Muriel Barbery Quotes (68 Quotes)

Don't worry Renee, I won't commit suicide and I won't burn a thing. Because from now on, for you, I'll be searching for those moments of always within never. Beauty, in this world.

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.

People think that children don't know anything. It's enough to make you wonder if grownups were ever children once upon a time.

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

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

Madame Michel has the elegance of the hedgehog: on the outside she is covered in quills, a real fortress, but my gut feeling is that on the inside, she has the same simple refinement as the hedgehog: a deceptively indolent little creature, fiercely solitary--and terrible elegant.

Every day I tell myself that my sister cannot possibly sink any further into the slough of disgrace and, every day, I am amazed to see that she does.

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 ...

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

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

Beautiful things should belong to beautiful souls.

Maybe that's what being alive is about: so we can track down those movments that are dying.

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.

To be poor, ugly and, moreover, intelligent condemns one in our society to a dark and disillusioned life...to beauty all is forgiven.

Tasting is an act of pleasure, and writing about that pleasure is an artistic gesture, but the only true work of art, in the end, is another person's feast.

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

Because beauty consits of it's own passing, just as we reach for it. It's the ephemeral configuration of things in the moment, when you can see both their movement and their death.

Maybe the greatest anger and frustration come not from unemployment or poverty or the lack of a future but from the feeling that you have no culture, because you've been torn between cultures, between incompatible symbols. How can you exist when you don't know where you are?

I am a complete slave to vocabulary, I ought to have named my cat Roget.

To rich people it must seem that the ordinary little people..experience human emotions with less intensity and greater indifference...The fact that we might be going through hell like any other human being, or that our hearts might be filling with rage as Lucien's suffering ravaged our lives, or that we might be slowly going to pieces inside, in the torment of fear and horror that death inspires in everyone, did not cross the mind of anyone on these premises.

The French are often, when it comes to wine, so formal that they border on the ridiculous.

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 dessing up as an Indian is going to make you an Indian.

But enough of phenomenology; it is nothing more than the solitary, endless monologue of consciousness, a hard-core autism that no real cat would ever importune.

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.

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

To tell a group of adolescents who already know how to speak and write that that is the purpose of grammar is like telling someone that they need to read a history of toilets through the ages in order to pee and poop.

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.

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'?

But I feel like letting other people be good for me--after all, I'm just an unhappy little girl and even if I'm extremely intelligent, that doesn't change anything, does it? An unhappy little girl who, just when things are at their worst, has been lucky enough to meet some good people. Morally, do I have the right to let this chance go by?

Poverty is a reaper: it harvests everything inside us that might have made us capable of social intercourse with others, and leaves us empty, purged of feeling, so that we may endure all the darkness of the present day.