Top 100 Muriel Barbery Quotes
#1. But the world, in its present state, is no place for princesses
Muriel Barbery
#2. In any event, it's done, said Papa-which are the words of a coward to the power of ten.
Muriel Barbery
#3. In the end, I wonder if the true movement of the world might not be a voice raised in song.
Muriel Barbery
#4. The lines gradually become their own demiurges and, like some witless yet miraculous participant, I witness the birth on paper of sentences that have eluded my will and appear in spite of me on the sheet, teaching me something that I neither knew nor thought I might want to know.
Muriel Barbery
#5. A teenager who pretends to be an adult is still a teenager. If you imagine that getting high at a party and sleeping around is going to propel you into a state of adulthood, that's like thinking that dressing up as an Indian is going to make you an Indian.
Muriel Barbery
#6. There was only one thing I wanted: to be left alone, without too many demand upon my person, so that for a few moments each day I might be allowed to assuage my hunger.
Muriel Barbery
#7. The only purpose of cats is that they constitute mobile decorative objects.
Muriel Barbery
#9. Tea and mangas instead of coffee and newspapers: something elegant and enchanting, instead of adult power struggles and their sad aggressiveness.
Muriel Barbery
#10. I'm afraid to go into myself and see what's going on in there.
Muriel Barbery
#11. So that's what it's like? All of a sudden all possibility just vanishes? A life full of projects, discussions just started, desires not even fulfilled - it all vanishes in a second and there's nothing left, nothing left to do, and there's no going back?
Muriel Barbery
#12. In our world, that's the way you live your grown-up life: you must constantly rebuild your identity as an adult, the way it's been put together it is wobbly, ephemeral, and fragile, it cloaks despair and, when you're alone in front of the mirror, it tells you the lies you need to believe.
Muriel Barbery
#13. Music plays a huge role in my life. It is music that helps me to endure ... well ... everything there is to endure.
Muriel Barbery
#14. When we disappear, it is the others who die for us
Muriel Barbery
#15. 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.
Muriel Barbery
#16. Literature, for example, serves a pragmatic purpose. Like any form of Art, literature's mission is to make the fulfillment of our essential duties more bearable.
Muriel Barbery
#17. If you have but one friend, make sure you choose her well.
Muriel Barbery
#18. I suddenly felt my spirit expand, for I was capable of grasping the utter beauty of the trees.
Muriel Barbery
#19. How can one betray oneself to such a degree? What corruption greater even than power can lead us to thus deny the proof of pleasure, to hold in contempt that which we have loved? ... I could have written about chouquettes my whole life long; and my whole life long, I wrote against them.
Muriel Barbery
#20. As far as I can see, only psychoanalysis can compete with Christians in their love of drawn-out suffering.
Muriel Barbery
#21. 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.
Muriel Barbery
#22. For in order for consciousness to be aroused, it must have a name. However,
Muriel Barbery
#23. We live each day as if it were merely a rehearsal for the next, and the cosy existence at 7, rue de Grenelle, with its daily proof of continuity, suddenly seems like an island battered by storms.
Muriel Barbery
#24. I don't give a damn about where I happen to be, provided nothing stops me from going into my mind.
Muriel Barbery
#25. Conclusion: better to be a thinking monk than a postmodern
thinker.
Muriel Barbery
#26. We never look beyond our assumptions and what's worse, we have given up trying to meet others; we just meet ourselves.
Muriel Barbery
#28. Truth will out, when the end is near . . . we are all prisoners of our own destiny, must confront it with the knowledge that there is no way out and, in our epilogue, must be the person we have always been deep inside, regardless of any illusions we may have nurtured in our lifetime.
Muriel Barbery
#29. 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.
Muriel Barbery
#30. 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.
Muriel Barbery
#31. Is it possible that we are all sharing the same frenetic agitation, even though we have not sprung from the same earth or the same blood and do not share the same ambition?
Muriel Barbery
#32. I find this a fascinating phenomenon: the ability we have to manipulate ourselves so that the foundation of our beliefs is never shaken.
