Top 100 Muriel Barbery Quotes
#1. Who has ever heard of a maid and a concierge making use of their afternoon break to ponder the cultural significance of interior decoration? You would be surprised by what ordinary little people come out with.
Muriel Barbery
#2. 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
#3. If you want to heal
Heal others
And smile or weep
At this very happy reversal of fate
Muriel Barbery
#4. 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.
Muriel Barbery
#5. I may be indigent in name, position, and in appearance, but in my own mind I am an unrivaled goddess -
Muriel Barbery
#6. Papa is just a kid who's playing the dead serious grown-up.
Muriel Barbery
#7. What is an aristocrat? A woman who is never sullied by vulgarity, although she may be surrounded by it.
Muriel Barbery
#8. 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.
Muriel Barbery
#9. 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
#10. If you change the way you crunch into something, it is like trying something new.
Muriel Barbery
#11. Olympe is not one for affected charades, the way some people in the building are, to prove that because she is a well-brought-up-child-of-leftists-without-prejudices she is conversing with the concierge.
Muriel Barbery
#12. Birch trees
Teach me that I am nothing
And that I am deserving of life
Muriel Barbery
#13. 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
#14. It really takes an effort to appear stupider than you are.
Muriel Barbery
#16. It is always reassuring to be disabused of one's own paranoia.
Muriel Barbery
#17. 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
#18. 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
#19. I am an intellectual (who makes fun of other intellectuals).
Muriel Barbery
#20. 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
#21. We can be friends. We can be anything we want to be.
Muriel Barbery
#22. Eternity: for all its invisibility, we gaze at it.
Muriel Barbery
#23. 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.
Muriel Barbery
#24. 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
#25. I belong to the 8% of the world population who calm their apprehension by drowning it in numbers.
Muriel Barbery
#26. 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
#27. 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
#28. 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?
Muriel Barbery
#29. 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
#30. I won't get any better by punishing the people I can't heal.
Muriel Barbery
#31. Day after day, we pace up and down our life the way we pace up and down a passageway.
Muriel Barbery
#32. 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
#33. 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
#34. Talent consists not in inventing shapes but in causing those that were invisible to emerge.
Muriel Barbery
#35. With the exception of love, friendship and the beauty of art, I don't see much else that can nurture human life.
Muriel Barbery
#36. How distressing to stumble on a dominant social habitus, just when one was convinced of one's own uniqueness in the matter!
Muriel Barbery
#37. The strong ones among humans do nothing. They talk and talk again.
Muriel Barbery
#38. 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
#39. 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
#40. I don't think it has ever occurred to her that a text is written above all to be read and to arouse emotions in the reader.
Muriel Barbery
#41. They have never seen you ... I would recognize you anywhere.
Muriel Barbery
#43. To the rich, therefore, falls the burden of Beauty. And if they cannot assume it, then they deserve to die.
Muriel Barbery
#44. We don't recognize each other because other people have become our permanent mirrors. If we actually realized this, if we were able to become aware of the fact that we are only ever looking at ourselves in the other person, that we are alone in the wilderness, we would go crazy.
Muriel Barbery
#45. I thought: pity the poor in spirit who know neither the enchantment nor the beauty of language.
Muriel Barbery
#46. Beautiful things should belong to beautiful souls.
Muriel Barbery
#47. 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
#48. 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
#49. 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
#50. Grammar A stratum of consciousness Leading to beauty
Muriel Barbery
#51. but it is the waiting that is unbearable, this suspension of time when something has not yet happened and where we feel how very useless it is to struggle
Muriel Barbery
#52. People think that children don't know anything. It's enough to make you wonder if grownups were ever children once upon a time.
Muriel Barbery
#53. 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.
Muriel Barbery
#54. True faith, it is a well-known fact, has little regard for chapels, but does believe in the communion of mysteries.
