Total Chaos Quotes

“Sometimes, all it takes is one gesture, one word, to change the course of someone's life. Even if you know it won't last forever.”
― Jean-Claude Izzo, Total Chaos

“The sensuality of desperate lives. Only poets talk like that. But poetry has never had an answer for anything. All it does it bear witness. To despair. And desperate lives. ”
― Jean-Claude Izzo, Total Chaos

“I felt suffocated. And alone. More alone than ever. Every year, I ostentatiously crossed out of my address book any friend who'd made a racist remark, neglected those whose only ambition was a new car and a Club Med vacation, and forgot all those who played the Lottery. I loved fishing and silence. Walking the hills. Drinking cold Cassis, Lagavulin, or Oban late into the night. I didn't talk much. Had opinions about everything. Life and death. Good and evil. I was a film buff. Loved music. I'd stopped reading contemporary novels. More than anything, I loathed half-hearted, spineless people.”
― Jean-Claude Izzo, Total Chaos

“Marseilles isn't a city for tourists. There's nothing to see. Its beauty can't be photographed. It can only be shared. It's a place where you have to take sides, be passionately for or against. Only then can you see what there is to see. And you realize, too late, that you're in the middle of a tragedy. An ancient tragedy in which the hero is death. In Marseilles, even to lose you have to know how to fight.”
― Jean-Claude Izzo, Total Chaos

“Πυγμαχία δεν είναι μόνο να χτυπάς. Το πρώτο που πρέπει να μάθεις είναι να δέχεσαι χτυπήματα. Να τα αντέχεις. Και να φροντίζεις ώστε να σου κάνουν το μικρότερο δυνατό κακό. Η ζωή τίποτε άλλο δεν είναι από μια σειρά γύρων, ο ένας μετά τον άλλο. Να τρως και να δίνεις γροθιές, ξανά και ξανά. Να τις αντέχεις. Να μη λυγίζεις. Και να βαράς εκεί που πρέπει , τη στιγμή που πρέπει.”
― Jean-Claude Izzo, Total Chaos

“Pleasure involves respect, and respect starts with words.”
― Jean-Claude Izzo, Total Chaos

“Dawn is merely an illusion that the world is beautiful.”
― Jean-Claude Izzo, Total Chaos

“I don't like answering private questions. The answers are often ambiguous and can be interpreted in different ways. Even when the other person is close to you.”
― Jean-Claude Izzo, Total Chaos

“...I understand where you're coming from. I know it isn't just a question of revenge. It's the feeling there are some things you can't let pass. If you did, you wouldn't be able to look at yourself in the mirror afterwards.”
― Jean-Claude Izzo, Total Chaos

“Days are only beautiful early in the morning. I should have remembered that. Dawn is merely an illusion that the world is beautiful. When the world opens its eyes, reality reasserts itself, and you're back with the same old shit.”
― Jean-Claude Izzo, Total Chaos

“So much violence. If God existed, I'd have strangled him on the spot. Without batting an eyelid. And with all the fury of the damned.”
― Jean-Claude Izzo, Total Chaos

“Of course, every new caress would only have taken us closer to the inevitable: break-ups, tears, disillusionment, sadness, anguish, loathing. It wouldn’t have made the slightest difference to the mess that human beings make of this world.”
― Jean-Claude Izzo, Total Chaos: Book One in the Marseilles Trilogy

“Leila was untouchable. She was in my heart now, and I'd carry her always, on this earth that every day gives men a chance.”
― Jean-Claude Izzo, Total Chaos

“Happiness. One day. Ten thousand years ago.”
― Jean-Claude Izzo, Total Chaos

“You ought to get out more. You know, Pérol, we should go out some evening, just you and me. Otherwise, you lose touch with reality. You know what I mean? You lose your sense of reality, and hey presto, you don't know which shelf you left your soul on. The shelf where you put your friends. The shelf where you put your women. Stage right, stage left. Or in the shoebox. You turn around and you find you're stuck in the bottom drawer, with the accessories.”
― Jean-Claude Izzo, Total Chaos

“Why was it so difficult to make new friends once you were past forty Was it because we didn't have dreams anymore, only regrets?”
― Jean-Claude Izzo, Total Chaos

“Nobody was speaking. Only the cicadas continued their whine, indifferent to human tragedies.”
― Jean-Claude Izzo, Total Chaos

“But poetry has never had an answer for anything. All it does is bear witness. To despair. And desperate lives.”
― Jean-Claude Izzo, Total Chaos: Book One in the Marseilles Trilogy

“Only the cicadas continued their whine, indifferent to human tragedies.”
― Jean-Claude Izzo, Total Chaos: Book One in the Marseilles Trilogy

“Her fingers were burning hot. I felt as if she was branding me. For life.”
― Jean-Claude Izzo, Total Chaos: Book One in the Marseilles Trilogy

“We’re slaves, not idiots. That’s all you have to understand.”
― Jean-Claude Izzo, Total Chaos: Book One in the Marseilles Trilogy

“Killing was easy. Dying was something else.”
― Jean-Claude Izzo, Total Chaos

“The one thing I could give them was a smile. I've always been good at smiles.”
― Jean-Claude Izzo, Total Chaos

“Ordinary French people. Citizens of fear.”
― Jean-Claude Izzo, Total Chaos

“It's at moment of misfortune that we remember we're all exiles.”
― Jean-Claude Izzo, Total Chaos

“I was the last, the sole survivor. The most honorable thing a survivor could do was survive. If you stayed on your feet, stayed alive, you were the winner.”
― Jean-Claude Izzo, Total Chaos

“The novels, travel books and poems I read had a particular smell. The smell of cellars. An almost spicy smell, a mixture of dust and grease. Verdigris. Books today don't have a smell. They don't even smell of print.”
― Jean-Claude Izzo, Total Chaos

“After the love, I went back on the other side of my border. Back to the territory where I have my own rules, my own laws, my own code, and my own stupid obsessions. The territory where I lose my way, and where I lost the women who ventured onto”
― Jean-Claude Izzo, Total Chaos: Book One in the Marseilles Trilogy

“We were all moving to a pre-ordained end. You just had to open the papers and read the international news, or the crime reports. We didn't need nuclear weapons. We were killing each other with prehistoric savagery. We were just dinosaurs, and the worst thing of all was that we knew it.”
― Jean-Claude Izzo, Total Chaos

“We fought over a girl's smile, not because of the color of our skins. It created friendships, not hatreds.”
― Jean-Claude Izzo, Total Chaos