Muriel Barbery
#33. Moments like this act as magical interludes, placing our hearts at the edge of our souls: fleetingly, yet intensely, a fragment of eternity has come to enrich time ... When tea becomes ritual, it takes its place at the heart of our ability to see greatness in small things.
Muriel Barbery
#34. Eternity: for all its invisibility, we gaze at it.
Muriel Barbery
#35. Some people are incapable of perceiving in the object of their contemplation the very thing that gives it its intrinsic life and breath,
Muriel Barbery
#36. 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.
Muriel Barbery
#37. I'm going to stop undoing, deconstructing, I'm going to start building. Even with Colombe I'll try to do something positive. What matters is what you are doing when you die, and when June 16th comes around, I want to be building.
Muriel Barbery
#38. It is always reassuring to be disabused of one's own paranoia.
Muriel Barbery
#39. 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.
Muriel Barbery
#40. Birch trees
Teach me that I am nothing
And that I am deserving of life
Muriel Barbery
#41. If you change the way you crunch into something, it is like trying something new.
Muriel Barbery
#42. Yes, our eyes may perceive, yet they do not observe; they may believe, yet they do not question; they may receive yet they do not search: they are emptied of desire, with neither hunger nor passion.(Renee Michel)
Muriel Barbery
#43. What is an aristocrat? A woman who is never sullied by vulgarity, although she may be surrounded by it.
Muriel Barbery
#44. Papa is just a kid who's playing the dead serious grown-up.
Muriel Barbery
#45. I may be indigent in name, position, and in appearance, but in my own mind I am an unrivaled goddess -
Muriel Barbery
#46. 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.
Muriel Barbery
#47. Grammar A stratum of consciousness Leading to beauty
Muriel Barbery
#48. I'd seen the older children in class look into books for invisible traces, as if they were driven by the same force and, sinking deeper into silence, they were able to draw from the dead paper something that seemed alive.
Muriel Barbery
#49. Clara looked at Maria and tried to understand what she must do so that Maria would be able to see her. But the little French girl cast all around her the bronze of infinite solitude.
Muriel Barbery
#50. No one seems to have thought of the fact that life is absurd, being a brilliant success has no greater value than being a failure. It's just more comfortable. And even then: I think lucidity gives your success a bitter taste, whereas mediocrity still leaves hope for something.
Muriel Barbery
#51. Beautiful things should belong to beautiful souls.
Muriel Barbery
#52. They have never seen you ... I would recognize you anywhere.
Muriel Barbery
#53. As a child I often wondered whether I would be allowed to live such moments- to inhabit the slow, majestic ballet of the snowflakes, to be released at last from the dreary frenzy of time. Is that what it feels to be naked? All one's clothes are gone, yet one's mind is overladen with finery.
Muriel Barbery
#54. Whether I say to him: "War and Peace is the staging of a determinist vision of history" or "You'd do well to oil the hinges in the garbage room," he will not find that one is any more significant than the other.
Muriel Barbery
#55. How distressing to stumble on a dominant social habitus, just when one was convinced of one's own uniqueness in the matter!
Muriel Barbery
#56. With the exception of love, friendship and the beauty of art, I don't see much else that can nurture human life.
Muriel Barbery
#57. Talent consists not in inventing shapes but in causing those that were invisible to emerge.
Muriel Barbery
#58. 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.
Muriel Barbery
#59. 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
Muriel Barbery
#60. I won't get any better by punishing the people I can't heal.
Muriel Barbery
#61. 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.
Muriel Barbery
#62. 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.
Muriel Barbery
#63. The pathways of hell are hardly foreign; we shall end up there one day if we tarry too long. From a passageway to a pathway: it is an easy fall, without shock or surprises. Every day we are reacquainted with the sadness of the passageway and step by step we clear the path toward our mournful doom.
Muriel Barbery
#64. That is the way a summer rain can take hold in you- like a new heart, beating in time with another's.
Muriel Barbery
#65. It would be so much better if we could share our insecurity, if we could all venture inside ourselves and realize that green beans and vitamin C, however much they nurture us, cannot save lives, or sustain our souls.
Muriel Barbery
#66. Art is life playing to other rhythms."
