Julien Green Quotes & Sayings

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

Thought flies and words go on foot. — Julien Green

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

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

You cannot imagine at all how much you interest God; He is interested in you as if there were no one else on earth. — Julien Green

I enter the world called real as one enters a mist. — Julien Green

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

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

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

What we give the world, we have borrowed from no one; it is ours. It may be taken from us, stolen from us, but imitated? - never. — Julien Green

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

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

What is real is beyond all reach. — Julien Green

In growing older, we become our parents. — Julien Green

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

Yesterday, happiness came in suddenly, as it used to, and remained for a moment in the great, dark, silent drawing room. — Julien Green

Within ourselves is not very far and yet it is so far that one's whole life is not always long enough to get there. — Julien Green

A dish around which I see too many people doesn't tempt me. — Julien Green

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

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

Paris is a city that might well be spoken of in the plural, as the Greeks used to speak of Athens, for there are many Parises, and the tourists' Paris is only superficially related to the Paris of the Parisians. The foreigner driving through Paris from one museum to another is quite oblivious to the presence of a world he brushes past without seeing. Until you have wasted time in a city, you cannot pretend to know it well. The soul of a big city is not to be grasped so easily; in order to make contact with it, you have to have been bored, you have to have suffered a bit in those places that contain it. Anyone can get hold of a guide and tick off all the monuments, but within the very confines of of Paris there is another city as difficult to access as Timbuktu once was. — Julien Green

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

A scrupulous man will never produce a great novel. — Julien Green

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

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

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

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

Faith means walking on the waters. — Julien Green