The Life of an Unknown Man Quotes

“The life these words speak of is not worth the ink they are written in.... He now knows that the only words worth writing down arise when language is impossible.”
― Andreï Makine, The Life of an Unknown Man

“This happiness rendered absurd men's desire to dominate, to kill, to possess, thought Volsky. For neither Mila nor he possessed anything. Their joy came from the things one does not possess, from what other people had abandoned or scorned. But, above all, this sunset, this scent of warm bark, these clouds above the young trees in the graveyard, these belonged to everybody!”
― Andreï Makine, The Life of an Unknown Man

“They did not speak, surprised to see how simple, almost poor, happiness could be, yes, materially poor and yet so abundant.”
― Andreï Makine, The Life of an Unknown Man

“This sacrifice, which saved his life, reminded him again that the evil of this world could be put to rout by the will of a single human being.”
― Andreï Makine, The Life of an Unknown Man

“All of this seemed equally trifling to him now. And when he thought again about the world of free people, the difference between it and the miseries and joys of this place seemed minimal. If three tiny fragments of tea leaf chanced to fall into a prisoner's battered cup, he relished them. In Leningrad during the interval at the opera a woman sipped champagne with the same pleasure. Their sufferings were also comparable. Both the prisoner and the woman had painful shoes. Hers were narrow evening shoes which she took off during the performance. The prisoner suffered from what they wore in the camp, section of tyres into which you thrust your foot wrapped in rags and fastened with string. The woman at the opera knew that somewhere in the world there were millions of beings transformed into gaunt animals, their faces blackened by the polar winds. But this did not stop her drinking her glass of wine amid the glittering of the great mirrors. The prisoner knew that a warm and brilliant life was lived elsewhere in tranquility but this did not spoil his pleasure as he chewed those fragments of tea leaf....”
― Andreï Makine, The Life of an Unknown Man

“He had already come to see human lives as one single communal life and it was perhaps this perception that gave him hope.”
― Andreï Makine, The Life of an Unknown Man

“In war the most testing moments are those of peace , for a dead man lying in the grass makes the living see the world as it would be, but for their folly.”
― Andreï Makine, The Life of an Unknown Man

“The though revives in him the oldest memory of his life. A child sees a door closing: without knowing who it is that has just left, he senses it is someone he loves with all his tiny, still mute being.”
― Andreï Makine, The Life of an Unknown Man

“Their own life together was like a subtle watercolor sketch, invisible to other people. They gave the world what it required of them and for the rest of the time were content to be forgotten.”
― Andreï Makine, The Life of an Unknown Man

“An exile's only country is his country's literature.”
― Andreï Makine, The Life of an Unknown Man

“Volsky once more had the feeling that the bond between them was indifferent to the demise of bodies.”
― Andreï Makine, The Life of an Unknown Man

“Once again, without explaining anything, they understood that they must leave. Go away before this world woke up and continued with a life from which they were forever excluded.”
― Andreï Makine, The Life of an Unknown Man

“Historians rewrite the truth every day. What interests us is the truth that gets the reader to reach for his wallet”
― Andreï Makine, The Life of an Unknown Man