Bouvard Quotes & Sayings

When I was born I brought no joy, my father said he wanted a boy! — Rodney Dangerfield

They still didn't talk on the bus, but it had become a less confrontational silence. Almost friendly. (But not quite.) — Rainbow Rowell

We aren't there yet,' said Bouvard.
Let's hope not,' said Pecuchet. — Gustave Flaubert

I have a weird graphic I made for myself once, and it's the "lineage tree" of everyone that has inspired me and more importantly given me the permission to be myself in my work. There's a slew of people from theater: Erwin Piscator, Chekhov, Mac Wellman, Stein; and then a whole lot of wonderful works that are called novels: everything from Tristram Shandy to Bouvard and Pecuchet, to Virginia Woolf's Three Guineas, and Finnegan's Wake and Invisible Man, and then contemporary writers I'm currently reading like Renee Gladman and Anakana Schofield. There are many more in my graphic also: there's Beckett's novels and Melancholy of Resistance, and there's Reznikoff and Dos Passos, there are contemporary poets I admire like Jena Osman, dance-writers like Michelle Ellsworth, and books I can't help read for fun like Muriel Spark. But there's Groucho Marx and Oscar Wilde. It's a huge question and the answers would likely change daily. But these I'm talking about here are in the pantheon. — Thalia Field

My problem is that my body acts before my brain thinks ... it sometimes brings me huge trouble, or also huge success. recently, my body and brain got come to an agreement. it may be far better to live this gambling life than living in boring average ... they at least make my art more interesting — Hiroko Sakai

I love stage actors. There's something special about all people who have to do a performance eight shows a week, and musical people, especially, are so much fun. — Kelly Bishop

Anything that's of any use, famous people get hold of it and take it for themselves and it gets a bad rap. — Noel Gallagher

Mankind spends much more on training pilots of aircraft than it does to train the nuclear reactor operators. — Abdus Salam

In the end idealism annoyed Bouvard. 'I don't want any more of it: the famous cogito is a bore. The ideas of things are taken for the things themselves. What we barely understand is explained by means of words that we do not understand at all! Substance, extension, force, matter and soul, are all so many abstractions, figments of the imagination. As for God, it is impossible to know how he is, or even if he is! Once he was the cause of wind, thunder, revolutions. Now he is getting smaller. Besides, I don't see what use he is. — Gustave Flaubert

I've rarely said the word "Lord," unless it's followed by "of the Rings. — A. J. Jacobs

What we need are more people who specialize in the impossible. — Theodore Roethke

We're opening the doors to people launching missiles and dropping bombs by taking the human out of the decision chain for deciding how we should respond to these threats. And this is something we're seeing more and more happening in the traditional means as our methods of warfare become increasingly automated and roboticized such as through drone warfare. — Edward Snowden

Today's terrorists do not share a particular ethnic, educational or socioeconomic background. — Bennie Thompson

Of the eternal questions, nothing else: is there a God, is there immortality? And those who do not believe in God will talk of socialism or anarchy, of the transformation of all humanity on a new pattern, which all comes to the same thing, they're the same questions turned inside out. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

We'll free every slave in every town and region. Can anybody get a bigger army than that? — Dalton Trumbo