Michel Houellebecq Quotes

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It's hard to understand other people, to know what's hidden in their hearts, and without the assistance of alcohol it might never be done at all. ~ Michel Houellebecq
Michel Houellebecq quotes by Michel Houellebecq
To refuse to do something because you've already done it, because you've already been there, rapidly leads to the destruction, for yourself as much as for others, of any reason for living, for any possible future, and it plunges you into an oppressive ennui that will eventually transform into atrocious bitterness, accompanied by hatred and rancor toward those who still belong to the land of the living. ~ Michel Houellebecq
Michel Houellebecq quotes by Michel Houellebecq
On a Parisienne's Bookshelf
THERE ARE MANY BOOKS ON A PARISIENNE'S BOOKSHELF:

The books you so often claim you've read that you actually believe you have.
The books you read in school from which you remember only the main character's name.
The art books your parents give you each Christmas so you can get some "culture".
The art books that you bought yourself and which you really love.
The books that you've been promising yourself you'll read next summer … for the past ten years.
The books you bought only because you liked the title.
The books that you think makes you cool.
The books you read over and over again, and that evolve along with your life.
The books that remind you of someone you loved.
The books you keep for your children, just in case you ever have any.
The books whose first ten pages you've read so many times you know them by heart.
The books you own simply because you must and, taken together, form intangible proof that you are well read.
AND THEN THERE ARE THE BOOKS YOU HAVE READ, LOVED, AND WHICH ARE A PART OF YOUR IDENTITY:

The Stranger, Albert Camus
The Elementary Particles, Michel Houellebecq
Belle du Seigneur, Albert Cohen
Bonjour Tristesse, Françoise Sagan
Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert
L'Écume des jours, Boris Vian
Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov
Les Fleurs du Mal, Charles Baudelaire
Journey to the End of the Night, Louis-Ferdinand C ~ Caroline De Maigret
Michel Houellebecq quotes by Caroline De Maigret
Later Michel went up to the priest as he was packing away the tools of the trade. "I was very interested in what you were saying earlier ... " The man of God smiled urbanely, then Michel began to talk about the Aspect experiments and the EPR paradox: how two particle, once united, are forever and inseparable whole, "which seems pretty much in keeping with what you were saying about one flesh." The priest's smile froze slightly. "What I'm trying to say, "Michel went on enthusiastically, "is that from an ontological point of view, the pair can be assigned a single vector in Hilbert space. Do you see what I mean? ~ Michel Houellebecq
Michel Houellebecq quotes by Michel Houellebecq
What was he doing? Reading a little, maybe. We can't even be sure of this. In fact, his biographers have to admit they don't know much at all, and that, judging from appearances - at least between the ages of eighteen and twenty-three - he did absolutely nothing. ~ Michel Houellebecq
Michel Houellebecq quotes by Michel Houellebecq
That old queer Nietzsche had it right: Christianity was, at the end of the day, a feminine religion. ~ Michel Houellebecq
Michel Houellebecq quotes by Michel Houellebecq
be fair, when I was young, the elections could not have been less interesting; the mediocrity of the 'political offerings' was almost surprising. A centre-left candidate would be elected, serve either one or two terms, depending how charismatic he was, then for obscure reasons he would fail to complete a third. When people got tired of that candidate, and the centre-left in general, we'd witness the phenomenon of democratic change, and the voters would install a candidate of the centre-right, also for one or two terms, depending on his personal appeal. Western nations took a strange pride in this system, though it amounted to little more than a power-sharing deal between two rival gangs, and they would even go to war to impose it on nations that failed to share their enthusiasm. ~ Michel Houellebecq
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Jean-Yves looked up at his mother's face, her greying chignon, her harsh features: it was difficult to feel a rush of tenderness, of affection for this woman; as far back as he could remember, she had never really been one for hugs; it was equally difficult to imagine her in the role of a sensual lover, a slut. He suddenly realised that his father must have been bored shitless his whole life. He felt terribly shocked by this, his hands tensed on the edge of the table: this time it was irreparable, it was definitive. In despair, he tried to recall a moment when he had seen his father beaming, happy, genuinely glad to be alive. ~ Michel Houellebecq
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Thirty years later he could not come to any other conclusion: women were indisputably better than men. They were gentler, more affectionate, more loving and more compassionate, they were rarely violent, selfish, cruel or self-centred. Moreover, they were more rational, more intelligent and more hardworking.
