Le Clezio Quotes

It is, I believe, the primary charm of poetry to give the lesson of mirage, that is, to show the fragile and vibrant movement of creation, in which the word is in a certain way human quintessence, prayer. ~ Jean-Marie G. Le Clezio

[W]hat is one to say of the writer who lies when he writes that he is lying? ~ Jean-Marie G. Le Clezio

I can understand better than most the contradiction between the idealistic civilisation and religious morals of Europe and what they did with the slaves, because the root of the evil is only two generations away from me. Maybe this has fed my need to fight against the abuses of modern civilisation. ~ J M G Le Clezio

When I was a child, I grew up speaking French, I mean, in a French public school. So my first contact with literature was in French, and that's the reason why I write in French. ~ J M G Le Clezio

She carried the burn of the sun on her body. It was for all of those wasted, dull years. ~ Jean-Marie G. Le Clezio

To act: that is what the writer would like to be able to do, above all. To act, rather than to bear witness. To write, imagine, and dream in such a way that his words and inventions and dreams will have an impact upon reality, will change people's minds and hearts, will prepare the way for a better world. ~ J M G Le Clezio

If you really want to know, I'd rather not have been born at all. I find life very tiring. The thing's done now, of course, and I can't alter it. But there will always be this regret at the back of my mind, I shall never quite be able to get rid of it, and it will spoil everything. The thing to do now is to grow old quickly, to eat up the years as fast as possible, looking neither right nor left. ~ Jean-Marie G. Le Clezio

human beings, cans of living preserves ~ Jean-Marie G. Le Clezio

[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 Clezio

Abruptly, with the shock of the Conquest, the sober and puritanical man of the Christian Inquisition encountered, through their violent and upsetting nature, peoples who through their rituals were identified with the gods. ~ Jean-Marie G. Le Clezio

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 Clezio

One day is enough to master reading in Korean. Hangeul is a very scientific and convenient alphabet system for communication. ~ J M G Le Clezio

We know of no other event like it in the history of the world, except perhaps the first confrontation in Europe between the neolithic peoples who came from the East and the primitive hunters. But no witness ever wrote of that great drama. ~ Jean-Marie G. Le Clezio

Reading is a free practice. I think the readers are free to begin by the books where they want to. They don't have to be led in their reading. ~ J M G Le Clezio

The non-stop music wrapped a warm cocoon around her body. People's thoughts, rapid words flowed around her, without doing her any harm. She was part and parcel of the shop, a commodity like any other, an article in the first-floor department. ~ Jean-Marie G. Le Clezio

I don't have any office; I can write everywhere. So, I put a piece of paper on the table, and then I travel. Literally, writing for me is like travelling. It's getting out of myself and living another life - maybe a better life. ~ J M G Le Clezio

Looking at the sky, he suddenly saw that it had become black. Then white again, but with great rippling circles. The circles were vultures wheeling around the sun. The vultures disappeared, to be replaced by checkers squares ready to be played on. On the board, the pieces moved around incredibly rapidly, winning dozens of games every minute. They were scarcely lined up before they started rushing at each other again, banging into each other, forming fighting combinations, wiping the other side out in the wink of an eye. Then the squares scattered, giving way to the grille of a crossword puzzle, and here, too, words flashed, drove each other away, clustered, were erased. They were all very long words, like Catalepsy, Thunderbird, Superrequeteriquísímo and Anticonstitutionally. The grille faded away, and suddenly the whole sky was covered with linked words, long sentences full of semicolons and inverted commas. For the space of a few seconds, there was this gigantic sheet of paper on which were written sentences that moved forward jerkily, changing their meaning, modifying their construction, altering completely as they advanced. It was beautiful, so beautiful that nothing like that had ever been read anywhere, and yet it was impossible to decipher the writing. It was all about death, or pity, or the incredible secrets that are hidden somewhere, at one of the farthest points of time. It was about water, too, about vast lakes floating just above the mountains, lakes shimmering u ~ J M G Le Clezio

Maybe it was Roumiya's beauty that drove me away, her silent beauty, her eyes that seemed to be looking through everythig and draining it of all meaning. ~ Jean-Marie G. Le Clezio

