19 quotes found
“Ideas are substitutes for sorrows...”
“Every reader, as he reads, is actually the reader of himself.”
“The beauty of images lies behind things, the beauty of ideas in front of them.”
“...pretention is very close to stupidity and that simplicity has a less visible but still gratifying aspect.”
“For every death is a simplification of existence for the others, removes the necessity to show gratitude, the obligation to pay visits.”
“Every reader finds himself. The writer's work is merely a kind of optical instrument that makes it possible for the reader to discern what, without this book, he would perhaps never have seen in hi...”
“Real life, life finally uncovered and clarified, the only life in consequence lived to the full, is literature. Life in this sense dwells within all ordinary people as much as the artist. But they ...”
“Our vanity, our passions, our spirit of imitation, our abstract intelligence, our habits have long been at work, and it is the task of art to undo this work of theirs, making us travel back in the ...”
“ it would even be inexact to say that I thought of those who read it as readers of my book. Because they were not, as I saw it, my readers. More exactly they were readers of themselves, my book bei...”
“But it is always easy to put together stories about a past which nobody any longer remembers, like those about journeys to countries where nobody has ever been.”
“And like an aviator who rolls painfully along the ground until, abruptly, he breaks away from it, I felt myself being slowly lifted towards the silent peaks of memory.”
“What we have not had to decipher, to elucidate by our own efforts, what was clear before we looked at it, is not ours. From ourselves comes only that which we drag forth from the obscurity which li...”
“Every individual who makes us suffer can be attached by us to a divinity of which he or she is a mere fragmentary reflexion, the lowest step in the ascent that leads to it, a divinity or an Idea wh...”
“It was that evening, when my mother abdicated her authority, that marked the beginning, along with the slow death of my grandmother, of the decline of my will and of my health. Everything had been ...”
“A general is like a writer who wants to write a play, or a book, but whom the book itself, with the unexpected options that it reveals at one point, the impasse it presents at another, causes to de...”
“No doubt my books too, like my mortal being, would eventually die, one day. But one has to resign oneself to dying. One accepts the thought that in ten years oneself, in a hundred years one's books...”
“But sometimes it is just when everything seems to be lost that we experience a presentiment that may save us; one has knocked on all the doors which lead nowhere, and then, unwittingly, one pushes ...”
“The real propaganda is whatif we are genuinely a living member of a nationwe tell ourselves because we have hope, hope being a symbol of a nation's instinct of self-preservation. To remain blind to...”
“A book is like a large cemetery upon whose tombs one can no longer read the effaced names. On the other hand, sometimes one remembers well the name, without knowing if anything of the being, whose ...”