What on earth were men for? Michael wondered as he watched sunlight play across the closed curtains. In earlier times, when bears were more common, perhaps masculinity served a particular function, but for centuries now, men served no useful purpose. For the most part, they assuaged their boredom playing squash, which was a lesser evil; but from time to time they felt the need to change history - which expressed itself in leading a revolution or starting a war somewhere. Aside from the senseless suffering they caused, revolutions and war destroyed the achievements of the past, forcing societies to build again. Without the notion of continuous progress, human evolution took random, irregular and violent turns for which men (with their predilection for risk and danger, their repulsive egotism, their volatile nature and their violent tendencies) were directly to blame. A society of women would be immeasurably superior, tracing a slow, unwavering progression, with no U-turns and no chaotic insecurity, towards a general happiness. ~ Michel Houellebecq
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Thirty years later, Bruno was convinced that, taken in context, the episode could be summed up in one sentence: Caroline Yessayan's miniskirt was to blame for everything. ~ Michel Houellebecq
Michel Houellebecq quotes by Michel Houellebecq
When he was six, Victor had made a card for his father's birthday. On heavy drawing paper, he had written in big, multicolored letters: i love you dad. Now all that was past, over and done with. Bruno knew that things would only get worse, that they would move from mutual indifference to loathing. In a couple of years his son would try to go out with girls his own age; the same fifteen-year-old girls that Bruno lusted after. They would come to be rivals - which was the natural relationship between men. They would be like animals fighting in a cage; and the cage was time. ~ Michel Houellebecq
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Sexual pleasure was not only superior, in refinement and violence, to all the other pleasures life had to offer; it was not only the one pleasure with which there is no collateral damage to the organism, but which on the contrary contributes to maintaining it at its highest level of vitality and strength; it was in truth the sole pleasure, the sole objective of human existence, ~ Michel Houellebecq
Michel Houellebecq quotes by Michel Houellebecq
Back in Paris they had happy moments together, like stills from a perfume ad (dashing hand in hand down the steps of Montmartre; or suddenly revealed in motionless embrace on the Pont des Arts by the lights of a bateau-mouche as it turned). There were the Sunday afternoon half-arguments, too, the moments of silence when bodies curl up beneath the sheets on the long shores of silence and apathy where life founders. Annabelle's studio was so dark they had to turn on the lights at four in the afternoon. They sometimes were sad, but mostly they were serious. Both of them knew that this would be their last human relationship, and this feeling lacerated every moment they spent together. They had a great respect and a profound sympathy for each other, and there were days when, caught up in some sudden magic, they knew moments of fresh air and glorious, bracing sunshine. For the most part, however, they could feel a gray shadow moving over them, on the earth that supported them, and in everything they could glimpse the end. ~ Michel Houellebecq
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During a press conference he declared (to general bafflement) that he was profoundly influenced by distributism. He had actually said so before, several times, on the campaign trail, but since journalists have a natural tendency to ignore what they don't understand, no one had paid attention and he'd let it drop. Now ~ Michel Houellebecq
Michel Houellebecq quotes by Michel Houellebecq
People are suspicious of single men on vacation, after they get to a certain age: they assume that they're selfish, and probably a bit pervy. I can't say they're wrong. ~ Michel Houellebecq
Michel Houellebecq quotes by Michel Houellebecq
While I was waiting to die, I still had the Journal of Nineteenth-Century Studies. ~ Michel Houellebecq
Michel Houellebecq quotes by Michel Houellebecq
Using a big word like 'plagiarism' ... always causes some damage. It will always do lasting damage, like accusations of racism. ~ Michel Houellebecq
Michel Houellebecq quotes by Michel Houellebecq
I think it's more difficult to live without a religion, definitely. ~ Michel Houellebecq
Michel Houellebecq quotes by Michel Houellebecq
When we think about the present, we veer wildly between the belief in chance and the evidence in favour of determinism. When we think about the past, however, it seems obvious that everything happened in the way that it was intended. ~ Michel Houellebecq
Michel Houellebecq quotes by Michel Houellebecq
