. . . Granted, the young woman has a fairly efficient way with words, despite her youth. But the fact that the middle classes are working themselves to the bone, using their sweat and taxes to finance such pointless and pretentious research leaves me speechless. Every gray morning, day after gloomy day, secretaries, craftsmen, employees, petty civil servants, taxi drivers and concierges shoulder their burdens so that the flower of French youth, duly housed and subsidized, can squander the fruit of all that dreariness upon the altar of ridiculous endeavors . . .

Should you devote your time to teaching, to producing a body of work, to research, to culture? It makes no difference. The only thing that matters is your intention: are you elevating thought and contributing to the common good, or rather joining the ranks in the field of study whose only purpose is its own perpetuation, and only function the self-reproduction of the elite - for this turns the University into a sect.

I'm afraid to go into myself and see what's going on in there.

Love doesn't save, it raises you up and makes you bigger, it lights you up from inside and carves out that light like wood in the forest. It nestles in the hollows of empty days, of thankless tasks, of useless hours, it doesn't drift along on golden rafts or sparkling rivers, it doesn't sing or shine and it never proclaims a thing. But at night, once the room's been swept and the embers covered over and the children are asleep
at night between the sheets, with slow gazes, not moving or speaking
at night, at last, when we're weary of our meager lives and the trivialities of our insignificant existance, each of us becomes the well where the other one can draw water ...

But the life he now led no longer resonated with the echo of past moments of exhilaration, other than the trilling of birds at dawn, or the grand calligraphy of clouds. Therefore, when the little girl began to play, the pain he felt courted a sorrow he no longer knew still lived inside him, a brief reminiscence of the cruelty of pleasure.

Life has meaning and we grown-ups know what it is is the universal lie that everyone is supposed to believe. Once you become an adult and you realize that's not true, it's too late.

Entrusting one's life is not the same as opening up one's soul.

French with Madame Fine is reduce to a long series of technical exercises whether we're doing grammar or reading texts. With her it's as if a text was written so that we can identify the characters, the narrator, the setting, the plot, the time of the story, and so on. I don't think it has ever occurred to her that a text is written above all to be read and to arouse emotions in the reader. Can you imagine, she has never even asked us the question: Did you like this book?

[H]umans live in a world where it's words and not deeds that have power, where the ultimate skill is mastery of language. This is a terrible thing because basically we are primates who've been programmed to eat, sleep, reproduce, conquer and make our territory safe, and the ones who are most gifted at that, the most animal types among us, always get screwed by the others, the fine talkers, despite these latter being incapable of defending their own garden or bringing a rabbit home for dinner or procreating properly. Humans live in a world where the weak are dominant. This is a terrible insult to our animal nature, a sort of perversion or a deep contradiction.

Music plays a huge role in my life. It is music that helps me to endure ... well ... everything there is to endure.

I understood that I was suffering because I couldn't make anyone else around me feel better.

Literature, for example, serves a pragmatic purpose. Like any form of Art, literature's mission is to make the fulfillment of our essential duties more bearable.

The pathways of hell are hardly foreign; we shall end up there one day if we tarry too long. From a passageway to a pathway: it is an easy fall, without shock or surprises. Every day we are reacquainted with the sadness of the passageway and step by step we clear the path toward our mournful doom.

What does Art do for us? It gives shape to our emotions, makes them visible, and, in so doing, places a seal of eternity upon them, a seal representing all those works that, by means of a particular form, have incarnated the universal nature of human emotions.

Like any form of Art, literature's mission is to make the fulfillment of our essential duties more bearable. For a creature like man, who must forge his destiny by means of thought and reflexivity, the knowledge gained from this will perforce be unbearably lucid. We know that we are beasts who have this weapon for survival, and that we are not gods creating a world with our own thoughts, and something has to make our own wisdom bearable, something has to save us from the woeful eternal fever of biological destiny. Therefore, we have invented Art: our animal selves have devised another way to ensure the survival of our species.

Boredom was born on a day of uniformity.