"The Elegance of the Hedgehog
Muriel Barbery
#67. It would never have crossed her mind spontaneously that somebody might actually need silence. That silence helps you to go inward, that anyone who is interested in something more than just life outside actually needs silence.
Muriel Barbery
#69. To be poor, ugly and, moreover, intelligent condemns one in our society to a dark and disillusioned life ... to beauty all is forgiven.
Muriel Barbery
#70. Civilization is the mastery of violence, the triumph, constantly challenged, over the aggressive nature of the primate. For primates we have been and primates we shall remain, however often we learn to find joy in a camellia on moss. This is the very purpose of education.
Muriel Barbery
#71. have our civilizations become so destitute that we can only live in our fear of want? Can we only enjoy our possessions or our senses when we are certain that we shall always be able to enjoy them?
Muriel Barbery
#72. Shocked to realize how much vitality is required simply to support our primitive requirements, we wonder, bewildered, where Art fits in.
Muriel Barbery
#73. What is the purpose of intelligence if it is not to serve others?
Muriel Barbery
#74. After a day spent running around outside, Clara never went home without first slipping through the orchard, where she would stop to pray to the spirits of enclosure to prepare her for her return within four walls.
Muriel Barbery
#75. 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.
Muriel Barbery
#76. Object lesson: in the world, everything is compensation. When you can't go fast, you push harder
Muriel Barbery
#77. I know that they're all unhappy because nobody loves the right person the way they should and because they don't understand that it's really their own self that they're mad at.
Muriel Barbery
#78. Maybe that's what being alive is about: so we can track down those movments that are dying.
Muriel Barbery
#79. Wine is the refined jewel that only a grown woman will prefer to the sparkling trinkets adored by little girls.
Muriel Barbery
#80. What do you drink
What do you read
At breakfast
And I know who
You are
Muriel Barbery
#82. True novelty is that which does not grow old, despite the passage of time.
Muriel Barbery
#83. If there is one thing I detest, it's when people transform their powerlessness or alienation into a creed.
Muriel Barbery
#84. I'll be searching for those moments of always within never. Beauty, in this world. - Paloma
Muriel Barbery
#85. The real ordeal is not leaving those you love but learning to live without those who don't love you.
Muriel Barbery
#86. 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.
Muriel Barbery
#87. What makes the strength of a soldier isn't the energy he uses trying to intimidate the other guy by sending him a whole lot of signals, it's the strength he's able to concentrate within himself, by staying centered.
Muriel Barbery
#88. I understood that I was suffering because I couldn't make anyone else around me feel better.
Muriel Barbery
#89. In a world full of fossils, the slightest movement of a pebble on the slope of the cliff is nearly enough to bring on a whole series of heart attacks-so you can imagine what happens when someone dynamites the whole mountain!
Muriel Barbery
#90. I also wonder fearfully what will happen when the only friend I have ever had, the only one who knows everything without ever having to ask, leaves behind her this woman whom no one knows, enshrouding her in oblivion.
Muriel Barbery
#92. We musn't forget that our bodies decline, friends die, everyone forgets about us, and the end is solitude,
Muriel Barbery
#93. 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.
Muriel Barbery
#94. God appeases our animal fears and the unbearable prospect that someday all our pleasures will cease.
Muriel Barbery
#95. If you can pretend to ignore the fact that you've got a right hand, what else can you pretend to ignore? Can you have a negative heart, a hollow soul?
Muriel Barbery
#96. 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?
Muriel Barbery
#97. A terroir only exists by virtue of one's childhood mythology ... we have invented these words of tradition rooted deep in the land and identity of a region ... because we want to solidify and objectify the magical, bygone years that preceded the horror of becoming an adult.
Muriel Barbery
#98. The vulgarity of an environment as bleakly desolate as the neon lights of the factory where the men go each morning, like sinners returning to hell ...
Muriel Barbery
#99. 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'?
Muriel Barbery
#100. [N]obody is a greater schoolgirl in spirit than a cynic. Cynics can not relinquish the rubbish they were taught as children: they hold tight to the belief that the word [sic] has meaning and, when things go wrong for them, they consequently adopt the inverse attitude.
Muriel Barbery
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