People don't really care all that much about their own death. What they really worry about, their one real fixation, is how to avoid physical suffering as much as possible. ~ Michel Houellebecq
Michel Houellebecq quotes by Michel Houellebecq
After my baccalaureate, I signed up for acting lessons; there followed some inglorious years, during which I grew nastier and nastier and, as a consequence, more and more caustic; thanks to this, success finally arrived - on a scale that surprised me. ~ Michel Houellebecq
Michel Houellebecq quotes by Michel Houellebecq
Through all the years of my sad youth Huysmans remained a companion, a faithful friend; never once did I doubt him, ~ Michel Houellebecq
Michel Houellebecq quotes by Michel Houellebecq
The physical bodies of young people, the only desirable possession the world has ever produced, were reserved for the exclusive use of the young, and the fate of the old was to work and to suffer. ~ Michel Houellebecq
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In revolutionary times, those who accord themselves, with an extraordinary arrogance, the facile credit for having inflamed anarchy in their contemporaries fail to recognize that what appears to be a sad triumph is in fact due to a spontaneous disposition, determined by the social situation as a whole. - AUGUSTE COMTE, ~ Michel Houellebecq
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There is no endless silence of infinite space, for in reality there is no space, no silence and no void. ~ Michel Houellebecq
Michel Houellebecq quotes by Michel Houellebecq
The characters aren't the only ones stranded in their country retreat: Huysmans is stranded there, too. It would almost seem that he was trying to go back to Naturalism - the sordid Naturalism of the countryside, where the peasants turn out to be more abject and greedy even than Parisians - if not for the dream sequences, which interrupt and ultimately hobble the story, and make it so impossible to classify. ~ Michel Houellebecq
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In all of human history there may never have been a mind as brilliant as Isaac Newton's - just think what an amazing, unheard-of intellectual effort it took to discover a single law that accounted for the fall of earthly bodies and the movement of the planets! Well, Newton believed in God. ~ Michel Houellebecq
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These immigrants held out the hope of a new golden age for the old continent. ~ Michel Houellebecq
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Nostalgia has nothing to do with aesthetics, it's not even connected to happy memories. We feel nostalgia for a place simply because we've lived there; whether we lived well or badly scarcely matters. ~ Michel Houellebecq
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I hadn't seen any novel make the statement that entering the workforce was like entering the grave. That from then on, nothing happens and you have to pretend to be interested in your work. And, furthermore, that some people have a sex life and others don't just because some are more attractive than others. I wanted to acknowledge that if people don't have a sex life, it's not for some moral reason, it's just because they're ugly. Once you've said it,
it sounds obvious, but I wanted to say it. ~ Michel Houellebecq
Michel Houellebecq quotes by Michel Houellebecq
He doesn't know it yet, but the infinity of childhood is brief. ~ Michel Houellebecq
Michel Houellebecq quotes by Michel Houellebecq
You know, you don't have to have permanent opinions. You can think, every morning, 'I love the world' and go to bed every night thinking, 'I hate the world.' ~ Michel Houellebecq
Michel Houellebecq quotes by Michel Houellebecq
As I finished my rice, I sketched out the plot of a pornographic adventure film called The Massage Room. Sirien, a young girl from northern Thailand, falls hopelessly in love with Bob, an American student who winds up in the massage parlor by accident, dragged there by his buddies after a fatefully boozy evening. Bob doesn't touch her, he's happy just to look at her with his lovely, pale-blue eyes and tell her about his hometown - in North Carolina, or somewhere like that. They see each other several more times, whenever Sirien isn't working, but, sadly, Bob must leave to finish his senior year at Yale. Ellipsis. Sirien waits expectantly while continuing to satisfy the needs of her numerous clients. Though pure at heart, she fervently jerks off and sucks paunchy, mustached Frenchmen (supporting role for Gerard Jugnot), corpulent, bald Germans (supporting role for some German actor). Finally, Bob returns and tries to free her from her hell - but the Chinese mafia doesn't see things in quite the same light. Bob persuades the American ambassador and the president of some humanitarian organization opposed to the exploitation of young girls to intervene (supporting role for Jane Fonda). What with the Chinese mafia (hint at the Triads) and the collusion of Thai generals (political angle, appeal to democratic values), there would be a lot of fight scenes and chase sequences through the streets of Bangkok. At the end of the day, Bob carries her off. But in the penultimate scene, Siri ~ Michel Houellebecq
