Muriel Barbery
There's so much humanity in a love of trees, so much nostalgia for our first sense of wonder, so much power in just feeling our own insignificance when we are surrounded by nature.Collection: Tree
People aim for the stars, and they end up like goldfish in a bowl. I wonder if it wouldn't be simpler just to teach children right from the start that life is absurd.Collection: Life
To beauty, all is forgiven, even vulgarity. Intelligence no longer seems an adequate compensation for things.Collection: Adequate
. . . maybe that's what life's all about: there's a lof of despair, but also the odd moments of beauty, where time is no longer the same . . . [like] something suspended . . . an elsewhere . . . an always within a never. Yes, that's is, an always within a never.Collection: Despair
When something is bothering me, I seek refuge. No need to travel far; a trip to the realm of literary memory will suffice. For where can one find more noble distraction, more entertaining company, more delightful enchantment than in literature?Collection: Memories
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.Collection: Real
...we have to surpass ourselves every day, make every day undying. Climb our own personal Everest and do it in such a way that every step is a little bit of eternity. That's what the future is for: to build the present, with real plans, made by living people.Collection: Inspirational
I thought: pity the poor in spirit who know neither the enchantment nor the beauty of language.Collection: Enchantment
Personally I think that grammar is a way to attain beauty.Collection: Thinking
With the exception of love, friendship and the beauty of Art, I don't see much else that can nurture human life.Collection: Art
When someone that you love dies..it's like fireworks suddenly burning out in the sky and everything going black.Collection: Sky
When tea becomes ritual, it takes its place at the heart of our ability to see greatness in small things. Where is beauty to be found? In great things that, like everything else, are doomed to die, or in small things that aspire to nothing, yet know how to set a jewel of infinity in a single moment?Collection: Heart
If you have but one friend, make sure you choose her well.Collection: Inspiring
Live, or die: mere consequences of what you have built. What matters is building well. So here we are, I've assigned myself a new obligation. I'm going to stop undoing, deconstructing, I'm going to start building. What matters is what you are doing when you die... I want to be building.Collection: What Matters
Beauty consists of its own passing, just as we reach for it. It’s the ephemeral configuration of things in the moment, when you see both their beauty and their death. ...Does this mean that this is how we must live our lives? Constantly poised between beauty and death, between movement and its disappearance? Maybe that’s what being alive is all about: so we can track down those moments that are dying.Collection: Mean
..if you dread tomorrow, it's because you don't know how to build the present, you tell yourself you can deal with it tomorrow, and it's a lost cause anyway because tomorrow always ends up becoming today, don't you see?Collection: Today
Art is emotion without desire.Collection: Art
The real ordeal is not leaving those you love but learning to live without those who don't love you.Collection: Real
We think we can make honey without sharing in the fate of bees, but we are in truth nothing but poor bees, destined to accomplish our task and then die.Collection: Fate
I'll be searching for those moments of always within never. Beauty, in this world." - PalomaCollection: World
But many intelligent people have a sort of bug: they think intelligence is an end in itself. They have one idea in mind: to be intelligent, which is really stupid. And when intelligence takes itself for its own goal, it operates very strangely: the proof that it exists is not to be found in the ingenuity or simplicity of what it produces, but in how obscurely it is expressed.Collection: Stupid
...This is the first time I have met someone who seeks out people and who sees beyond. [...] We never look beyond our assumptions and, what's worse, we have given up trying to meet others; we just meet ourselves. We don't recognize each other because other people have become our permanent mirrors. If we actually realized this, if we were to become aware of the fact that we are alone in the wilderness, we would go crazy. [...] As for me, I implore fate to give me the chance to see beyond myself and truly meet someone.Collection: Crazy
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.Collection: Important
As always, I am saved by the inability of living creatures to believe anything that might cause the walls of their little mental assumptions to crumble.Collection: Wall
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.Collection: Self
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.Collection: Art
Because art is life, playing to other rhythms.Collection: Art
To be poor, ugly and, moreover, intelligent condemns one in our society to a dark and disillusioned life...to beauty all is forgiven.Collection: Dark
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.Collection: Moving
Don't let the cat out or the concierge in: this is the first principle of socialist ladies.Collection: Cat
I may know that the world is an ugly place, I still don't want to see it.Collection: Ugly
That's what the future is for: to build the present, with real plans, made by living people.Collection: Real
Humans live in a world where the weak are dominant. This is a terrible insult to our animal nature, a sort of perversion or a deep contradiction.Collection: Animal
In the end, I wonder if the true movement of the world might not be a voice raised in song.Collection: Song
Pastries . . . can only be appreciated to the full extent of their subtlety when they are not eaten to assuage our hunger, when the orgy of their sugary sweetness is not destined to full some primary need but to coat our palate with all the benevolence of the world.Collection: Needs
boredom was born on a day of uniformity.Collection: Boredom
Personally I think that grammar is a way to attain Beauty. When you speak, or read, or write, you can tell if you've spoken or read or written a fine sentence. You can recognise a well-tuned phrase or an elegant style. But when you are applying the rules of grammar skilfully, you ascend to another level of the beauty of language. When you use grammar you peel back the layers, to see how it is all put together, to see it quite naked, in a way.Collection: Writing
We never look beyond our assumptions and what's worse, we have given up trying to meet others; we just meet ourselves.Collection: Trying
What is writing, no matter how lavish the pieces, if it says nothing of the truth, cares little for the heart, and is merely subservient to the pleasure of showing one's brilliance.Collection: Writing
Melancholy overwhelms me at supersonic speed.Collection: Melancholy
People think that children don't know anything. It's enough to make you wonder if grownups were ever children once upon a time.Collection: Children
When tea becomes ritual, it takes place at the heart of our ability to see greatness in small things.Collection: Heart
When illness enters a home, not only does it take hold of a body. It also weaves a dark web between hearts, a web where hope is trapped.Collection: Home
shocked to realize how much vitality is required simply to support our primitive requirements, we wonder, bewildered, where Art fits in.Collection: Art
Conclusion: better to be a thinking monk than a postmodern thinker.Collection: Thinking
A man who farts in bed . . . is a man who loves life.Collection: Love Life
Maybe that's what being alive is about: so we can track down those movments that are dying.Collection: Track
Live or die: mere consequences of what you have built. What matters is building well.Collection: What Matters
They didn't recognize me," I repeat. He stops in turn, my hand still on his arm. "It is because they have never seen you," he says. "I would recognize you anywhere.Collection: Hands
We musn't forget old people with their rotten bodies, old people who are so close to death, something that young people don't want to think about. We musn't forget that our bodies decline, friends die, everyone forgets about us, and the end is solitude. Nor must we forget that these old people were young once, that a lifespan is pathetically short, that one day you're twenty and the next day you're eighty.Collection: Thinking