Julien Gracq Quotes

#1. The barometer for judging the character of people, in regard human rights, is now those who consider themselves gay, homosexual, lesbian. The judgment as to whether you can trust the future, the social advancement - depending on people - will be judged on where they come out on that question.

Bayard Rustin

#2. 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

#3. 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

#4. The loss of national identity is the greatest defeat a nation can know, and it is inevitable under the contemporary form of colonization.

Slobodan Milosevic

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

Julien Gracq

#6. If women be educated for dependence; that is, to act according to the will of another fallible being, and submit, right or wrong, to power, where are we to stop?

Mary Wollstonecraft

#7. 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

#8. The loss of life will be irreplaceable.

Dan Quayle

#9. On the one hand our body is our temple, but on the other we despise it for being mere machinery. We've become accustomed to valuing mind over body. We feel nothing but contempt for the factors relating to our physical survival.

Frank Schatzing

#10. Eyes watching always
Shadows in shadows they wait
A black feather falls
First accepted, loved
Then betrayed-spit in the face
Vengeance sweet like dots.

Kristin Cast

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

Julien Gracq

#12. Floating high on the waters of catastrophe

Julien Gracq

#13. It's better to be the best connected than the most connected.

Reid Hoffman

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

Julien Gracq

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

Julien Gracq

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

Julien Gracq

#17. War is capitalism with the gloves off

Tom Stoppard

#18. To make matters worse, Linda, it appears, is madly in love with a monster of a Scotsman, who came to dinner last night in his kilt. Those hairy old knees decided us. "The Mountains I can bear," said Loudie. "Natives in the semi-nude at dinner time is another matter. I leave tomorrow.

Nancy Mitford