Out there, in the open desert, men can walk for days without passing a single house, seeing a well, for the desert is so vast that no one can know it all. Men go out into the desert, and they are like ships at sea; no one knows when they will return. Sometimes there are storms, but nothing like here, terrible storms, and the wind tears up the sand and throws it high into the sky, and the men are lost. They die, drowned in the sand, they die lost like ships in a storm, and the sand retains their bodies. Everything is so different in that land; the sun isn't the same as it is here, it burns hotter, and there are men that come back blinded, their faces burned. Nights, the cold makes men who are lost scream out in pain, the cold breaks their bones. Even the men aren't the same as they are here...they are cruel, they stalk their pray like foxes, drawing silently near. They are black, like the Hartani, dressed in blue, faces veiled. They aren't men, but djinns, children of the devil, and they deal with the devil; they are like sorcerers... ~ J M G Le Clezio

Words are taking their revenge. One day, they break the seals of the phylacteries, and come swarming out like snakes. Another day, they spurt from the labels of the bottles that had held them prisoner, and spread through the black sky with their pterodactyl-like jaws thrust forward like a saw-blade knife. They sweep straight ahead, and as they kill their masters their cries of vengeance can be heard. ~ J M G Le Clezio

Nights are long when it's cold and you're waiting for a train. ~ Jean-Marie G. Le Clezio

I grew up in a Mauritian bubble in France ... I had the feeling of not belonging, but still living with French culture. ~ J M G Le Clezio

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 Clezio

Now I know that without mirrors we are different, we're not really the same ... Maybe they had noticed us looking worriedly at other people's faces, as if we wee trying to see in them what we had become ~ Jean-Marie G. Le Clezio

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 Clezio

Language is the most extraordinary invention in the history of humanity, the one which came before everything and which makes it possible to share everything. ~ J M G Le Clezio

To understand the hidden secret of the modern industrial world in which I find myself, I have to return to another world. That world is at once wartime Nice and the plantation - the sugar isles on which Europe's prosperity was built. ~ J M G Le Clezio

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 Clezio

The writer, the poet, the novelist, are all creators. This does not mean that they invent language; it means that they use language to create beauty, ideas, images. This is why we cannot do without them. ~ J M G Le Clezio

Each time a drop of water forms under the spout of a tap, it means that one can wrench something away from the nameless mass. ~ Jean-Marie G. Le Clezio

A writer is not a prophet, is not a philosopher; he's just someone who is witness to what is around him. And so writing is a way to ... it's the best way to testify, to be a witness. ~ J M G Le Clezio

It is not the men who are in command of the bulldozers. It is the bulldozer who invented men, and then, since they failed to interest it, obliterated them with its muscular arm. ~ Jean-Marie G. Le Clezio

My message will be very clear; it is that I think we have to continue to read novels. Because I think that the novel is a very good means to question the current world without having an answer that is too schematic, too automatic. The novelist, he's not a philosopher, not a technician of spoken language. He's someone who writes, above all, and through the novel asks questions. ~ Jean-Marie G. Le Clezio

The fact is, that for the Huichol, and for all those who refuse, who are in flight, words and things are precisely what language does not speak about. Language is a natural act which implies belonging. He who exists, speaks. He who does not speak, does not exist. He has no place in the world. The Huichol language is Huichol to the same degree as the Huichol earth, the Huichol sky, religion, tattooing, dress, the peyoteros' hat. It is not enough to pronounce the syllables of the Huichol language to be Huichol. That is obvious. ~ Jean-Marie G. Le Clezio

If I examine the circumstances which inspired me to write - and this is not mere self-indulgence, but a desire for accuracy - I see clearly that the starting point of it all for me was war. ~ J M G Le Clezio

I have the feeling of being a very small item on this planet, and literature enables me to express that. ~ J M G Le Clezio

Cold, still, lookin a little uncomfortable in death as if they weren't quite used to it yet. ~ Jean-Marie G. Le Clezio

The earth is neither fabulous nor paradisal. And therefore it is not hell. ~ Jean-Marie G. Le Clezio

Real lives have no end. Real books have no end. ~ Jean-Marie G. Le Clezio

The desert is so vast that no one can know it all. Men go out into the desert, and they are like ships at sea; no one knows when they will return. ~ J M G Le Clezio

I wanted to tell you this, too: consciousness is a bad thing. Consciousness is a dead thing. Free yourselves from consciousness! It is high time. All that is needed is to strip off this garment: nothing very difficult about that. Tear the skin from your body, for it is not a true skin, it is a cellophane tissue that blocks the pores, that asphyxiates. Peel the tissue off, peel it off. ~ J M G Le Clezio

