Pascale > Pascale's Quotes

“Victor Hugo stopped talking and everybody went to bed.”
― Adèle Hugo, Victor Hugo raconté par Adèle Hugo (Collection Les Mémorables)

“History is what people want to remember.”
― Jane Stevenson, The Empress of the Last Days

“Dying is a matter of slapstick and pratfalls. The ageing process is not gradual or gentle. It rushes up, pushes you over and runs off laughing. No one should grow old who isn't ready to appear ridiculous.”
― John Mortimer, The Summer of a Dormouse

“Greed is a way of avoiding making choices: if I have everything I don't have to choose what I want. And choosing what I want means giving up some pleasures for other pleasures.”
― Adam Phillips, On Balance

“There is an hour when you realize: here is what you have been given. More than this, you won't receive. And what this is, what your life has come to, will be taken from you. In time.”
― Joyce Carol Oates, Wild Nights!: Stories About the Last Days of Poe, Dickinson, Twain, James, and Hemingway

“Pity me that the heart is slow to learn
What the swift mind beholds at every turn.”
― Edna St. Vincent Millay, The Harp-Weaver and Other Poems

“I think people often try to find through sex things that are much easier to find in other ways.”
― Patricia Highsmith, The Price of Salt

“I can't think, if people want gods, why not the Greek ones; they were so useful in emergencies, and such enterprising and entertaining companions. Capricious, of course, but helpful, unless one offended them. I don't know why paganism has so quite gone out in England.”
― Rose Macaulay, The World My Wilderness

“Sometimes I think the purpose of life is to reconcile us to its eventual loss by wearing us down, by proving, however long it takes, that life isn't all it's cracked up to be.”
― Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending

“The only satisfactions available are the satisfactions of reality, which are themselves frustrating.”
― Adam Phillips, Missing Out: In Praise of the Unlived Life

“What was any art but an effort to make a sheath, a mold in which to imprison for a moment the shining, elusive element which is life itself.”
― Willa Cather

“Since landscape changes like this from country to country it must owe very little to Nature: Nature is no more than the canvas, and landscape the self-portrait the people who live there paint on it. But no, hold hard! Surely, rather the people who have lived there; for landscape is always at least one generation behind in its portrayal.”
― Richard Hughes, The Fox in the Attic

“In three words I can sum up everything I've learned about life: it goes on.”
― Robert Frost

“What can he mean by the lambent pupilability of slow, low, dry chat, five notes below the natural tone, which you know, madam, is little more than a whisper?”
― Sterne Laurence 1713-1768 Laurence

“Vous croyez qu'il faut suivre l'ordre chronologique parce qu'on doit être réaliste, et que c'est la vie même. Vous oubliez que ce n'est là qu'une convention littéraire. Quand nous nous sommes connus, vous aviez vingt-cinq ans, j'ai appris bien plus tard comment vous étiez à seize ans, à dix, à cinq, votre premier été au bord de la mer, l'histoire de vos leçons d'anglais. J'ignore encore bien des choses: les trois quarts. Et vous voudriez que je fasse métier de restaurateur, que j'assemble les pièces, que je remplace celles qui manquent et mette des chevilles aux jointures? Vous appelez vie cette fabrication de meubles anciens? Du temps de Voltaire, le fauteuil Voltaire devait s'appeler fauteuil tout court.”
― Vladimir Pozner

“On peut rire de tout, mais pas à n'importe quel moment.”
― Julien Blanc-Gras, Touriste

“Les moments naissent un à un de la nuit, poursuivent, souples et noirs, quelque mystérieuse besogne, et saisis tout vifs par le temps sont jetés, chauds encore, comme les taupes, dans le sac du passé.”
― Marie Gevers

“Les mois s'ouvrent comme les fleurs de navets, en quatre pétales de semaines; les jours de la semaine, comme des étamines, entourent les pistils dorés des dimanches. Peut-être que les mois ne sont eux-mêmes que les feuilles des saisons: quatre trèfles par an; et les saisons forment les quatre pétales d'une immense crucifère, l'année. Elles fleurissent, se fanent, refleurissent...”
― Marie Gevers

“Studies of cancer patients show that attitudes of mind have very little effect on clinical outcome. We may say we are fighting cancer, but cancer is merely fighting us; we may think we have beaten it, when it has only gone away to regroup. It is all just the universe doing its stuff, and we are the stuff it is being done to. And so, perhaps, with grief. We imagine we have battled against it, been purposeful, overcome sorrow, scrubbed the rust from our soul, when all that has happened is that grief has moved elsewhere, shifted its interest.”
― Julian Barnes, Levels of Life

“La jeunesse est un temps merveilleux qui aboutit presque toujours à une trahison de soi-même dont on ignore comment elle s'est faite, et dont le reste de la vie se passe à contempler les conséquences dans un consentement dont on ne s'étonne même plus.”
― Louis Guilloux

“La vérité, c'est qu'il y a une quantité incroyable de gouttes qui ne font pas déborder le vase. C'est fait pour ça.”
― Romain Gary, Gros-Câlin

“Si on ne pouvait pas acheter de l'amour avec de l'argent, l'amour perdrait beaucoup de sa valeur et l'argent aussi.”
― Romain Gary, Gros-Câlin

“Les miroirs sont nos auberges espagnoles.”
― Antoine Blondin, L'Humeur vagabonde

“La langue n'a pas inventé de nom pour qualifier ceux qui sont privés de leurs enfants. En revanche, l'homme qui ne travaille pas est un chômeur.”
― Antoine Blondin, L'Humeur vagabonde

“On ne parle pas assez quand il en est temps et les âmes se boucanent côte à côte.”
― Antoine Blondin, L'Humeur vagabonde

“It is so small a thing, the life of a man, and yet there is time to do great things, fragments of a common task.”
― Paul Gauguin, The Writings of a Savage

“Soul mate" isn't a pre-existing condition. It's an earned title. They're made over time.”
― Pamela Druckerman

“It reminds me too much of how little life changes: how, without dramatic events or high resolves, without tragedy, without even pathos, a reasonably endowed, reasonable well-intentioned man can walk through the world's great kitchen from end to end and arrive at the back door hungry.”
― Wallace Stegner, The Spectator Bird

“She felt really quite unequal to the tedious process of reconciliation which, in view of the fact that she was sorry, seemed to her highly unnecessary, like some legal routine or the difficulty of getting passports. Her interest in expiation quickly vanished in the face of its actuality.”
― Mary McCarthy, The Oasis

“His flexible mind extended to take in his opponent's position and then snapped back like an elastic, with the illusion that it had covered ground.”
― Mary McCarthy, The Oasis