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The beach at Meschers was crawling with wankers in shorts and bimbos in thongs. It was reassuring. ~ Michel Houellebecq
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If you control the children, you control the future. ~ Michel Houellebecq
Michel Houellebecq quotes by Michel Houellebecq
Two years before, when the riots started, the media had had a field day, but now people discussed them less and less ... in fact the media's attitude had changed over the last few months. No one talked about violence in the banlieues or race riots anymore. That was all passed over in silence. ~ Michel Houellebecq
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they argue that belief in a transcendent being conveys a genetic advantage: that couples who follow one of the three religions of the Book and maintain patriarchal values have more children than atheists or agnostics. You see less education among women, less hedonism and individualism. And to a large degree, this belief in transcendence can be passed on genetically. Conversions, or cases where people grow up to reject family values, are statistically insignificant. In the vast majority of cases, people stick with whatever metaphysical system they grow up in. That's why atheist humanism - the basis of any 'pluralist society' - is doomed. ~ Michel Houellebecq
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In reality, the monotheist texts preach neither peace, love nor tolerance. They are texts of hate. ~ Michel Houellebecq
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The past is always beautiful. So, for that matter, is the future. Only the present hurts, and we carry it around like an abscess of suffering, our compassion between two infinities of happiness and peace. ~ Michel Houellebecq
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Islam is a dangerous religion. ~ Michel Houellebecq
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For myself, I wouldn't have lifted a finger to own a Rolex, a pair of Nikes or a BMW Z3; in fact, I had never succeeded in identifying the slightest difference between designer goods and non-designer goods. In the eyes of the world, I was clearly wrong. I was aware of this: I was in a minority, and consequently in the wrong. There had to be a difference between Yves Saint-Laurent shirts and other shirts, between Gucci moccasins and Andre moccasins. I was alone in not perceiving this difference; it was an infirmity which I could not cite as grounds for condemning the world. Does one ask a blind man to set himself up as an expert on post-impressionist painting? Through my blindness, however involuntary, I set myself apart from a living human reality powerful enough to incite both devotion and crime. These youths, through their half-savage instincts, undoubtedly discerned the presence of beauty; their desire was laudable, and perfectly in keeping with social norms; it was merely a question of rectifying the inappropriate way in which it was expressed. ~ Michel Houellebecq
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Undoubtedly, the best way for a consumer to have a good time in the 2010s was to turn to Korean products: for a car, Kia and Hyundai; for electronics, LG and Samsung. ~ Michel Houellebecq
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The transition to a salaried workforce had doomed the nuclear family and led to the complete atomization of society, ~ Michel Houellebecq
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In societies like ours sex truly represents a second system of differentiation, completely independent of money; and as a system of differentiation it functions mercilessly. The effects of these two systems are, furthermore, strictly equivalent. Just like unrestrained economic liberalism produces phenomena of absolute pauperization. Some men make love every day; others five of six times in their life, or never. Some make love with dozens of women; others with none. It's what's known as 'the law of the market. ~ Michel Houellebecq
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Unlike his sometime rival Tariq Ramadan, who'd been tainted by his old Trotskyite connections, Ben Abbes had kept his distance from the anticapitalist left. He understood that the pro-growth right had won the "war of ideas," that young people today had become entrepreneurs, and that no one saw any alternative to the free market. But his real stroke of genius was to grasp that elections would no longer be about the economy but about values, and that here, too, the right was about to win the "war of ideas" without a fight. ~ Michel Houellebecq
