Mathias Énard > Quotes

“Night does not communicate with the day. It burns up in it. Night is carried to the stake at dawn. And its people along with it—the drinkers, the poets, the lovers. We are a people of the banished, of the condemned.”
― Mathias Énard, Parle-leur de batailles, de rois et d'éléphants

“Beauty comes from abandoning the refuge of the old forms for the uncertainty of the present.”
― Mathias Énard, Parle-leur de batailles, de rois et d'éléphants

“A pošto su to deca, pričaj im o bitkama
i kraljevima, đavolima, slonovima i
anđelima, ali ne zaboravi da im pričaš
o ljubavi i sličnim stvarima.

(epigraf, Radjard Kipling - Životna smetnja)”
― Mathias Énard, Parle-leur de batailles, de rois et d'éléphants

“I know that men are children who chase away their despair with anger, their fear with love; they respond to the void by building castles and temples. They cling to stories, they shove them in front of them like banners; everyone makes some story his own so as to attach himself to the crowd that shares it.”
― Mathias Énard, Tell Them of Battles, Kings, and Elephants

“We remained travelers, enclosed in the self, capable, possibly, of transforming ourselves in contact with alterity, but certainly not of experiencing it profoundly. We are spies, we make the rapid, furtive contact of spies. When”
― Mathias Énard, Compass

“There is nothing more majestic than a bridge. No poem or story can ever have that strength.”
― Mathias Énard, Parle-leur de batailles, de rois et d'éléphants

“I’m not looking for love. I’m looking for consolation. Comfort for all these countries we have lost since we left our mother’s womb, which we replace with stories, like greedy children, our eyes wide open to the storyteller. The truth is that there is nothing but suffering: we try to forget, in the arms of strangers, that we will soon vanish.”
― Mathias Énard, Parle-leur de batailles, de rois et d'éléphants

“.. everything is more difficult once you reach man’s estate, everything rings falser, but sometimes the gods offer you flashes of clairvoyance, moments when you contemplate the whole universe, the infinite wheel of worlds, you see yourself, from high up, for few instants truly before leaving, propelled into the next thing, toward the end…”
― Mathias Énard, Zone

“Since the dawn of time people have had to humiliate themselves before the Caesars.”
― Mathias Énard, Parle-leur de batailles, de rois et d'éléphants

“Noć se ne obraća danu. Ona u njemu sagoreva. U zoru se prinosi na lomaču. A sa njom i njeni ljudi, pijanci, pesnici, ljubavnici.”
― Mathias Énard, Parle-leur de batailles, de rois et d'éléphants

“He hears Saint Paul’s phrase in his head: “To learn how to pray, you must go to sea,” and he understands. The immensity of the watery plain frightens him.”
― Mathias Énard, Parle-leur de batailles, de rois et d'éléphants

“Night does not communicate with the day. it burns up in it. Night is carried to the stake at dawn. And its people along with it — the drinkers, the poets, the lovers. We are a people of the banished, of the condemned. I do not know you. You want to join us. Your fear and confusion propel you into our arms; you want to nestle in there, but your tough body keeps clinging to its certainties; it pushes desire away, refuses to surrender. I don’t blame you. You live in another prison, a world of strength and bravery where you think you can be carried aloft in triumph; you think you can win the goodwill of the powerful, you seek glory and wealth. But when night falls, you tremble. You don’t drink, for you are afraid; you know that the burning sensation of alcohol plunges you into weakness, into an irresistible need to find caresses, a vanished tenderness, the lost world of childhood, gratification, the need to find peace when faced with the glistering uncertainty of darkness. You think you desire my beauty, the softness of my skin, the brilliance of my smile, the delicacy of my limbs, the crimson of my lips, but actually, what you want without realizing it is for your fears to disappear, for healing, union, return, oblivion. This power inside you devours you in solitude. So you suffer, lost in an infinite twilight, one foot in day and the other in night.”
― Mathias Énard, Parle-leur de batailles, de rois et d'éléphants

“Often one wishes for things to repeat; you want to relive a moment that escaped, return to a gesture that didn’t take place or a word that wasn’t uttered; you try to find again the sounds that were left in your throat, the caress you didn’t dare give, the tightening of the chest that is gone forever.”
― Mathias Énard, Parle-leur de batailles, de rois et d'éléphants

“He begins to recite some verses. A Persian poem. I don’t stop desiring when my desire Is fulfilled, when my mouth wins The red lips of my beloved, When my soul expires in the sweetness of her breath. Arslan smiles, he has recognized the inimitable Hafez of Shiraz, which is confirmed by the last couplet: And you will always invoke the name of Hafez In the company of the sad and the brokenhearted.”
― Mathias Énard, Parle-leur de batailles, de rois et d'éléphants

“Silence comes after everything. Everything is enclosed in silence. Everything is extinguished there, or falls asleep there.”
― Mathias Énard, Compass

“... the gods will feast on the smoke of rams and ewes that all these lovely people will offer them, on the Temple Mount three times promised, there where the heads of Palestinian suicide bombers take off for the skies, corks of divine champagne, during the celebration of the end of days, the last fireworks, prefigured by the explosions of war, and it’s no doubt only a question of patience before the universe decides to become infinitesimal again and sucks all these burning memories into nothingness…”
― Mathias Énard, Zone

“.. after all a photographer is a kind of spy bought by the highest bidder, a parasite who lives off war without fighting it…”
― Mathias Énard, Zone

