Muriel Barbery Quotes & Sayings

There are times, however, when life becomes a phantom comedy. As if aroused from a dream, we watch ourselves in action and, shocked to realize how much vitality is required simply to support our primitive requirements, we wonder, bewildered, where ARt fits in. All our frenzied nudging and posturing suddenly becomes utterly insignificant; our cozy little nest is reduced to some futile barbarian custom, and our position in society, hard-won and eternally precarious, is but a crude vanity. As for our progeny, we view them now with new eyes, and we are horrified, because without the cloak of altruism, the preproductive act seems extraordinarily out of place. All that is left is sexual pleasure, but if it is relegated to a mere manifestation of primal abjection, it will fail to proportion, because a loveless session of gymnastics is not what we have struggled so hard to master.
Eternity eludes us. — Muriel Barbery

What do you drink
What do you read
At breakfast
And I know who
You are — 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

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

Do you know what a summer rain is?
To start with, pure beauty striking the summer sky, awe-filled respect absconding with your heart, a feeling of insignificance at the very heart of the sublime, so fragile and swollen with the majesty of things, trapped, ravished, amazed by the bounty of the world.
And then, you pace up and down a corridor and suddenly enter a room full of light. Another dimension, a certainty just given birth. The body is no longer a prison, your spirit roams the clouds, you possess the power of water, happy days are in store, in this new birth.
Just as teardrops, when they are large and round and compassionate, can leave a long strand washed clean of discord, the summer rain as it washes away the motionless dust can bring to a person's soul something like endless breathing. — Muriel Barbery

Any game where the goal is to build territory has to be beautiful. There may be phases of combat, but they are only means to an end, to allow your territory to survive. One of the most extraordinary aspects of the game of go is that it has been proven that in order to win, you must live, but you must also allow the other player to live. Players who are too greedy will lose: it is a subtle game of equilibrium, where you have to get ahead without crushing the other player. In the end, life and death are only the consequences of how well or how poorly you have made your construction. This is what one of Taniguchi's characters says: you live, you die, these are consequences. It's a proverb for playing go, and for life. — 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

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

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

As always, I am saved by the inability of living creatures to believe anything that might cause the walls of their little mental assumptions to crumble. — Muriel Barbery

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

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

I know that they're all unhappy because nobody loves the right person the way they should and because they don't understand that it's really their own self that they're mad at. — Muriel Barbery

If people could climb higher in the social hierarchy in proportion to their incompetence, I guarantee the world would not go round the way it does. But that's not even the problem. What his sentence means isn't that incompetent people have found their place in the sun, but that nothing is harder or more unfair than human reality: humans live in a world where it's words and not deeds that have power, where the ultimate skill is mastery of language. — Muriel Barbery

If you have but one friend, make sure you choose her well. — Muriel Barbery

I thought I had found my calling, I thought I'd understood that in order to heal, I could heal others, or at least the other "healable" people, the ones who can be saved - instead of moping because I can't save other people. So what does this mean - I'm supposed to become a doctor? Or a writer? It's a bit the same thing, no? (Paloma) — Muriel Barbery

True faith, it is a well-known fact, has little regard for chapels, but does believe in the communion of mysteries. — 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

And I wonder how well I myself can see. — 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

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

With the exception of love, friendship and the beauty of art, I don't see much else that can nurture human life. — Muriel Barbery

As far as I can see, only psychoanalysis can compete with Christians in their love of drawn-out suffering. — 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

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

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

Boredom was born on a day of uniformity. — Muriel Barbery

Shocked to realize how much vitality is required simply to support our primitive requirements, we wonder, bewildered, where Art fits in. — Muriel Barbery

We think we can make honey without sharing in the fate of bees, but we are in truth nothing but poor bees, destined to accomplish our task and then die. — Muriel Barbery

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 adulthood, that's like thinking that dressing up as an Indian is going to make you an Indian. — Muriel Barbery

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

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

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

If you want to heal
Heal others
And smile or weep
At this very happy reversal of fate — 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

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

There are days when I feel I have been able to grasp all there is to know in one single gaze, as if invisible branches suddenly spring out of nowhere, weaving together all the disparate strands of my reading
and then suddenly the meaning escapes, the essence evaporates, and no matter how often I reread the same lines, they seem to flee ever further with each subsequent reading ... — Muriel Barbery

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

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

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

The only purpose of cats is that they constitute mobile decorative objects. — 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

Talent consists not in inventing shapes but in causing those that were invisible to emerge. — Muriel Barbery

I won't get any better by punishing the people I can't heal. — Muriel Barbery

Day after day, we pace up and down our life the way we pace up and down a passageway. — Muriel Barbery

Olympe is not one for affected charades, the way some people in the building are, to prove that because she is a well-brought-up-child-of-leftists-without-prejudices she is conversing with the concierge. — 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

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

Aman feeds her plants the way she feeds her children: water and fertilizer for the kentia, green beans and vitamin C for us. That's the heart of the paradigm: concentrate on the object, convey all the nutritional elements from the outside to the inside and, as they make their way inside, they will cause the object to grow and prosper ... you are satisfied with the knowledge that you've done what you were supposed to do, you've played your nurturing role: you feel reassured and, for a time, things feels safe ...
It would be so much better if we could share our insecurity, if we could all venture inside ourselves and realize that green beans and vitamin C, however much they nurture us, cannot save lives, nor sustain souls. — 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

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

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

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

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

As we all know, poodles are a type of curly-haired dog preferred by petit bourgeois retirees, ladies very much on their own who transfer their affection upon their pet, or residential concierges ensconced in their gloomy loges. Poodles come in black or apricot. The apricot ones tend to be crabbier than the black ones, who on the other hand do not smell as nice. Though all poodles bark snappily at the slightest provocation, they are particularly inclined to do so when nothing at all is happening. They follow their master by trotting on their stiff little legs without moving the rest of their sausage-shaped trunk. Above all they have venomous little black eyes set deep in their insignificant eye-sockets. Poodles are ugly and stupid, submissive and boastful. They are poodles, after all — Muriel Barbery

Conclusion: better to be a thinking monk than a postmodern
thinker. — 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

I had a brief glimpse of a frail, mature man carrying a ravaged child in his arms... — Muriel Barbery

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

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. This painless birth, like an unsolicited proof, gives me untold pleasure, and with neither toil nor certainty but the joy of frank astonishment I follw the pen that is guiding and supporting me. — Muriel Barbery

What is particularly amusing about cocker spaniels is their swaying gait when they are in a playful mood: it's as if they had tiny little springs screwed to their paws that cause them to bounce upward - but gently, without jolting. This also affects their paws and ears like the rolling of a ship, so cocker spaniels, like jaunty little vessels plying dry land, lend a nautical touch to the urban landscape: utterly enchanting. — Muriel Barbery

At times like this you desperately need Art. You seek to reconnect with your spiritual illusions, and you wish fervently that something might rescue you from your biological destiny, so that all poetry and grandeur will not be cast out from the world — Muriel Barbery

I don't know if you have any idea what a high school in Paris is like in this day and age in the posh neighborhoods - but quite honestly, the slummy banlieues of Marseille have nothing on ours. In fact it may even be worse here, because where you have money, you have drugs - and not just a little bit and not just one kind. — 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

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

When tea becomes ritual, it takes its place at the heart of our ability to see greatness in small things. Where is beauty to be found? In great things that, like everything else, are doomed to die, or in small things that aspire to nothing, yet know how to set a jewel of infinity in a single moment? — 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

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

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

What makes the strength of the 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. That Maori player was like a tree, a great indestructible oak with deep roots and a powerful radiance- everyone could feel it. And yet you also got the impression that the great oak could fly, that it would be as quick as the wind, despite, or perhaps because of, its deep roots. — Muriel Barbery

There are only two moments when everything is possible in this life," said Petrus, "when one drinks, and when one makes up stories. — 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

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

Beautiful things should belong to beautiful souls. — Muriel Barbery

If you dread tomorrow it's because you don't know how to build the present, and when you don't know how to build the present, you tell yourself you can deal with it tomorrow, and it's a lost cause anyway because tomorrow always ends up being today don't you see ... 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 now that matters: to build something now at any price using all our strength. Always remember that there's a retirement home waiting somewhere and so we have to surpass ourselves every day, make every day undying. Climb our own personal Everest and do it in such a way that every step is a little bit of eternity. That's what the future is for: to build the present with real plans made by living people. — Muriel Barbery

To write a profound thought, I have to put myself onto a very special stratum, otherwise the ideas and words just don't come. I have to forget myself and at the same time be superconcentrated. But it's not a question of the will, it is a mechanism I can set in motion or not, like scratching my nose or doing a backward roll. — 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

When we move, we are in a way de-structured by our movement toward something: we are both here and at the same time not here because we're already in the process of going elsewhere, if you see what I mean. To stop de-structuring yourself, you have to stop moving altogether. Either you move and you're no longer whole, or you're whole and you can't move. — 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

Here are all these people, full of heartache or hatred or desire, and we all have our troubles and the school year is filled with vulgarity and triviality and consequence, and there are all these teachers and kids of every shape and size, and there's this life we're struggling through full of shouting and tears and fights and break-ups and dashed hopes and unexpected luck
it all disappears, just like that, when the choir begins to sing. Everyday life vanishes into song, you are suddenly overcome with a feeling of brotherhood, of deep solidarity, even love, and it diffuses the ugliness of everyday life into a spirit of perfect communion. — Muriel Barbery

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

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. — 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

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

So much for the movement of the world! It could have been perfection and it was a disaster. It should be experienced in reality and it is pleasure by proxy, like always. — Muriel Barbery

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

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

The strong ones among humans do nothing. They talk and talk again. — 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

This is eminently true of many happy moments in life. Freed from the demands of decision and intention, adrift on some inner sea, we observe our various movements as if they belonged to someone else, and yet we admire their involuntary excellence. — Muriel Barbery

Civilization is the mastery of violence, the triumph, constantly challenged, over the aggressive nature of the primate. For primates we have been and primates we shall remain, however often we learn to find joy in a camellia on moss. This is the very purpose of education. — Muriel Barbery

The real ordeal is not leaving those you love but learning to live without those who don't love you. — 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

Truth will out, when the end is near . . . we are all prisoners of our own destiny, must confront it with the knowledge that there is no way out and, in our epilogue, must be the person we have always been deep inside, regardless of any illusions we may have nurtured in our lifetime. — 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

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