Personally I think that grammar is a way to attain beauty.

Neptune can sense that I love him; his multiple desires are perfectly clear to me. What charms me about the whole business is that he stubbornly insists on remaining a dog, whereas his mistress would like to make a gentleman of him.

Eternity: for all its invisibility, we gaze at it.

Maybe that's what being alive is about: so we can track down those movments that are dying.

Most people, when they move, well they just move depending on whatever's around them. At this very moment, as I am writing, Constitution the cat is going by with her tummy dragging close to the floor. This cat has absolutely nothing constructive to do in life and still she is heading toward something, probably an armchair.

Melancholy overwhelms me at supersonic speed.

There was only one thing I wanted: to be left alone, without too many demand upon my person, so that for a few moments each day I might be allowed to assuage my hunger.

For a few seconds Maria did not move, or even breathe, apparently. Then she gave a sorrowful gulp and, like all little girls, even those who speak to fantastical wild boars and mercurial horses, she collapsed in desperate sobs, of the kind that come so easily to a twelve-year-old, and so hard to a person of forty.

The French are often, when it comes to wine, so formal that they border on the ridiculous.

I find this a fascinating phenomenon: the ability we have to manipulate ourselves so that the foundation of our beliefs is never shaken.

To beauty, all is forgiven, even vulgarity. Intelligence no longer seems an adequate compensation for things ...

Grammar A stratum of consciousness Leading to beauty

She was dark-haired, fierce; she wore two drop earrings made of crystal; her face was a pure oval tickled with dimples; her skin was golden; and her laugh was like a fire in the night. But on her face you could also read the concentration of a soul whose life is entirely inward, and a mischievous gravity which acquires a silver patina with age.

One must concede to others what one tolerates in oneself.

I take the measure of the ridiculous, superfluous cats who wander through our lives with all the placidity and indifference of an imbecile are in fact the guardians of life's good and joyful moments, and of its happy web, even beneath the canopy of misfortune.

So that's what it's like? All of a sudden all possibility just vanishes? A life full of projects, discussions just started, desires not even fulfilled - it all vanishes in a second and there's nothing left, nothing left to do, and there's no going back?

Do you know that it is in your company that I have had my finest thoughts?

Who has ever heard of a maid and a concierge making use of their afternoon break to ponder the cultural significance of interior decoration? You would be surprised by what ordinary little people come out with.

Clara looked at Maria and tried to understand what she must do so that Maria would be able to see her. But the little French girl cast all around her the bronze of infinite solitude.

I belong to the 8% of the world population who calm their apprehension by drowning it in numbers.

Art is emotion without desire.

Then there was Jeannot, who was reminded of another war and who was discovering inside himself the roots of a mad hopefulness that made him want to believe that the present hour might appease the torture of memories, and he could again see the paths of his life opening up before him, paths that came to an abrupt end the day he saw his brother die. Every morning he got up to face this wound that no one could see, and he drank his wine and laughed at stories, and his soul was more bare than a rosebush in winter.

have our civilizations become so destitute that we can only live in our fear of want? Can we only enjoy our possessions or our senses when we are certain that we shall always be able to enjoy them?

Is it possible that we are all sharing the same frenetic agitation, even though we have not sprung from the same earth or the same blood and do not share the same ambition?

What is this war we are waging, when defeat is so certain? Day after day, already wearied by the constant onslaught, we face out terror of the everyday, the endless passageway that, in the end - because we have spent so much time walking to and fro between its walls -will become a destiny. Yes, my angel, that is our everyday existence: dreary, empty and mired in troubles. The pathways of hell are hardly foreign; we shall end up there one day if we tarry too long.

A flavor...what do you think, old madman, what do you think? That if you find a lost flavor you will eradicate decades of misunderstanding and find yourself confronted with a truth that might redeem the aridity of your heart of stone? And yet he had in his possession all the arms that make for the best duelist: a fine way with his pen, nerve, panache. His prose...his prose was nectar, ambrosia, a hymn to language: it was gut-wrenching, and it hardly mattered whether he was talking about food or something else, it would be a mistake to think that the topic mattered: it was the way he phrased it that was so brilliant.

