Pierre et Jean Quotes

“The great artists are those who impose their personal vision upon humanity.”
― Guy de Maupassant, Pierre et Jean

“There were some children round him playing in the dust on the paths. They had long fair hair, and with very earnest faces and solemn attention were making little mountains of sand so as to stamp on them and squash them underfoot.
Pierre was going through one of those gloomy days when one looks into every corner of one's soul and shakes out every crease.
'Our occupations are like the work of those kids,' he thought. Then he wondered whether after all the wisest course in life was not to beget two or three of these little useless beings and watch them grow with complacent curiosity. And he was touched by the desire to marry. You aren't so lost when you're not alone any more. At any rate you can hear somebody moving near you in times of worry and uncertainty, and it is something anyway to be able to say words of love to a woman when you are feeling down.
He began thinking about women.
His knowledge of them was very limited, as all he had had in the Latin Quarter was affairs of a fortnight or so, dropped when the month's money ran out and picked up again or replaced the following month. Yet kind, gentle, consoling creatures must exist. Hadn't his own mother brought sweet reasonableness and charm to his father's home? How he would have loved to meet a woman, a real woman!
He leaped up, determined to go and pay a little visit to Mme Rosémilly.
But he quickly sat down again. No, he didn't like that one!”
― Guy de Maupassant, Pierre et Jean

“Charming, charming,' the lawyer said at intervals.”
― Guy de Maupassant, Pierre et Jean

“When he woke up in the darkness of his hot and stuffy room he felt, even before his mind began working again, that painful oppression or malaise of the soul left in us by some grief we have slept on. It seems as though the misfortune which merely grazed us the day before has worked its way during our sleep into our very flesh and is bruising and exhausting it like a fever.”
― Guy de Maupassant, Pierre et Jean

“He felt better, pleased to have understood, to have caught himself out, and to have revealed the other self which is to be found in each of us.”
― Guy de Maupassant, Pierre et Jean

“Le baiser frappe comme la foudre, l'amour passe comme un orage, puis la vie, de nouveau, se calme comme le ciel, et recommence ainsi qu'avant. Se souvient- on d'un nuage ?”
― Guy de Maupassant, Pierre et Jean

“cette oppression douloureuse, ce malaise de l’ame que laisse en nous lé chagrin sur lequel on a dormi. Il semble que lé malheur, dont lé choc nous a seulement heurte la veille, se soit glisse, durant nôtre repos, dans nôtre chair elle-meme, qu’il meurtrit et fatigue comme une fièvre.
هذا الضيق المؤلم، إنزعاج الروح الذي ننام عليه يترك فينا الأسى. ويبدو أن صدمة التعاسة التي ضربتنا بالأمس تنزلق خلال راحتنا، في لحمنا نفسه فتُمرض وتًتعب كالحمى.”
― Guy de Maupassant, Pierre et Jean

“The love between man and woman is a voluntary pact in which the one who falls short is only guilty of perfidy, but when a woman has become a mother her duty is greater because nature has entrusted the human species to her. If she fails then she is a coward, unworthy and infamous.”
― Guy de Maupassant, Pierre et Jean

“Her husband was not malicious, but he did bully, though without anger or animosity, as do petty tyrants who think that giving orders means swearing. In front of any stranger he behaved himself, but in his family he let himself go and pretended to be terrible although he was really scared of everybody.”
― Guy de Maupassant, Pierre et Jean

“But a vague jealousy, one of those dormant jealousies that develop between brothers or sisters almost unnoticed until maturity, only to burst out when one of them marries or has a stroke of good fortune, kept them constantly on the alert in a fraternal, unaggressive hostility. They did love each other, yet they kept an eye on each other.”
― Guy de Maupassant, Pierre et Jean

“Comme c'est misérable et trompeur, la vie !.. Il n'y a rien qui dure.”
― Guy De Mauspassant, Pierre et Jean

“Loveless?--was it possible then that a woman should not love? That a young and pretty woman, living in Paris, reading books, applauding actresses for dying of passion on the stage, could live from youth to old age without once feeling her heart touched? He would not believe it
of any one else; why should she be different from all others, though she was his mother?”
― Maupassant (de) Guy, Pierre et Jean