Muriel Barbery Quotes

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. ~ Muriel Barbery

It would never have crossed her mind spontaneously that somebody might actually need silence. That silence helps you to go inward, that anyone who is interested in something more than just life outside actually needs silence. ~ Muriel Barbery

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. ~ Muriel Barbery

If, in our world, there is any chance of becoming the person you haven't yet become ... will I know how to seize that chance, turn my life into a garden that will be completely different from my forebears'? ~ Muriel Barbery

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. ~ Muriel Barbery

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? ~ Muriel Barbery

Grammar A stratum of consciousness Leading to beauty ~ Muriel Barbery

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. ~ Muriel Barbery

To rich people it must seem that the ordinary little people..experience human emotions with less intensity and greater indifference ... The fact that we might be going through hell like any other human being, or that our hearts might be filling with rage as Lucien's suffering ravaged our lives, or that we might be slowly going to pieces inside, in the torment of fear and horror that death inspires in everyone, did not cross the mind of anyone on these premises. ~ Muriel Barbery

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. ~ Muriel Barbery

If there is one thing I despise, it is the perverse affectation of rich people who go around dressing as if they were poor, in second-hand clothes, ill-fitting gray wool bonnets, socks full of holes, and flowered shirts under threadbare sweaters. Not only is it ugly, it is also insulting: nothing is more despicable than a rich man's scorn for a poor man's longing. ~ Muriel Barbery

People think that children don't know anything. It's enough to make you wonder if grownups were ever children once upon a time. ~ Muriel Barbery

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

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. ~ Muriel Barbery

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

Every time, it's the same thing, I feel like crying, my throat goes all tight and I do the best I can to control myself but sometimes it gets close: I can hardly keep myself from sobbing. So when they sing a canon I look down at the ground because it's just too much emotion at once: it's too beautiful, and everyone singing together, this marvelous sharing. I'm no longer myself. I am just one part of a sublime whole, to which the others also belong, and I always wonder at such moments why this cannot be the rule of everyday life, instead of being an exceptional moment, during a choir. ~ Muriel Barbery

Wine is the refined jewel that only a grown woman will prefer to the sparkling trinkets adored by little girls. ~ Muriel Barbery

since destiny always rings three times... ~ Muriel Barbery

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

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. ~ Muriel Barbery

This pause in time, within time ... When did I first experience the exquisite sense of surrender that is only possible with another person? The peace of mind one experiences on one's own, one's certainty of self in the serenity of solitude, are nothing in comparison to the release and openness and fluency one shares with another, in close companionship ... ~ Muriel Barbery

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. ~ Muriel Barbery

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

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. ~ Muriel Barbery

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

When illness enters a home, not only does it take hold of a body. It also weaves a dark web between hearts, a web where hope is trapped. ~ Muriel Barbery

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

[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. ~ Muriel Barbery

That is the way a summer rain can take hold in you- like a new heart, beating in time with another's. ~ Muriel Barbery

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. ~ Muriel Barbery

Do you know what an involuntary act signifies? Psychoanalysts say that it reflects the insidious maneuvering of one's hidden unconscious. What a pointless theory, in fact. When we do something involuntarily, this is the most visible sign of the power of our conscious will; for our will, when opposed by emotion, makes use all of its wiles to attain its ends. ~ Muriel Barbery

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. ~ Muriel Barbery

The camellia against the moss of the temple, the violet hues of the Kyoto mountains, a blue porcelain cup
this sudden flowering of pure beauty at the heart of ephemeral passion: is this not something we all aspire to? And something that, in our western civilization, we do not know how to attain?
The contemplation of eternity within the very movement of life. ~ Muriel Barbery

Melancholy overwhelms me at supersonic speed. ~ Muriel Barbery

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

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

A man who farts in bed . . . is a man who loves life. ~ Muriel Barbery

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. ~ Muriel Barbery

They didn't recognize me," I repeat.
He stops in turn, my hand still on his arm.
"It is because they have never seen you," he says. "I would recognize you anywhere. ~ Muriel Barbery

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

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

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. ~ Muriel Barbery

I am an intellectual (who makes fun of other intellectuals). ~ Muriel Barbery

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. ~ Muriel Barbery

What I really devoured ... was the truculence of my hosts' language: the syntax may have been brutally sloppy, but it was oh so warm in its juvenile authenticity. I feasted on their words, yes, the words flowing at that get-together of country brothers, the sort of words that, at times, delight one much more than the pleasures of the flesh. Words: repositories for singular realities which they transform into moments 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. Life exists only by virtue of the osmosis of words and facts, where the former encase the latter in ceremonial dress. ~ Muriel Barbery

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. ~ Muriel Barbery

The first time he consulted me, I caught a glimpse of my salvation. He made a gift to me of the very thing that I - too corrupted by my bourgeoise blood to renounce it- could not be, merely by tacitly agreeing to be my client, simply by frequenting my waiting room on a regular basis, with his ordinary docile manner of a patient who makes no fuss. Later he gave me another gift, magnanimously, that of his conversation. Worlds hitherto unknown to me suddenly appeared, and the very thing that my flame had always coveted so ardently, and had despaired of ever obtaining, was suddenly mine, thanks to him, vicariously. ~ Muriel Barbery

I also wonder fearfully what will happen when the only friend I have ever had, the only one who knows everything without ever having to ask, leaves behind her this woman whom no one knows, enshrouding her in oblivion. ~ Muriel Barbery