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What in fact could two men talk about, beyond a certain age? What reason could two men find for being together, except, of course, in the case of a conflict of interests, or some common project? After a certain age, it's quite obvious that everything has been said and done. How could a project as intrinsically empty as two men spending some time together lead to anything other than boredom, annoyance, and, at the end of the day, outright hostility? While between a man and a woman there still remained, despite everything, something: a little bit of attraction, a little bit of hope, a little bit of a dream. ~ Michel Houellebecq
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Nevertheless, some free time remains. What's to be done? How do you use your time? In dedicating yourself to helping people? But basically other people don't interest you. Listening to records? That used to be a solution, but as the years go by you have to say that music moves you less and less. Taken in its widest sense, a spot of do-it-yourself can be a way out. But the fact is that nothing can halt the ever-increasing recurrence of those moments when your total isolation, the sensation of an all-consuming emptiness, the foreboding that your existence is nearing a painful and definitive end all combine to plunge you into a state of real suffering. And yet you haven't always wanted to die. You ~ Michel Houellebecq
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Should I just die? The decision struck me as premature. ~ Michel Houellebecq
Michel Houellebecq quotes by Michel Houellebecq
DURING THE FIRST PART of your life, you only become aware of happiness once you have lost it. Then an age comes, a second one, in which you already know, at the moment when you begin to experience true happiness, that you are, at the end of the day, going to lose it. ~ Michel Houellebecq
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Let's put a
chimpanzee in a tiny cage fronted by concrete bars. The animal would go berserk,
throw itself against the walls, rip out its hair, inflict cruel bites on itself, and in 73%
of cases will actually end up killing itself. Let's now make a breach in one of the
walls, which we will place next to a bottomless precipice. Our friendly sample
quadrumane will approach the edge, he'll look down, but remain at the edge for
ages, return there time and again, but generally he won't teeter over the brink; and
in all events his nervous state will be radically assuaged. ~ Michel Houellebecq
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As a teenager, Michel believed that suffering conferred dignity on a person. Now he had to admit that he had been wrong. What conferred dignity on people was television. ~ Michel Houellebecq
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All I knew was that once again I found myself alone, with even less desire to live and nothing to look forward to but aggravations. ~ Michel Houellebecq
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I was about as political as a bath towel. ~ Michel Houellebecq
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Life is painful and disappointing. It is useless, therefore, to write new realistic novels. We generally know where we stand in relation to reality and don't care to know any more. ~ Michel Houellebecq
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There was no way I could think it over without a second Calvados. After thinking it over, I decided that the really prudent thing was to go out and buy another bottle. ~ Michel Houellebecq
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... it isn't the future but past that kills you, that comes back to torment and undermine you, and effectively ends up killing you. ~ Michel Houellebecq
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Life begins at fifty, that's true, inasmuch as it ends at forty. ~ Michel Houellebecq
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Bloy was the ultimate weapon against the twentieth century, its mediocrity, its moronic 'engagement,' its cloying humanitarianism; against Sartre, and Camus, and all their political playacting; and against all those sickening formalists, the nouveau roman, the pointless absurdity of it all. ~ Michel Houellebecq
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Without beauty a girl is unhappy because she has missed her chance to be loved. People do not jeer at her, they are not cruel to her, but it is as if she were invisible, no eyes follow her as she walks. People feel uncomfortable when they are with her. They find it easier to ignore her. A girl who is exceptionally beautiful, on the other hand, who has something which too far surpasses the customary seductive freshness of adolescence, appears somehow unreal. Great beauty seems invariably to portend some tragic fate. ~ Michel Houellebecq
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I was myself drawn along a path that was just as hypothetical, but it had become a matter of indifference to me whether or not I reached my destination: basically, what I wanted to do was to continue to travel with Fox across the prairies and mountains, to experience the awakenings, the baths in a freezing river, the minutes spent drying in the sun, the evenings spent around the fire in the starlight. I had attained innocence, in an absolute and nonconflictual state, I no longer had any plan, nor any objective, and my individuality dissolved into an indefinite series of days; I was happy. ~ Michel Houellebecq
