The Anomaly

by Hervé Le Tellier

If you’re going to despair about life, the universe, and everything, you might as well do it on a Parisian café terrace.

But love means not being able to stop your heart trampling all over your intelligence.

“Hope keeps us waiting in the corridor to happiness. If we secure what we hope for, we enter the anteroom of unhappiness.”

The lowest trash always have the option of taking refuge in patriotism.

“Nobody lives long enough to know just how little interest anybody takes in anybody.”

Tired people are argumentative. Exhausted people a lot less so.

No author writes the reader’s book, no reader reads the author’s book. At most, they may have the final period in common.

There is a life after death, particularly other people’s.

you can always lie to yourself but what’s the point of lying to you?—by

Dying is all the more intolerable if you know when.

There are some loves that can be added together, and others that can never be divided.

“No one takes their own life, didn’t they teach you that? There are just tortured souls who escape by killing their torturer.”

Religion is a carnivorous fish in the abyssal depths. It emits the feeblest of light and needs a vast darkness around it to attract its prey.

But I still don’t really like the word ‘destiny.’ It’s just a target that people draw after the fact, in the place where the arrow landed.”