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 Clezio

forming the "hydrogen bond"... is dynamic, with the exchange occurring in a few billionths of a billionth of a second. Since water molecules can "lose" two hydrogen atoms and "win" two by way of their oxygen atom, they are on average regrouped in fours, and the network of water, whether in our glass or in our cells is tetrahedral. All the same, this arrangement is not perfect in liquid water (otherwise the water would be a solid crystal), and locally there are many defects in the network. Although the motif of four water molecules is the most common in "linear" hydrogen bonds, the water molecule sometimes has a "forked tongue" with bifurcated liaisons, which creates arrangements of three or five, or even two or six molecules. This variability prevents water from being structured over a great distance and enables it to remain in a liquid state at the ambient temperature. ~ Denis Le Bihan

If you can't lick'em, join'em. If it hurts, repeat it. But to praise despair is to condemn delight , to embrace violence is to lose hold of everything else. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

Women are so enigmatical – some in everything – all in matters of the heart. Don't they sometimes actually admire what is repulsive?... ~ J. Sheridan Le Fanu

Finally, Europe's post-war history is a story shadowed by silences; by absence. The continent of Europe was once an intricate, interwoven tapestry of overlapping languages, religions, communities and nations. Many of its cities - particularly the smaller ones at the intersection of old and new imperial boundaries, such as Trieste, Sarajevo, Salonika, Cernovitz, Odessa or Vilna - were truly multicultural societies avant le mot, where Catholics, Orthodox, Muslims, Jews and others lived in familiar juxtaposition. We should not idealise this old Europe. What the Polish writer Tadeusz Borowski called 'the incredible, almost comical melting-pot of peoples and nationalities sizzling dangerously in the very heart of Europe' was periodically rent with riots, massacres and pogroms - but it was real, and it survived into living memory.
Between 1914 and 1945, however, that Europe was smashed into the dust. The tidier Europe that emerged, blinking, into the second half of the twentieth century had fewer loose ends. Thanks to war, occupation, boundary adjustments, expulsions and genocide, almost everybody now lived in their own country, among their own people. For forty years after World War Two Europeans in both halves of Europe lived in hermetic national enclaves where surviving religious or ethnic minorities the Jews in France, for example - represented a tiny percentage of the population at large and were thoroughly integrated into its cultural and political mainstream. Only Yugos ~ Tony Judt

We of Es Toch tell a little myth, which says that in the beginning the Creator told a great lie. For there was nothing at all, but the Creator spoke, saying, It exists. And behold, in order that the lie of God might be God's truth, the universe at once began to exist. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

Words are the wings both intellect and imagination fly on. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

In the big, crowded, noisy room where golden suns swam on the walls and the years and Years were told on golden dials, he searched for the alien, the stranger, his wife. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

Music that paints nothing is only noise. ~ Jean Le Rond D'Alembert

I actually love shopping in vintage shops. What I do with the high street, I buy it, then keep it for a while and then wear it when everyone's not wearing it. So I do that: stock up, then keep it hidden! ~ Amber Le Bon

A civilization, when the moment has come for crowds to acquire a high hand over it, is at the mercy of too many chances to endure for long. Could anything postpone for a while the hour of its ruin, it would be precisely the extreme instability of the opinions of crowds and their growing indifference and lack of respect for all general beliefs. ~ Gustave Le Bon

The pornography of violence of course far exceeds, in volume and general acceptance, sexual pornography, in this Puritan land of ours. Exploiting the apocalypse, selling the holocaust, is a pornography. For the ultimate selling job on ultimate violence one must read those works of fiction issued by our government as manuals of civil defense, in which you learn that there's nothing to be afraid of if you've stockpiled lots of dried fruit. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

Waking and sleeping she had demanded to know where she belonged in a white man's world, and how and where she should invest her ambition and her humanity ~ John Le Carre

Marine Le Pen may want me dead, that's possible, but she must not count on my co-operation ~ Jean-Marie Le Pen

Modesty in women has two special advantages,
it enhances beauty and veils uncomeliness. ~ Bernard Le Bovier De Fontenelle

The cooking was invigorating, joyous. For Julia, the cooking fulfilled the promises that Le Cordon Bleu had made but never kept. Where Le Cordon Bleu always remained rooted in the dogma of French cuisine, Julia strove to infuse its rigors with new possibilities and pleasures. It must have felt liberating for her to deconstruct Carême and Escoffier, respecting the traditions and technique while correcting the oversight. "To her," as a noted food writer indicated, "French culinary tradition was a frontier, not a religion." If a legendary recipe could be improved upon, then let the gods beware. ~ Bob Spitz

