Jonathan

“For, when all is said and done, if one trusts what one sees and hears, one has not much reason for hope. Don't put your trust in reason. It is with that that a man puts the rope around his neck.”
― Jean Giono, Blue Boy

“I know that I am a sensualist.
If I have such a love for the memory of my father, if I can never separate myself from his image, if time cannot cut the thread, it is because in the experiences of every single day I realize all that he has done for me. He was the first to recognize my sensuousness. He was the first to see, with his gray eyes, that sensuousness that made me touch a wall and imagine the roughness like porous skin. That sensuousness that prevented me from learning music, putting a higher price on the intoxication of listening than on the joy of being skilful, that sensuousness that made me like a drop of water pierced by the sun, pierced by the shapes and colors in the world, bearing in truth, like a drop of water, the form, the color, the sound, the sensation, physically in my flesh.”
― Jean Giono, Blue Boy

“The bark of the tree, the scale of the foot, that was all there was between the blood of the bird and tree. There were only these barriers of skin between.”
― Jean Giono, Blue Boy

“She was an agreeable country lady, very ugly; with so much goodness in her blind eye, so much goodness in her good eye, so much goodness in her moustache, in her snuff-taking nose, in her sagging cheeks, in her black-lipped mouth, that she was frightfully ugly. It was an ugliness made of all that sacrifice, of all that martyrdom which constitutes real goodness. In the photograph that I saw in the bedroom where she was holding in her hand the forefinger of the shepherd Massot, all rigged out for the wedding, she was beautiful and fresh and seemingly inflated with an artless loveliness. That creature had to be gradually broken, burned, twisted, kneaded; the eye blinded, the body made ungainly, be cooked in the oven of goodness like a brick or a pot; it had to forget everything but that little red fruit that was the heart. She had fully succeeded.”
― Jean Giono, Blue Boy