Perdu Quotes & Sayings

We have lift off of the third Advanced Extremely High Frequency (AEHF-3) communication satellite at 4:44 a.m — Antonia Perdu

Do you know that there's a halfway world between each ending and each new beginning? It's called the hurting time, Jean Perdu. It's a bog; it's where your dreams and worries and forgotten plans gather. Your steps are heavier during that time. Don't underestimate the transition, Jeanno, between farewell and new departure. Give yourself the time you need. Some thresholds are too wide to be taken in one stride. — Nina George

There is no greater sorrow
Than to recall a happy time
When miserable. — Dante Alighieri

beauty tip for the world, go read a book — Antonia Perdu

Turn bad thoughts into concrete so you can build a strong foundation. — Antonia Perdu

We were bullied, broken, built up, bronzed and polished.
We grew dull, dusty, doubtful, dark, and forgetful.
Yet we still know that we can love deeply. — Antonia Perdu

Happiness is beneficial for the body, but it is grief that develops the powers of the mind. — Marcel Proust

Dear Optimism, nice to see you. I've got an extra room, how about you stay for a while. — Antonia Perdu

I know gray areas too well. I write for silent audiences. — Antonia Perdu

A La Recherche du Temps Perdu is like a beautiful hand with long fingers reaching out to pluck a perfect fruit, without error,for the accurate eye knows well it is growing just there on the branch, while Ulysses is the fumbling of a horned hand in darkness after a doubted jewel. — Rebecca West

If you keep picking at that scab on your heart, it won't heal. — Antonia Perdu

Perdu reflected that is was a common misconception that booksellers looked after books. They look after people. — Nina George

Perdu recalled that when he was getting to know Manon, he had had dreams in which she turned into a female eagle. He tried to catch and tame her. He would chase her into the water because when her wings were wet, she couldn't escape. We are immortal in the dreams of our loved ones. And our dead live on after their deaths in our dreams. Dreams are the interface between the worlds, between time and space. As — Nina George

Whenever Monsieur Perdu looked at a book, he did not see it purely in terms of a story, retail price and an essential balm for the soul; he saw freedom on wings of paper. — Nina George

Et itah se au ma! It is as you wish! — Antonia Perdu

Perdu wanted Anna to feel that she was in a nest. He wanted her to sense the boundless possibilities offered by books. They would always be enough. They would never stop loving their readers. They were a fixed point in an otherwise unpredictable world. In life. In love. After death. — Nina George

Some fathers cannot love their children. They find them annoying. Or uninteresting. Or unsettling. They're irritated by their children because they've turned out differently than they had expected. They're irritated because the children were the wife's wish to patch up the marriage when there was nothing left to patch up, her means of forcing a loving marriage where there was no love. And such fathers take it out on the children. Whatever they do, their fathers will be nasty and mean to them." "Please stop." "And the children, the delicate, little, yearning children," Perdu continued more softly, because he was terribly moved by Max's inner turmoil, "do everything they can to be loved. Everything. They think that it must somehow be their fault that their father cannot love them. But Max," and here Perdu lifted Jordan's chin, "it has nothing to do with them. — Nina George

He whom is without typos, throw the first stone. — Antonia Perdu

Yet there is no spring in Florida, neither in boskage perdu, nor on the nunnery beaches. — Wallace Stevens

Also, there is a dedicated community of people in the world who will always be able to connect with each other across all languages, boundaries, and religions. It is the "Readers' Club." People who read a lot, starting at a very young age, are people who were raised by books. They have learned about forms of love and hate, kindness, respect, and ideas that are different from their own. They experience the world as something infinitely larger than before. They enjoy the indescribable feeling of having found their true selves. We readers are book people, and Jean Perdu [the protagonist] is one of us. We are all traveling on an invisible literary riverboat, one that carries us down the stream of life. It shapes, holds, and comforts us. At — Nina George

The sea was the first thing he had found that was large enough to absorb his sorrow.

...Perdu would drift on his back, his feet pointing toward the beach. There, on the waves, with the water spilling through his outspread fingers, he drew up from the depths of his memory every hour he had spent with Manon. He examined each one until he no longer felt any regret that it was past, then he let it go.

So Jean let the waves rock him, raise him up and pass him on. And slowly, infinitely slowly, he began to trust. Not the sea, far from it; no one should make that mistake! Jean Perdu trusted himself again. He wouldn't go under; he wouldn't drown in his emotions.