Muriel Barbery
#55. That's what the future is for: to build the present, with real plans, made by living people. - The Elegance of the Hedgehog
Muriel Barbery
#56. When we disappear, it is the others who die for us
Muriel Barbery
#57. Music plays a huge role in my life. It is music that helps me to endure ... well ... everything there is to endure.
Muriel Barbery
#58. Neptune can sense that I love him; his multiple desires are perfectly clear to me. What charms me about the whole business is that he stubbornly insists on remaining a dog, whereas his mistress would like to make a gentleman of him.
Muriel Barbery
#59. To beauty, all is forgiven, even vulgarity. Intelligence no longer seems an adequate compensation for things ...
Muriel Barbery
#60. 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
#61. 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
#62. I'm afraid to go into myself and see what's going on in there.
Muriel Barbery
#63. Tea and mangas instead of coffee and newspapers: something elegant and enchanting, instead of adult power struggles and their sad aggressiveness.
Muriel Barbery
#64. 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
#65. The French are often, when it comes to wine, so formal that they border on the ridiculous.
Muriel Barbery
#68. The only purpose of cats is that they constitute mobile decorative objects.
Muriel Barbery
#69. 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
#70. 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
#71. 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
#72. Life has meaning and we grown-ups know what it is is the universal lie that everyone is supposed to believe. Once you become an adult and you realize that's not true, it's too late.
Muriel Barbery
#73. In the end, I wonder if the true movement of the world might not be a voice raised in song.
Muriel Barbery
#74. I may know that the world is an ugly place, I still don't want to see it.
Muriel Barbery
#75. In any event, it's done, said Papa-which are the words of a coward to the power of ten.
Muriel Barbery
#76. Levin delights in the forgetfulness that movement brings, where the pleasure of doing is marvellously foreign to the striving of the will.
Muriel Barbery
#77. Maybe the greatest anger and frustration come not from unemployment or poverty or the lack of a future but from the feeling that you have no culture, because you've been torn between cultures, between incompatible symbols. How can you exist when you don't know where you are?
Muriel Barbery
#78. Sashimi is velvet dust, verging on silk, or a bit of both, and the extraordinary alchemy of its gossamer essence allows it to preserve a milky density unknown even by clouds ... my cheeks recalled the effects of its profound caress.
Muriel Barbery
#79. 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
#80. 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
#81. 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
#82. So if there is something on the planet that is worth living for, I'd better not miss it, because once you're dead, it's too late for regrets, and if you die by mistake, that is really, really dumb.
Muriel Barbery
#83. 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
#85. We never look beyond our assumptions and what's worse, we have given up trying to meet others; we just meet ourselves.
Muriel Barbery
#86. There are only two moments when everything is possible in this life," said Petrus, "when one drinks, and when one makes up stories.
Muriel Barbery
#87. Conclusion: better to be a thinking monk than a postmodern
thinker.
Muriel Barbery
#88. I don't give a damn about where I happen to be, provided nothing stops me from going into my mind.
Muriel Barbery
#89. But the world, in its present state, is no place for princesses
Muriel Barbery
#90. 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
#91. When you don't know how to build the present, you tell
Muriel Barbery
#92. For in order for consciousness to be aroused, it must have a name. However,
Muriel Barbery
#93. 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
#94. As far as I can see, only psychoanalysis can compete with Christians in their love of drawn-out suffering.
Muriel Barbery
#95. 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
#96. To write entire pages of dazzling prose about a tomato
for Pierre Arthens reviews food as if he were telling a story, and that alone is enough to make him a genius
without ever seeing or holding the tomato is a troubling display of virtuosity.
Muriel Barbery
#97. I suddenly felt my spirit expand, for I was capable of grasping the utter beauty of the trees.
Muriel Barbery
#98. If you have but one friend, make sure you choose her well.
Muriel Barbery
#99. Entrusting one's life is not the same as opening up one's soul.
Muriel Barbery
#100. 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
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