The problem is that children believe what adults say and once they're adults themselves they exact their revenge by deceiving their own children. "Life has meaning and we grown-ups know what it is" is the universal lie that everyone is supposed to believe. Once you become an adult and you realize that's not true it's too late. The mystery remains intact but all your available energy has long ago been wasted on stupid things. All that's left is to anesthetize yourself by trying to hide the fact that you can't find any meaning in your life and then the better to convince yourself you deceive your own children. ... People aim for the stars and they end up like goldfish in a bowl. I wonder if it wouldn't be simpler just to teach children right from the start that life is absurd. That might deprive you of a few good moments in your childhood but it would save you a considerable amount of time as an adultnot to mention the fact that you'd be spared at least one traumatic experience i.e. the goldfish bowl.

Beauty consists of its own passing, just as we reach for it. It's the ephemeral configuration of things in the moment, when you see both their beauty and their death.
... Does this mean that this is how we must live our lives? Constantly poised between beauty and death, between movement and its disappearance?
Maybe that's what being alive is all about: so we can track down those moments that are dying.

I don't think it has ever occurred to her that a text is written above all to be read and to arouse emotions in the reader.

Important decisions are made by those who are invisible, by the humble people.

To write entire pages of dazzling prose about a tomato
for Pierre Arthens reviews food as if he were telling a story, and that alone is enough to make him a genius
without ever seeing or holding the tomato is a troubling display of virtuosity.

since destiny always rings three times...

A man who farts in bed . . . is a man who loves life.

This is the end of an epic tale, the story of my coming of age, which, like in the novels of the same description, went from wonder to ambition, from ambition to disillusion, and from disillusion to cynicism.

It's all well and good to have profound thoughts on a regular basis, but I think it's not enough. Well, I mean: I'm going to commit suicide and set the house on fire in a few months; obviously I can't assume I have time at my disposal, therefore I have to do something substantial with the little I do have.

Say what you want, do what you will with all those fine speeches on evolution, civilisation and a ton of other '-tion' words, mankind has not progressed very far from its origins: people still believe they're not here by chance, and that there are gods, kindly for the most part, who are watching over their fate.

[N]obody is a greater schoolgirl in spirit than a cynic. Cynics can not relinquish the rubbish they were taught as children: they hold tight to the belief that the word [sic] has meaning and, when things go wrong for them, they consequently adopt the inverse attitude.

We musn't forget that our bodies decline, friends die, everyone forgets about us, and the end is solitude,

We never look beyond our assumptions and what's worse, we have given up trying to meet others; we just meet ourselves.

Words: repositories for singular realities which they then transform into memories in an anthology, magicians that change the face of reality by adorning it with the right to become memorable, to be placed in a library of memories.

When we disappear, it is the others who die for us

We live each day as if it were merely a rehearsal for the next, and the cosy existence at 7, rue de Grenelle, with its daily proof of continuity, suddenly seems like an island battered by storms.

It is always reassuring to be disabused of one's own paranoia.

They have the same relationship that all progressive middle-class women have with their cleaning ladies, although Maman really thinks she is the exception: a good old rose-colored paternalistic relationship (we offer her coffee, give her decent pay, never scold, pass on old clothes and broken furniture, and show an interest in her children, and in return she brings us roses and brown and beige crocheted bedspreads).

Personally I think there is only one thing to do: find the task we have been placed on this earth to do, and accomplish it as best we can, with all our strength, without making things complicated or thinking there's anything divine about our animal nature. This is the only way we will ever feel that we have been doing something constructive when death comes to get us.

Just by observing the adults around me I understood very early on that life goes by in no time at all, yet they're always in such a hurry, so stressed out by deadlines, so eager for now that they needn't think about tomorrow ... But if you dread tomorrow, it's because you don't know how to build the present, and when you don't know how to build the present, you tell yourself you can deal with it tomorrow, and it's a lost cause anyway because tomorrow always ends up becoming today, don't you see?

