Julien Gracq Quotes

#1. And what can still delight an inert stone except to become, once more, the bed of a raging torrent?

Julien Gracq

#2. On its own, having escaped my grasp, the spool I had loosed was unwinding.

Julien Gracq

#3. A history of literature, unlike history as such, ought to list only victories, for its defeats are no victory for anyone.

Julien Gracq

#4. Floating high on the waters of catastrophe

Julien Gracq

#5. I felt in complicity with the tendency of this country to absolute desolation.

Julien Gracq

#6. but the force of traditions, as in all crumbling empires, grows proportionately with the explicit revelation, in the machinery of government and commerce alike, of the preponderant action of all principles of inertia...

Julien Gracq

#7. A redoubtable alchemy was at work behind impenetrable veils as the forest prepared it's nocturnal mysteries.

Julien Gracq

#8. Solitude and boredom. It's what happens to something that's felt itself gathered together too long, too...exclusively. The vacuum that occurs at its frontiers--a kind of numbness which is generated on its torpid surface as if it had lost the sense of touch--lost contact.

Julien Gracq

#9. There are cities that are damned for some people by the mere fact that they seem created to close off the distances that are the only reason for living.

Julien Gracq