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The metaphysical mutation that gave rise to materialism and modern science in turn spawned two great trends: rationalism and individualism. Huxley's mistake was in having poorly evaluated the balance of power between these two. Specifically, he underestimated the growth of individualism brought about by an increased consciousness of death. Individualism gives rise to freedom, the sense of self, the need to distinguish oneself and to be superior to others. A rational society like the one he describes in Brave New World can defuse the struggle. Economic rivalry - a metaphor for mastery over space - has no more reason to exist in a society of plenty, where the economy is strictly regulated. Sexual rivalry - a metaphor for mastery over time through reproduction - has no more reason to exist in a society where the connection between sex and procreation has been broken. But Huxley forgets about individualism. He doesn't understand that sex, even stripped of its link with reproduction, still exists - not as a pleasure principle, but as a form of narcissistic differentiation. The same is true of the desire for wealth. Why has the Swedish model of social democracy never triumphed over liberalism? Why has it never been applied to sexual satisfaction? Because the metaphysical mutation brought about by modern science leads to individuation, vanity, malice and desire. Any philosopher, not just Buddhist or Christian, but any philosopher worthy of the name, knows that, in itself, desire - u ~ Michel Houellebecq
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My novels are all ideas. ~ Michel Houellebecq
Michel Houellebecq quotes by Michel Houellebecq
The problem is, it's just not enough to live according to the rules. Sure, you manage to live according to the rules. Sometimes it's tight, extremely tight, but on the whole you manage it. Your tax papers are up to date. Your bills paid on time. You never go out without your identity card (and the special little wallet for your Visa!).
Yet you haven't any friends.
The rules are complex, multiform. There's the shopping that needs doing out of working hours, the automatic dispensers where money has to be got (and where you so often have to wait). Above all there are the different payments you must make to the organizations that run different aspects of your life. You can fall ill into the bargain, which involves costs, and more formalities.
Nevertheless, some free time remains. What's to be done? How do you use your
time? In dedicating yourself to helping people? But basically other people don't interest you. Listening to records? That used to be a solution, but as the years go by you have to say that music moves you less and less.
Taken in its widest sense, a spot of do-it-yourself can be a way out. But the fact is that nothing can halt the ever-increasing recurrence of those moments when your total isolation, the sensation of an all-consuming emptiness, the foreboding that your existence is nearing a painful and definitive end all combine to plunge you into a state of real suffering.
And yet you haven't always wanted to die.
You have had a l ~ Michel Houellebecq
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What little private tutoring I'd done, to raise my standard of living, soon convinced me that the transmission of knowledge was generally impossible, the variance of intelligence extreme, and that nothing could undo or even mitigate this basic inequality. ~ Michel Houellebecq
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The world outside had its own rules, and those rules were not human. ~ Michel Houellebecq
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The sun shone on the meadows and woods like a trusted employee. ~ Michel Houellebecq
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To maintain order in your bureaucratic life, you more or less have to stay home; go away for any length of time and you're always likely to run afoul of some agency or other. ~ Michel Houellebecq
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The intellectual summits of my life had been completing my dissertation and publishing my book, and that was already more than ten years ago. Intellectual summits? Summits, full stop. In those days, at least, I'd felt justified. Since then I hadn't produced anything except a few short articles for the Journal of Nineteenth-Century Studies, plus a couple for The Literary Review, when some new book touched on my field of expertise. My articles were clear, incisive and brilliant. They were generally well received, especially since I never missed a deadline. But was that enough to justify a life? ~ Michel Houellebecq