Hen I say that "he's a truly nasty man," I mean he has so thoroughly renounced everything good that he might have inside him that he's already like a corpse even though he's still alive. Because truly nasty people hate everyone, to be sure, but most of all themselves. Can't you tell when a person hates himself? He becomes a living cadaver, it numbs all his negative emotions but also all the good ones so he won't feel nauseated by who he is.

We have to live with the certainty that we'll get old and that it won't look nice or be good or feel happy. And tell ourselves that it's nowt hat matters: to build something, now, at any price, using all our strength.

Behold the man I also know how to be.

In our world, that's the way you live your grown-up life: you must constantly rebuild your identity as an adult, the way it's been put together it is wobbly, ephemeral, and fragile, it cloaks despair and, when you're alone in front of the mirror, it tells you the lies you need to believe.

Don't let the cat out or the concierge in: this is the first principle of socialist ladies.

In a world full of fossils, the slightest movement of a pebble on the slope of the cliff is nearly enough to bring on a whole series of heart attacks-so you can imagine what happens when someone dynamites the whole mountain!

Desire! It carries us and crucifies us, delivers us every new day to a battlefield where, on the eve, the battle was lost; but in sunlight does it not look like a territory ripe for conquest, a place where - even though tomorrow we will die - we can build empires doomed to fade to dust, as if the knowledge we have of their imminent fall had absolutely no effect on our eagerness to build them now? We are filled with the energy of constantly wanting that which we cannot have, we are abandoned at dawn on a field littered with corpses, we are transported until our death by projects that are no sooner completed than they must be renewed. Yet how exhausting it is to be constantly desiring ...

But the world, in its present state, is no place for princesses

but it is the waiting that is unbearable, this suspension of time when something has not yet happened and where we feel how very useless it is to struggle

I don't give a damn about where I happen to be, provided nothing stops me from going into my mind.

I suddenly felt my spirit expand, for I was capable of grasping the utter beauty of the trees.

A terroir only exists by virtue of one's childhood mythology ... we have invented these words of tradition rooted deep in the land and identity of a region ... because we want to solidify and objectify the magical, bygone years that preceded the horror of becoming an adult.

So: have our civilizations become so destitute that we can only live in our fear of want? Can we only enjoy our possessions or our senses when we are certain that we shall always be able to enjoy them? Perhaps the Japanese have learned that you can only savor a pleasure when you know it is ephemeral and unique; armed with this knowledge, they are yet able to weave their lives.

What makes the strength of a soldier isn't the energy he uses trying to intimidate the other guy by sending him a whole lot of signals, it's the strength he's able to concentrate within himself, by staying centered.

Now read again: The cat, is sleeping. Let me repeat it, so that there is no cause for ambiguity: The cat comma is sleeping. The cat, is sleeping. Would you be so kind as, to sign for. On the one hand we have an example of a prodigious use of the comma that takes great liberties with language, as said commas have been inserted quite unnecessarily, but to great effect:

I thought: pity the poor in spirit who know neither the enchantment nor the beauty of language.

My mother, who has read all of Balzac and quotes Flaubert at every dinner, is living proof every day of how education is a raging fraud. All you need to do is watch her with the cats. She's vaguely aware of their decorative potential, and yet she insists on talking to them as if they were people, which she would never do with a lamp or an Etruscan statue. It would seem that children believe for a fairly long time that anything that moves has a soul and is endowed with intention. My mother is no longer a child but she apparently has not managed to conceive that Constitution and Parliament possess no more understanding than the vacuum cleaner.

How distressing to stumble on a dominant social habitus, just when one was convinced of one's own uniqueness in the matter!

Live or die: mere consequences of what you have built. What matters is building well. So here we are I've assigned myself a new obligation. I'm going to stop undoing deconstructing I'm going to start building ... What matters is what you are doing when you die ... I want to be building.

