Pecuchet Quotes & Sayings

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

Making things difficult for the reader is less an attack on the reader than it is on the age and its facile knowledge-market. — Don DeLillo

We must remember that science is a way of using empirical evidence to better understand our world. We are all scientists, just many of us are not very good ones. However, we are all capable of exercising our intellects in a purposeful, linear pursuit of knowledge. — Chris Matakas

The central movement of the mind is the desire for unrestricted liberty and ( ... ) this movement is invariably accompanied by its opposite, a dread of the consequences of liberty. — Thornton Wilder

All that I am. All that I will be is defined by this moment. — Truth Devour

The beginning of a novel: start a subject, no matter where, and to have the desire to finish, start with very beautiful phrases. — Charles Baudelaire

I hate, loathe and despise schools.School is bad for you if you have any talent. You should be cultivating that talent in your own particular way. — Maurice Sendak

If these self-anointed leaders did not keep the people aroused with calls to preserve the Revolution, or to defend it from one imaginary foe after another, then the people might shake themselves awake from the trance they were in and begin to question the very men who had drenched their streets in blood and make France pariah among the civilized nations of the world. — Robert Masello