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The terrible predicament of a beautiful girl is that only an experienced womanizer, someone cynical and without scruple, feels up to the challenge. More often than not, she will lose her virginity to some filthy lowlife in what proves to be the first step in an irrevocable decline. ~ Michel Houellebecq
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Depressive lucidity, usually described as a radical withdrawal from ordinary human concerns, generally manifests itself by a profound indifference to things which are genuinely of minor interest. Thus it is possible to imagine a depressed lover, while the idea of a depressed patriot seems frankly inconceivable. ~ Michel Houellebecq
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And I no longer even know where the source is; at present, everything looks the same. The landscape is more and more gentle, amiable, joyous; my skin hurts. I am at the heart of the abyss. I feel my skin again as a frontier, and the external world as a crushing weight. The impression of separation is total; from now on I am imprisoned within myself. It will not take place, the sublime fusion; the goal of life is missed. It is two in the afternoon. ~ Michel Houellebecq
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The love of a dog is a pure thing. He gives you a trust which is total. You must not betray it. ~ Michel Houellebecq
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All in all, I was harking back to the Ancient Greeks. When you get old, you always hark back to the Ancient Greeks. ~ Michel Houellebecq
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Young girls today were more sensible, more sophisticated. Nowadays they worried more about their exam results and did their best to ensure they would have a decent career. For them, going out with boys was simply a game, a distraction based as much as on narcissism as on sexual pleasure. Later, they would try to make a good marriage, basing their decision on a range of social and professional criteria as well as shared interests and tastes. Of course, in doing this, they cut themselves from any possibility of happiness - a condition indissociable from traditional and transient emotions which are incompatible with the practice of reason - but in doing so they hoped to escape the moral and emotional suffering which had so tortured their forebears. ~ Michel Houellebecq
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You're what," I asked, "Catholic? Fascist? Both?" It just popped out. I was out of practice with intellectuals of the right - I couldn't remember how to behave. All at once, in the distance, we heard a kind of sustained crackling. "What was that, do you think?" asked Alice. "It sounded like shooting," she added, hesitantly. We fell silent, ~ Michel Houellebecq
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In my own writing, I think of myself as a realist who exaggerates a little. ~ Michel Houellebecq
Michel Houellebecq quotes by Michel Houellebecq
What the boy felt was something pure, something gentle, something that predates sex or sensual fulfillment. It was the simple desire to reach out and touch a loving body, to be held in loving arms. Tenderness is a deeper instinct than seduction, which is why it is so difficult to give up hope. ~ Michel Houellebecq
Michel Houellebecq quotes by Michel Houellebecq
The feeling of closeness when we talked on the phone was too violent, and the void that came afterward too cruel. ~ Michel Houellebecq
Michel Houellebecq quotes by Michel Houellebecq
The great advantage of a novel is you can put in whatever comes into your head - it has the same shape as the human brain. ~ Michel Houellebecq
Michel Houellebecq quotes by Michel Houellebecq
Hidden all day in impenetrable black burkas, rich Saudi women transformed themselves by night into birds of paradise with their corsets, their see-through bras, their G-strings with multicolored lace and rhinestones. They were exactly the opposite of Western women, who spent their days dressed up and looking sexy to maintain their social status, then collapsed in exhaustion once they got home, abandoning all hope of seduction in favor of clothes that were loose and shapeless. ~ Michel Houellebecq
Michel Houellebecq quotes by Michel Houellebecq
To give a man 5 sous because he is poor and has no bread is perfect, but to give him a blowjob because he has no girlfriend is too much of a good thing: you don't have to do that. ~ Michel Houellebecq
Michel Houellebecq quotes by Michel Houellebecq
Beds last on an average much longer than marriages ... ~ Michel Houellebecq
Michel Houellebecq quotes by Michel Houellebecq
... I spent whole afternoons at Bon Marché looking at pullovers, there was no sense in going on like that. ~ Michel Houellebecq
Michel Houellebecq quotes by Michel Houellebecq
The mere will to live was clearly no match for the pains and aggravations that punctuate the life of the average Western man. ~ Michel Houellebecq