“(...) cet espoir se dilua dans le gris qui paraissait attrister même les arbres de la rue Custine, engoncés dans leurs grilles de fonte, cette limitation si parisienne à l'acharnement végétal (rien ne représente plus l'esprit moderne que cette étrange idée, la grille d'arbre. On a beau vous persuader que ces imposants morceaux de ferraille sont là pour protéger le marronnier ou le platane, pour leur bien, pour éviter qu'on ne nuise à leurs racines, il n'existe pas, je crois, de représentation plus terrible de la lutte à mort entre la ville et la nature, ni de signe plus éloquent de la victoire de la première sur la seconde)”
― Mathias Enard, Boussole

“He will express his suffering more clearly; he will compose two ghazals on the burning of jealousy, a sweet burning, for it fortifies love by consuming it.”
― Mathias Énard, Parle-leur de batailles, de rois et d'éléphants

“Die Teesträucher fließen die Hügel hinab; es sind kleine Büsche von rundem Wuchs mit länglichen Blättern, die dicht nebeneinander gepflanzt werden: von oben betrachtet sehen die Felder aus wie ein grünes, eng gelegtes Mosaik aus Knöpfen, bemoosten Kugeln, die sich über die Hänge des Himalaya ziehen.”
― Mathias Énard, Compass

“In der Liebe können wir die Leiden des anderen ebenso wenig teilen wie unsere eigenen heilen.”
― Mathias Énard, Compass

“I know that men are children who chase away their despair with anger, their fear with love; they respond to the void by building castles and temples. They cling to stories, they shove them in front of them like banners; everyone makes some story his own so as to attach himself to the crowd that shares it. You conquer people by telling them of battles, kings, elephants, and marvelous beings; by speaking to them about the happiness they will find beyond death, the bright light that presided over their birth, the angels wheeling around them, the demons menacing them, and love, love, that promise of oblivion and satiety. Tell them about all of that, and they will love you; they will make you the equal of a god. But you will know, since you are here pressed against me, you ill-smelling Frank whom chance has brought to my hands, you will know that all this is nothing but a perfumed veil hiding the eternal suffering of night.”
― Mathias Énard, Parle-leur de batailles, de rois et d'éléphants

“Decidedly these Ottomans are masters of light. Bayezid’s library, like his mosque, on a hill, is bathed in an omnipresent but discreet sunlight, whose rays never fall directly on the readers. You need all the attention of a Michelangelo to discover, in the knowledgeable game of placement and orientation of windows, the secret of the miraculous harmony of this simple space whose majesty, instead of crushing the visitor, places him at the center of the arrangement, flatters him, exalts and reassures him.”
― Mathias Énard, Parle-leur de batailles, de rois et d'éléphants

“La vita è una sinfonia di Mahler, non torna mai indietro, non ricomincia mai daccapo.”
― Mathias Énard, Compass

“We all ape God in His absence.”
― Mathias Énard, Parle-leur de batailles, de rois et d'éléphants

“At first sight Mesihi’s is a very different art: the height of the letter, the thickness of the line that gives movement, the disposition of the consonants, space stretching out according to sounds. Clinging to his reed pen, the calligrapher-poet gives a face to words, to phrases, to lines or verses.”
― Mathias Énard, Parle-leur de batailles, de rois et d'éléphants

“Danke für diese diplomatische Nachricht, sie hat mich zum Lachen gebracht – das ist im Augenblick sonst ziemlich schwierig. Du fehlst mir sehr. Oder vielmehr, alles fehlt mir sehr. Ich habe das Gefühl, aus der Welt zu sein, ich schwimme in der Trauer. Ich brauche nur dem Blick meiner Mutter zu begegnen, und schon beginnen wir beide zu weinen. Wir weinen über die Traurigkeit des anderen, über die Leere, die wir auf dem erschöpften Gesicht des anderen sehen. Paris ist ein Grab, nur Erinnerungsfetzen. Ich setze meine Streifzüge durch die literarischen Gefilde des Opiums fort. Ich weiß nicht mehr genau, wie es um mich steht.”
― Mathias Énard, Compass

“Below him, in the choir, the faithful are prostrating on countless rugs. They kneel down, place their foreheads on the ground, then get up, look at their hands held out in front of them as if they were holding a book, then place them behind their ears the better to hear a silent clamor, and then they kneel down again. They are murmuring, chanting, and the hum of all these inaudible words buzzes and mingles with the pure light, without any pious images, without any sculptures to divert the gaze from God; just a few arabesques, snakes of blank ink, seem to float in the air. Strange beings, these Mohammedans. Strange beings, these Mohammedans and their austere cathedral, without even an image of their Prophet.”
― Mathias Énard, Parle-leur de batailles, de rois et d'éléphants

“«En la vida hay heridas que roen como una lepra el alma en la soledad», escribe el iraní Sadeq Hedayat al principio de su novela La lechuza ciega: ese”
― Mathias Énard, Brújula

“Hedayat aveva una di quelle ferite del sé che fanno andare nel mondo barcollando, e quella incrinatura si è poi aperta fino a diventare una crepa; e come nell’oppio, come nell’alcol, come in tutto ciò che ti apre in due, non si tratta di una malattia ma di una decisione, la volontà di spezzare l’essere, fino in fondo.”
― Mathias Énard, Compass