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 ~ Muriel Barbery

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. ~ Muriel Barbery

Tasting is an act of pleasure, and writing about that pleasure is an artistic gesture, but the only true work of art, in the end, is another person's feast. ~ Muriel Barbery

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. ~ Muriel Barbery

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. ~ Muriel Barbery

Don't we all deal with life the way we do our military service? Doing what we can, while we wait either to be demobbed or do battle? Some will clean up the barrack-room, others will skive off, or spend their time playing cards, or trafficking, or plotting something. Officers command, soldiers obey, but no one's fooled by this comedy behind closed doors: one day, you'll have to go out there and die, officers and soldiers alike, the morons along with the crafty ones who smuggle toilet paper or deal in cigarettes on the black market. ~ Muriel Barbery

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

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. ~ Muriel Barbery

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

One must concede to others what one tolerates in oneself. ~ Muriel Barbery

The raw tomato, devoured in the garden when freshly picked, is a horn of abundance of simple sensations, a radiating rush in one's mouth that brings with it every pleasure ... a tomato, an adventure. ~ Muriel Barbery

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

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. ~ Muriel Barbery

Yes, our eyes may perceive, yet they do not observe; they may believe, yet they do not question; they may receive yet they do not search: they are emptied of desire, with neither hunger nor passion.(Renee Michel) ~ Muriel Barbery

This morning I understand what it means to die: when we disappear, it is the others who die for us, for here I am , lying on a cold pavement and it is not the dying I care about; it has no more meaning this morning that it did yesterday. But never again will I see those I love, and if that is what dying is about then it really is the tragedy they say it is. ~ Muriel Barbery

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

Behold the man I also know how to be. ~ Muriel Barbery

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. ~ Muriel Barbery

The lines gradually become their own demiurges and, like some witless yet miraculous participant, I witness the birth on paper of sentences that have eluded my will and appear in spite of me on the sheet, teaching me something that I neither knew nor thought I might want to know. ~ Muriel Barbery

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? ~ Muriel Barbery

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. ~ Muriel Barbery

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

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. ~ Muriel Barbery

I'll be searching for those moments of always within never. Beauty, in this world. - Paloma ~ Muriel Barbery

Elsewhere the world may be blustering or sleeping, wars are fought, people live and die, some nations disintegrate, while others are born, soon to be swallowed up in turn - and in all this sound and fury, amidst eruptions and undertows, while the world goes its merry way, bursts into flames, tears itself apart and is reborn: human life continues to throb. ~ Muriel Barbery

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. ~ Muriel Barbery

First of all, I think that sex, like love, is a sacred thing..if I were going to live beyond puberty, it would be really important to me to keep sex as a sort of marvelous sacrament. And secondly, a teenager who pretends to be an adult is still a teenager. If you imagine that getting high at a party and sleeping around is going to propel you into a state of full adulthood, that's like thinking that dressing up as an Indian is going to make you an Indian. And thirdly, it's a really weird way of looking at life to want to become an adult by imitating everything that is most catastrophic about adulthood. ~ Muriel Barbery

After a day spent running around outside, Clara never went home without first slipping through the orchard, where she would stop to pray to the spirits of enclosure to prepare her for her return within four walls. ~ Muriel Barbery

For in order for consciousness to be aroused, it must have a name. However, ~ Muriel Barbery

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! ~ Muriel Barbery

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

Pastries ... can only be appreciated to the full extent of their subtlety when they are not eaten to assuage our hunger, when the orgy of their sugary sweetness is not destined to full some primary need but to coat our palate with all the benevolence of the world. ~ Muriel Barbery

To be poor, ugly and, moreover, intelligent condemns one in our society to a dark and disillusioned life ... to beauty all is forgiven. ~ Muriel Barbery

But many intelligent people have a sort of bug: they think intelligence is an end in itself. They have one idea in mind: to be intelligent, which is really stupid. And when intelligence takes itself for its own goal, it operates very strangely: the proof that it exists is not to be found in the ingenuity or simplicity of what it produces, but in how obscurely it is expressed. ~ Muriel Barbery

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. ~ Muriel Barbery

Tea and mangas instead of coffee and newspapers: something elegant and enchanting, instead of adult power struggles and their sad aggressiveness. ~ Muriel Barbery

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. ~ Muriel Barbery

I have finally concluded, maybe that's what life is about: there's a lot of despair, but also the odd moment of beauty, where time is no longer the same. It's as if those strains of music created a sort of interlude in time, something suspended, an elsewhere that had come to us, an always within never. Yes, that's it, an always within never. ~ Muriel Barbery

In the end, I wonder if the true movement of the world might not be a voice raised in song. ~ Muriel Barbery

We musn't forget old people with their rotten bodies, old people who are so close to death, something that young people don't want to think about. We musn't forget that our bodies decline, friends die, everyone forgets about us, and the end is solitude. Nor must we forget that these old people were young once, that a lifespan is pathetically short, that one day you're twenty and the next day you're eighty. ~ Muriel Barbery

Art is emotion without desire. ~ Muriel Barbery

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. ~ Muriel Barbery

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

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. ~ Muriel Barbery

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. ~ Muriel Barbery

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. ~ Muriel Barbery

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. ~ Muriel Barbery

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

If there is one thing I detest, it's when people transform their powerlessness or alienation into a creed. ~ Muriel Barbery

And yet there's nothing to understand. 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, ... ~ Muriel Barbery

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

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. ~ Muriel Barbery