I wonder if men find it easier than women do to consider people not as bodies, as lives, but as numbers, figures, toys of the mind to be pushed about a battleground of the mind. This disembodiment gives pleasure, exciting them and freeing them to act for the sake of acting, for the sake of manipulating the figures, the game pieces. Love of country, or honor, or freedom, then, may be names they give that pleasure to justify it to the gods and to the people who suffer and kill and die in the game. So those words - love, honor, freedom - are degraded from their true sense. Then people may come to hold them in contempt as meaningless, and poets must struggle to give them back their truth. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

reading is actual collaboration with the writer's mind ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

In terms of facial creams or lotions, I try to switch it up and stay as natural as possible. l like Le Mer facial cream for when I have an event. It's very rich and sometimes too rich for some people, but I like it. ~ Sanaa Lathan

By and large books are mankind's best invention. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

I am ... persuaded that Woolf was right, that every novel has a characteristic rhythm. And that if the writer hasn't listened for that rhythm and followed it, the sentences will be lame, the characters will be puppets, the story will be false. And if the writer can hold to that rhythm, the book will have some beauty. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

As a child in Atuan, Tenar had learned how to learn. There seemed always to be a great deal to be learned, more than she would have believed when she was a prentice-priestess or the pupil of a mage. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

But she knew, though very vaguely, that she was crying, because hope hurts terribly when it breaks through the resignation in which you have lived for days. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

I have stepped outside my comfort zone enough to know that, yes, the world does fall apart, but not in the way that you fear. ~ Tan Le

I love Maje, Rick Owens, Helmut Lang, Christopher Kane, Felder + Felder, and Sam Edelman shoes. ~ Amber Le Bon

It is our suffering that brings us together. It is not love. Love does not obey the mind, and turns to hate when forced. The bond that binds us is beyond choice. We are brothers. We are brothers in what we share. In pain, which each of us must suffer alone, in hunger, in poverty, in hope, we know our brotherhood. We know it, because we have had to learn it. We know that there is no help for us but from one another, that no hand will save us if we do not reach out our hand. And the hand that you reach out is empty, as mine is. You have nothing. You possess nothing. You own nothing. You are free. All you have is what you are, and what you give. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

Le me try to be enough for you. ~ Krista Ritchie

For a woman, le smoking is an indispensable garment with which she finds herself continually in fashion, because it is about style, not fashion. Fashions come and go, but style is forever. ~ Yves Saint-Laurent

The much greater crimes of the Soviet Gulags occurred over decades and cost millions of lives. ~ Jean-Marie Le Pen

A book won't move your eyes for you like TV or a movie does. A book won't move your mind unless you give it your mind, or your heart unless you put your heart in it. It won't do the work for you. To read a good novel well is to follow it, to act it, to feel it, to become it - everything short of writing it, in fact. Reading is a collaboration, an act of participation. No wonder not everybody is up to it. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

I don't know. Do men kill men, except in madness? Does any beast kill its own kind? Only the insects. These yumens kill us as lightly as we kill snakes. The one who taught me said that they kill one another, in quarrels, and also in groups, like ants fighting. I haven't seen that. But I know they don't spare one who asks life. They will strike a bowed neck, I have seen it! There is a wish to kill in them, and therefore I saw fit to put them to death. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

Writers have to get used to launching something beautiful and watching it crash and burn. They also have to learn when to let go control, when the work takes off on its own and flies, farther than they ever planned or imagined, to places they didn't know they knew. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

What books didn't influence me? If only someone would ask that! I've been waiting for years to answer it. Atlas Shrugged, by Ayn Rand, I will say, had absolutely no influence on me except to cause hours of incredulous boredom. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

..all I understand about living is having your work to do, and being able to do it. That's the pleasure, and the glory, and all. And if you can't do the work, or it's taken from you, then what's any good? You have to have something... ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

My heart told me incontrovertibly that neither gender could go far without the other. So, in my story, neither the woman nor the man can get free without the other. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

The purpose of a thought-experiment, as the term was used by Schrödinger and other physicists, is not to predict the future - indeed Schrödinger's most famous thought-experiment goes to show that the 'future,' on the quantum level, cannot be predicted - but to describe reality, the present world.

Science fiction is not predictive; it is descriptive. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin