A T Mercier Quotes & Sayings

Why do we feel sorry for people who can't travel? Because, unable to expand externally, they are not able to expand internally either, they can't multiply and so they are deprived of the possibility of undertaking expansive excursions in themselves and discovering who and what else they could have become. — Pascal Mercier

I colour my hair mousy brown and I wear makeup only on stage. I use Laura Mercier - something called Biscuit, I think. I run one tiny sponge over my face and cover the red blotches. If I've got some rouge, I'll bung it on my mouth and cheeks. — Jane Birkin

Change only what you can't live with, but try to accept who you are, and say yes to what makes you unique. Your confidence will make you sexier than any beauty product or accessory you could possibly buy. — Laura Mercier

I am still there, at that distant place in time, I never left it, but live expanded in the past, or out of it. — Pascal Mercier

Disappointment is considered bad. A thoughtless prejudice. How, if not through disappointment, should we discover what we have expected and hoped for? And where, if not in this discovery, should self-knowledge lie? So how could one gain clarity about oneself without disappointment?
...
One could have the hope that he would become more real by reducing expectations, shrink to a hard, reliable core and thus be immune to the pain of disappointment. But how would it be to lead a life that banished every long, bold expectation, a life where there were only banal expectations like "the bus is coming"? — Pascal Mercier

In the end he said, I am Mercier, alone, ill, in the cold, the wet, old, half mad, no way on, no way back. He eyed briefly, with nostalgia, the ghastly sky, the hideous earth. At your age, he said. Another act. Immaterial — Samuel Beckett

Our lives are rivers, gliding free to that unfathomed, boundless sea, the silent grave! — Pascal Mercier

take reason out of the interactive context in which it evolved, and nothing guarantees that it will yield adaptive results. — Hugo Mercier

Sometimes, we are afraid of something because we're afraid of something else. — Pascal Mercier

What separates me from my present is like a fine mist, an intangible veil, an invisible wall. They don't put up the slightest resistance. Nothing would shatter if I were to walk through it. Because there is actually nothing at all between me and the world. A single step would be enough. Why didn't I take it long ago? — Pascal Mercier

Sleepless people were bound by a wordless solidarity. — Pascal Mercier

That words could cause something in the world, make someone move or stop, laugh or cry: even as a child he had found it extraordinary and it never stopped impressing him. How did words do that? Wasn't it like magic? — Pascal Mercier

A person must first learn how to walk on their own before you can guide them in the right direction. — Craig Mercier

Getting on an airplane and arriving a few hours later in a completely different world with no time to take in individual images of the road - he didn't like that and it bothered him. — Pascal Mercier

Motivation is the first step in achieving your dreams! — Craig Mercier

One who would really like to know himself would have to be a restless, fanatical collector of disappointments, and seeking disappointing experiences must be like an addiction, the all-determining addiction of his life, for it would stand so clearly before his eyes that disappointment is not a hot, destroying poison, but rather a cool calming balm that opens our eyes to the real contours of ourselves. — Pascal Mercier

Isn't it true that it's not people who meet, but rather the shadows cast by their imaginations? — Pascal Mercier

Loyalty ... A will, a decision, a resolution of the soul. — Pascal Mercier

Deborah Mercier couldn't have looked more like a WASP if her coat had been striped with yellow and her eyes had been on the sides of her head. She — John Connolly

As long as the case lay on the desk, the students would assume he was coming back. But that wasn't why he had left the books or why he now resisted the temptation to get them. If he left now, he also had to go away from those books. He felt that very clearly, even if at this moment, on the way out, he had no idea what it really meant: to go away. In — Pascal Mercier

After a while, he understood that he was experiencing a great liberation; the liberation from his self-imposed limitation, from a slowness and heaviness expressed in his name and had been expressed in the slow measured steps of his father walking ponderously from one room of the museum to another; liberation from an image of himself in which, even when he wasn't reading, he was someone bending myopically over dusty books; an image he hadn't drawn systematically, but that had grown slowly and imperceptibly; the image of Mundus, which bore not only his own handwriting, but also the handwriting of many others who had found it pleasant and convenient to be able to hold on to this silent museum-like figure and rest in it. — Pascal Mercier

AS SOMBRAS DA ALMA. THE SHADOWS OF THE SOUL. The stories others tell about you and the stories you tell about yourself: which come closer to the truth? Is it so clear that they are your own? Is one an authority on oneself? But that isn't the question that concerns me. The real question is: In such stories, is there really a difference between true and false? In stories about the outside, surely. But when we set out to understand someone on the inside? Is that a trip that ever comes to an end? Is the soul a place of facts? Or are the alleged facts only the deceptive shadows of our stories? — Pascal Mercier

Don't waste your time, do something worthwhile with it.
But what can that mean: worthwhile? Finally to start realizing long-cherished wishes. To attack the error that there will always be time for it later ... Take the long-dreamed-of trip, learn this language, read those books, buy yourself this jewelry, spend a night in that famous hotel. Don't miss out on yourself.
Bigger things are also part of that: to give up the loathed profession, break out of a hated milieu. Do what contributes to making you more genuine, moves you closer to yourself. — Pascal Mercier

I'm being given my heart's desire, and I just don't know what to do with it. I'm almost afraid tobelieve it's true, in case someone shakes me and tells me I'm dreaming.""It's not a dream. I'm here with you," I say. "For what looks like a really long time. — Amy Plum

It wasn't only that you didn't see him anymore, meet him anymore. You saw his absence and encountered it as something tangible. His not being there was like the sharply outlined emptiness of a photo with a figure cut out precisely with scissors and now the missing figure is more important, more dominant than all others. — Pascal Mercier

SOLIDAO, LONELINESS.
What is it that we call loneliness. It can't simply be the absence of others, you can be alone and not lonely, and you can be among people and yet be lonely. So what is it? ... it isn't only that others are there, that they fill up the space next to us. But even when they celebrate us or give advice in a friendly conversation, clever, sensitive advice: even then we can be lonely. So loneliness is not something simply connected with the presence of others or with what they do. Then what? What on earth? — Pascal Mercier

To stand by yourself
that was also part of dignity. That way, a person could get through a public flaying with dignity. Galileo. Luther. Even somebody who admitted his guilt and resisted the temptation to deny it. Something politicians couldn't do. Honesty, the courage for honesty. With others and yourself. — Pascal Mercier

(In Austria after VE Day)
Sergeant Mercier ... dressed in a full German officer's uniform, topped off with a monocle for his right eye. Someone got the bright idea to march him over to the company orderly room and turn him in at rifle point to Captain Speirs.
Someone got word to Speirs before Mercier showed up. When troopers brought Mercier up to Speirs's desk, prodding him with bayonets, Speirs did not look up. One of the troopers snapped a salute and declared, "Sir, we have captured this German officer. What should we do with him?"
"Take him out and shoot him," Speirs replied, not looking up.
"Sir," Mercier called out, "sir, please, sir, it's me, Sergeant Mercier."
"Mercier, get out of that silly uniform," Speirs ordered. — Stephen E. Ambrose

We are stratified creatures, creatures full of abysses, with a soul of inconstant quicksilver, with a mind whose color and shape change as in a kaleidoscope that is constantly shaken. — Pascal Mercier

Then there was a silence he had never before experienced: in it, you could hear the years. — Pascal Mercier

How would it be after the last sentence? The last sentence he had always feared and from the middle of a book, he had always been tormented by the thought that there would inevitably be a last sentence. — Pascal Mercier

He had walked on the beach and wished for icy winds to sweep away everything that sounded like mere linguistic habit, a malicious kind of habit that prevented thinking by producing the illusion that it had already taken place and found its conclusion in the hollow words. — Pascal Mercier

Think that you have to die someday, maybe this morning."
"I think of it all the time, and so I play hooky from the office and let myself bask in the sun. — Pascal Mercier

The dreamlike, bombastic wish to stand once again at that point in my life and be able to take a completely different direction than the one that has made me who I am now ... To sit once more on the warm moss and hold the cap - it's the absurd wish to go back behind myself in time and take myself - the only marked by events - along on this journey. — Pascal Mercier

Is that what happened to Mercier?" "No - not quite. In so far as I understood Sukhoi's work, it appeared that the zero-mass state would be very difficult to realise physically. As it neared the zero-mass state, the vacuum would be inclined to flip to the other side. Sukhoi called it a tunnelling phenomenon." Clavain raised an eyebrow. "The other side?" "The quantum-vacuum state in which matter has imaginary inertial mass. By imaginary I mean in the purely mathematical sense, in the sense that the square root of minus one is an imaginary number. Of course, you immediately see what that would imply." "You're talking about tachyonic matter," Clavain said. "Matter travelling faster than light. — Alastair Reynolds

We must not only give what we have, we must give what we are. — Desire-Joseph Mercier

We go wherever the flesh creeps least, said Mercier. We dodge along, hugging the walls, wherever the shit lies least thick. — Samuel Beckett

Recall the old story of the rather refined young man who preferred sex dreams to visiting brothels because he met a much nicer type of girl that way. — Vivian Mercier

To live for the moment: it sounds so right and so beautiful. But the more I want to, the less I understand what it means. — Pascal Mercier

You can never have for yourself someone who isn't on good terms with himself. — Pascal Mercier

What did I know of your fantasies? Why do we know so little about the fantasies of our parents? What do we know of somebody if we know nothing of the images passed to him by his imagination? — Pascal Mercier

[Vanity] is an unrecognised form of stupidity, you have to forget the cosmic meaninglessness of all our acts to be able to be vain and that's a glaring form of stupidity. — Pascal Mercier

We leave something of ourselves behind when we leave a place, we stay there, even though we go away. And there are things in us that we can find again only by going back there. — Pascal Mercier

Gregorius was never to forget this scene. They were his first Portuguese words in the real world and they worked. That words could cause something in the world, make someone move or stop, laugh or cry: even as a child he had found it enigmatic and it had never stopped impressing him. How did words do that? Wasn't it like magic?But at this moment, the mystery seemed greater than usual, for these were words he hadn't even known yesterday morning. — Pascal Mercier

I love tunnels. They 're the symbol of hope: sometime it will be bright again.
If by chance it is not night. — Pascal Mercier

Beauty is not generic. Quite often, the thing that makes you memorable is the thing that makes you different. — Laura Mercier

NOBREZA SILENCIOSA. SILENT NOBILITY. It is a mistake to believe that the crucial moments of a life when its habitual direction changes forever must be loud and shrill dramatics, washed away by fierce internal surges. This is a kitschy fairy tale started by boozing journalists, flashbulb-seeking filmmakers and authors whose minds look like tabloids. In truth, the dramatics of a life-determining experience are often unbelievably soft. It has so little akin to the bang, the flash, of the volcanic eruption that, at the moment it is made, the experience is often not even noticed. When it deploys its revolutionary effect and plunges a life into a brand-new light giving it a brand-new melody, it does that silently and in this wonderful silence resides its special nobility. — Pascal Mercier

Given that we can live only a small part of what there is in us
what happens with the rest? — Pascal Mercier

I would not like to live in a world without cathedrals. I need their beauty and grandeur. I need their imperious silence. I need it against the witless bellowing of the barracks yard and the witty chatter of the yes-men. I want to hear the rustling of the organ, this deluge of ethereal notes. I need it against the shrill farce of marches. — Pascal Mercier

You and I are both admirers of Marcus Aurelius, and you will remember this passage in his Meditations: "Do wrong to thyself, do wrong to thyself, my soul; but later thou wilt no longer have the opportunity of respecting and honoring thyself. For every man has but one life. But yours is nearly finished, though in it you had no regard for yourself but placed thy felicity in the souls of others. . . . But those who do not observe the impulses of their own minds must of necessity be unhappy." Thank — Pascal Mercier

Kitsch is the most pernicious of all prisons. The bars are covered with the gold of simplistic, unreal feelings, so that you take them for the pillars of a palace. — Pascal Mercier

Balance is the key to a beautifully made-up face. — Laura Mercier

When I do my own makeup, I always start with Laura Mercier Tinted Moisturizer. — Kourtney Kardashian

So, the fear of death might be described as the fear of not being able to become whom one had planned to be. — Pascal Mercier