Michel Houellebecq quotes by Michel Houellebecq
Irony won't save you from anything; humour doesn't do anything at all. You can look at life ironically for years, maybe decades; there are people who seem to go through most of their lives seeing the funny side, but in the end, life always breaks your heart. Doesn't matter how brave you are, or how reserved, or how much you've developed a sense of humour, you still end up with your heart broken. That's when you stop laughing. ~ Michel Houellebecq
Michel Houellebecq quotes by Michel Houellebecq
In the presence of a reader of Teilhard De Chardin I feel disarmed, nonplussed, ready to break down in tears. ~ Michel Houellebecq
Michel Houellebecq quotes by Michel Houellebecq
I wondered what could interest me, now that I was finished with love. ~ Michel Houellebecq
Michel Houellebecq quotes by Michel Houellebecq
The putting to death of morality had, on the whole, become a sort of ritual sacrifice necessary for the reassertion of the dominant values of the group - centered for some decades now on competition, innovation, and energy, more than on fidelity and duty. ~ Michel Houellebecq
Michel Houellebecq quotes by Michel Houellebecq
The Enlightened One, if he had meditated on it, would not necessarily have rejected a technical solution. ~ Michel Houellebecq
Michel Houellebecq quotes by Michel Houellebecq
To increase desires to an unbearable level whilst making the fulfillment of them more and more inaccessible: this was the single principle upon which Western society was based. ~ Michel Houellebecq
Michel Houellebecq quotes by Michel Houellebecq
You have to take an interest in something in life, I told myself. I wondered what could interest me, after I was finished with love. I could take a course in wine tasting, maybe , or start collecting model aeroplanes ~ Michel Houellebecq
Michel Houellebecq quotes by Michel Houellebecq
an intellectual didn't have to be responsible. That wasn't his job. In ~ Michel Houellebecq
Michel Houellebecq quotes by Michel Houellebecq
I admit that invective is one of my pleasures. This only brings me problems in life, but that's it. I attack, I insult. I have a gift for that, for insults, for provocation. So I am tempted to use it. ~ Michel Houellebecq
Michel Houellebecq quotes by Michel Houellebecq
It only confirmed what I'd always thought - that for all their education university professors can't even imagine political developments having any effect on their careers : they consider themselves untouchable. ~ Michel Houellebecq
Michel Houellebecq quotes by Michel Houellebecq
The frontispiece featured a brochure from a Parisian brothel of the belle époque. It came as a profound shock when I realised that some of the sexual specialities offered by 'Mademoiselle Hortense' were completely unknown to me. I had no idea what a 'voyage through the yellow land' or a 'Russian imperial soap' could possibly mean. Certain sexual practices had vanished from human memory, in one century – not unlike certain forms of skilled labour, such as cobbling or bell-ringing. How could anyone argue that Europe wasn't in decline? ~ Michel Houellebecq
Michel Houellebecq quotes by Michel Houellebecq
To the end, I will remain a child of Europe, of worry and of shame. I have no message of hope to deliver. For the West, I do not feel hatred. At most I feel a great contempt. I know only that every single one of us reeks of selfishness, masochism and death. We have created a system in which it has simply become impossible to live, and what's more, we continue to export it. ~ Michel Houellebecq
Michel Houellebecq quotes by Michel Houellebecq
Writing brings scant relief. It retraces, it delimits. It lends a touch of coherence, the idea of a kind of realism. One stumbles around in a cruel fog, but there is the odd pointer. Chaos is no more than a few feet away. A meagre victory, in truth. ~ Michel Houellebecq
Michel Houellebecq quotes by Michel Houellebecq
It is under the influence of an ancient animal sense of belonging that people have so many conversations about meteorology and the climate, influenced by a primitive memory, inscribed in the sense organs, and linked to the conditions of survival in the prehistoric era. These circumscribed, clichéd conversations are, however, the symptom of a real issue: even when we live in apartments, in conditions of thermal stability guaranteed by reliable and well-honed technology, it remains impossible for us to rid ourselves of this animal atavism; it is thus that a full awareness of our ignominy and misfortune, and of their complete and definitive nature, can only manifest itself in sufficiently favorable climatic conditions. ~ Michel Houellebecq
Michel Houellebecq quotes by Michel Houellebecq
People cannot live without God; life becomes unbearable. ~ Michel Houellebecq
Michel Houellebecq quotes by Michel Houellebecq
The academic study of literature leads basically nowhere, as we all know, ~ Michel Houellebecq
Michel Houellebecq quotes by Michel Houellebecq
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