And each time he abandoned himself to the sea another small grain of fear trickled out of him. It was his way of praying. — Nina George

Il y aura toujours un chien perdu quelque part qui m'empe" chera d'e" tre heureux. There will always be a lost dog somewhere that will prevent me being happy. — Jean Anouilh

His father would presumably have signed up without hesitation to the three things that made you really "happy" according to Cuneo's worldview. One: eat well. No junk food, because it only makes you unhappy, lazy and fat. Two: sleep through the night (thanks to more exercise, less alcohol and positive thoughts). Three: spend time with people who are friendly and seek to understand you in their own particular way. Four: have more sex - but that was Samy's addition, and Perdu saw no real reason to tell his father that one. — Nina George

Merry a mind is

of a weeping willow

roots raising concrete

be in

fit out

all abstract. — Antonia Perdu

I jumped into a crowd full of "u"s they turned into underscores. Hit the pavement hard." visualization words — Antonia Perdu

Her words were like the hammer. My stance was of a nail. I didn't need those callous words on my once strong shell. Hammered. Hammered. Words on my shoulder blades. All of my great feelings concave. — Antonia Perdu

The enigma.
The flowers that bloom in the dark shine the brightest.
We bloom from the moonlight. — Antonia Perdu

Beside the sleeping Max, who was curled up like a little boy, knees tucked into his chest, mouth pursed into a surprised pout, lay Sanary's Southern Lights. Perdu picked up the slim volume. Max had underlined certain sentences in pencil and jotted some questions in the margins; he had read the book as a book ought to be read. Reading - an endless journey; a long, indeed never-ending journey that made one more temperate as well as more loving and kind. Max had set out on that journey. With each book he would absorb more of the world, things and people. — Nina George

When I'm not writing, I'm thinking about writing. Filling pages and people with inspiration. When my thoughts don't want to rest on a page, we argue. We argue that one merely is ready just too comfortable playing in The Nile [denial] river. So we compromise. We grow,
water metaphors
and plant simile trees
of golden-almond
manifested love dreams.
Then at that moment, we forgot what we were arguing about.
Beauty can do that for you.
That's the beauty of writing. — Antonia Perdu

May inspiration travel and always return 360 degrees. — Antonia Perdu

Mothers yielding Bibles, contemplating smearing the blood of lamb chops over her doorway. Anything to keep her son alive another day. — Antonia Perdu

It is always yesterday, tomorrow, and 3 years ago today. It is always your birthday. It is always the future, the present, and the past. It is always eternity that will last. — Antonia Perdu Millie Farquoix

Different cities visit us daily, they exist in the clouds. — Antonia Perdu

I am at times prisoner to the darkness. Light will find a way in I am always assured. The sun has not died. The moon has not died. I live. — Antonia Perdu

Perdu and Cuneo gaped at creatures that seemed to have sprung from Middle Earth or Winterfell. Such is the power of books. — Nina George

Who goes to the beach without trying to touch the water? The one who cannot see the water, but if the blind wishes to FEEL the water, he shall not retreat, just as long as he holds hands with FAITH. — Antonia Perdu

Let the quiet tuck you in.
Let the quiet massage your shoulder.
Let the quiet embrace you; feeling all the dimensions of your skin.
Feel the quiet between your toes.
Behind your earlobes.
Under your tongue.
Over the space above your heart.
In the cells regenerating from the wounds.
Let it permeate through your blood.
Indigo & Cyan.
Eyes watching Zion.
Be the quiet
Lion — Antonia Perdu

You have to dance the things you cannot explain," Perdu said under his breath.
"And you have to write the things you cannot express," the old novelist thundered. — Nina George

What are we doing? Are we talking? Are we having fun? Are we building, destroying, remembering, or forgetting love? — Antonia Perdu

Hesse's Stage came to Perdu's mind. Most people were familiar with the first line, of course: "In all beginnings dwells a magic force..." but very few people know the ending: "For guarding us and helping us to live." And hardly anyone realized that Hesse wasn't talking about new beginnings. He meant a readiness to bid farewell. Farewell to old habits, Farwell to illusions. Farewell to a long-expired life, in which one was nothing but a husk, rustled by the occasional sigh. — Nina George

Soulcial Shit. [Fertilizer]
you climbed under the skin I'm trying to escape. — Antonia Perdu

Perdu cleared his throat and announced to the empty car: "Her words were so natural. Manon showed her feelings, always. She loved the tango. She drank from life as if it were champagne and faced it in the same spirit: she knew that life is special. — Nina George

Kilmartin wrote a highly amusing and illuminating account of his experience as a Proust revisionist, which appeared in the first issue of Ben Sonnenberg's quarterly Grand Street in the autumn of 1981. The essay opened with a kind of encouragement: 'There used to be a story that discerning Frenchmen preferred to read Marcel Proust in English on the grounds that the prose of A la recherche du temps perdu was deeply un-French and heavily influenced by English writers such as Ruskin.' I cling to this even though Kilmartin thought it to be ridiculous Parisian snobbery; I shall never be able to read Proust in French, and one's opportunities for outfacing Gallic self-regard are relatively scarce. — Christopher Hitchens

And so I miss the fertilization that might come from a contact. And for me
yes, I think I might as well admit it
fertilization does come a great deal from contacts. Why then do I avoid them
in a sort of false pride
shyness
timorous modesty? I used to be afraid of falling in love with people
or having them think I was
that I was chasing them (how ridiculous
I am actually always running away!) but now surely
I should be mature enough to be over that. I am no longer afraid of falling in love, and the other false modesties should vanish. I cannot bear to think "par delicatesse j'ai perdu ma vie." (Because of discretion I have lost my life). — Anne Morrow Lindbergh