Some people are incapable of perceiving in the object of their contemplation the very thing that gives it its intrinsic life and breath,

I'd seen the older children in class look into books for invisible traces, as if they were driven by the same force and, sinking deeper into silence, they were able to draw from the dead paper something that seemed alive.

Apparently, now and again adults take the time to sit down and contemplate what a disaster their life is. They complain without understanding and, like flies constantly banging against the same old windowpane, they buzz around, suffer, waste away, get depressed then wonder how they got caught up in this spiral that is taking them where they don't want to go.
The most intelligent among them turn their malaise into a religion: oh, the despicable vacuousness of bourgeois existence! Cynics of this kind frequently dine at Papa's table: "What has become of the dreams of our youth?" they ask, with a smug, disillusioned air. "Those years are long gone, and life's a bitch."
I despise this false lucidity that comes with age. The truth is that they are just like everyone else: nothing more than kids without a clue about what has happened to them, acting big and tough when in fact all they want is to burst into tears.

How to measure a life's worth? The important thing, said Paloma one day, is not the fact of dying, it is what you are doing in the moment of your death.

Object lesson: in the world, everything is compensation. When you can't go fast, you push harder

The vulgarity of an environment as bleakly desolate as the neon lights of the factory where the men go each morning, like sinners returning to hell ...

How can one betray oneself to such a degree? What corruption greater even than power can lead us to thus deny the proof of pleasure, to hold in contempt that which we have loved? ... I could have written about chouquettes my whole life long; and my whole life long, I wrote against them.

How ironic! After decades of grub, deluges of wine and alcohol of every sort, after a life spent in butter, cream, rich sauces, and oil in constant, knowingly orchestrated and meticulously cajoled excess, my trustiest right-hand men, Sir Liver and his associate Stomach, are doing marvelously well and it is my heart that is giving out. I am dying of cardiac insufficiency. What a bitter pill to swallow.

What is an aristocrat? A woman who is never sullied by vulgarity, although she may be surrounded by it.

People aim for the stars, and they end up like goldfish in a bowl. I wonder if it wouldn't be simpler just to teach children right from the start that life is absurd.

So if there is something on the planet that is worth living for, I'd better not miss it, because once you're dead, it's too late for regrets, and if you die by mistake, that is really, really dumb.

In any event, it's done, said Papa-which are the words of a coward to the power of ten.

To the rich, therefore, falls the burden of Beauty. And if they cannot assume it, then they deserve to die.

When something is bothering me, I seek refuge. No need to travel far; a trip to the realm of literary memory will suffice. For where can one find more noble distraction, more entertaining company, more delightful enchantment than in literature?

Until that time I had ascribed the reasons for my cultural eclecticism to my condition as a proletarian autodidact. As I have already explained, I have spent every moment of my existence that could be spared from work in reading, watching films, and listening to music.
Muriel Barbery, translated by Alison Anderson, The Elegance of the Hedgehog, 2008

When a Japanese woman disrupts the powerful sequence of natural movement with her jerky little steps, we ought to experience the disquiet that troubles our soul whenever nature is violated in this way, but in fact we are filled with a unfamiliar blissfulness, as if disruption could lead to a sort of ecstasy, and a grain of sand to beauty. What we discover in this affront to the sacred rhythm of life, this defiant movement of little feet, this excellence born of constraint, is a paradigm of Art.

True novelty is that which does not grow old, despite the passage of time.

But the fact that the middle classes are working themselves to the bone, using their sweat and taxes to finance such pointless and pretentious research leaves me speechless. Every gray morning, day after gloomy day, secretaries, craftsmen, employees, petty civil servants, taxi drivers and concierges shoulder their burdens so that the flower of French youth, duly housed and subsidized, can squander the fruit of all that dreariness upon the altar of ridiculous endeavors.

What is writing, no matter how lavish the pieces, if it says nothing of the truth, cares little for the heart, and is merely subservient to the pleasure of showing one's brilliance.