Life Quotes

“From this, one can make a deduction which is quite certainly the ultimate truth of jigsaw puzzles: despite appearances, puzzling is not a solitary game: every move the puzzler makes, the puzzlemaker has made before; every piece the puzzler picks up, and picks up again, and studies and strokes, every combination he tries, and tries a second time, every blunder and every insight, each hope and each discouragement have all been designed, calculated, and decided by the other.”
― Georges Perec, Life: A User's Manual

“I have neither one nor the other, and that has been going on for so long now that I have stopped wondering whether it is hate or love which gives us the strength to continue this life of lies, which provides the formidable energy that allows us to go on suffering, and hoping.”
― Georges Perec, Life: A User's Manual

“Who, on seeing a Parisian apartment house, has never thought of it as indestructible? A bomb, a fire, an earthquake could certainly bring it down, but what else? In the eyes of an individual, of a family, or even a dynasty, a town, street, or house seems unchangeable, untouchable by time, by the ups and downs of human life, to such an extent that we believe we can compare and contrast the fragility of our condition to the invulnerability of stone.”
― Georges Perec, Life: A User's Manual

“Grace Slaughter - the surname of her fifth husband, a manufacturer of pharmaceutical toners and "prophylactic" products, recently deceased due to a ruptured peritoneum - was sharply chauvinistic and would allow no more than two exceptions to her all-American views, exceptions with which her first spouse, Astolphe de Guéménolé-Longtgermain, no doubt had something to do: cooking had to be done by French nationals of male gender, laundry and ironing by British subjects of female gender (and absolutely not by Chinese). That allowed Henri Fresnel to be hired without having to hide his original citizenship, which is what had to be done by the director (Hungarian), the set designer (Russian), the choreographer (Lithuanian), the dancers (Italian, Greek, Egyptian), the scriptwriter (English), the librettist (Austrian), and the composer, a Finn of Bulgarian descent with a large dash of Romanian.”
― Georges Perec, Life: A User's Manual

“Sometimes Valène dreamt of cataclysms and tempests, of whirlwinds that would carry the whole house off like a wisp of straw and display the infinite marvels of the solar system to its shipwrecked inhabitants; or that an unseen crack would run through the building from top to bottom, like a shiver, and with a long, deep, snapping sound it would open in two and be slowly swallowed up in an indescribable yawning chasm; then hordes would overrun it, bleary-eyed monsters, giant insects with steel mandibles, blind termites, great white worms with insatiable mouths: the wood would crumble, the stone would turn to sand, the cupboards would collapse under their own weight, all would return to dust. But no. Only these shabby squabbles over buckets and tubs, over matches and sinks. And behind that ever-closed door the morbid gloom of that slow revenge, that ponderous business of two senile monomaniacs churning over their feigned histories and their wretched traps and snares.”
― Georges Perec, Life: A User's Manual

“The second project is in the field of metaphysics: with the aim of showing that, in the words of Professor H. M. Tooten, “evolution is a hoax”, Olivier Gratiolet has undertaken an exhaustive inventory of all the imperfections and inadequacies to which the human organism is heir: vertical posture, for example, gives man only a precarious balance: muscular tension alone keeps him upright, thus causing constant fatigue and discomfort in the spinal column, which, although sixteen times stronger than it would have been were it straight, does not allow man to carry a meaningful weight on his back; feet ought to be broader, more spread out, more specifically suited to locomotion, whereas what he has are only atrophied hands deprived of prehensile ability; legs are not sturdy enough to bear the body’s weight, which makes them bend, and moreover they are a strain on the heart, which has to pump blood about three feet up, whence come swollen feet, varicose veins, etc.; hip joints are fragile and constantly prone to arthrosis or serious fractures; arms are atrophied and too slender; hands are frail, especially the little finger, which has no use, the stomach has no protection whatsoever, no more than the genitals do; the neck is rigid and limits rotation of the head, the teeth do not allow food to be grasped from the sides, the sense of smell is virtually nil, night vision is less than mediocre, hearing is very inadequate; man’s hairless and unfurred body affords no protection against cold, and, in sum, of all the animals of creation, man, who is generally considered the ultimate fruit of evolution, is the most naked of all.”
― Georges Perec, Life A User's Manual

“Busco a un tiempo lo eterno y lo efímero”
― Georges Perec, Life: A User's Manual

“No son los elementos los que determinan el conjunto, sino el conjunto el que determina los elementos.
Aisladamente, una pieza de un puzzle no quiere decir nada; es tan sólo pregunta imposible, reto opaco; pero no bien logramos conectarla con una de sus vecinas, desaparece, deja de existir como pieza: la intensa dificultad que precedió aquel acercamiento, no sólo no tiene ya razón de ser, sino que parece no haberla tenido nunca, hasta tal punto se ha hecho evidencia: las dos piezas milagrosamente reunidas ya sólo son una, a su vez fuente de error, de duda, de desazón y de espera”
― Georges Perec, Life: A User's Manual

“Ni los que lo tuvieron casi todo ni los que no tuvieron casi nada triunfaron en la vida.”
― Georges Perec, Life: A User's Manual

“Enthusiasm is no state of mind for a historian.”
― Georges Perec, Life: A User's Manual

“There are two people in the waiting room. One is an extremely thin old man, a retired teacher of French who still gives tuition by correspondence, and who whilst waiting his turn is correcting a pile of scripts with a pencil sharpened to a fine point. On the script he is about to examine, the essay title can be read:

In Hell, Raskolnikov meets Meursault (“The Outsider”). Imagine a dialogue between them using material from both novels.”
― Georges Perec, Life: A User's Manual

“It is the twenty-third of June nineteen seventy-five, and it is eight o'clock in the evening. Seated at his jigsaw puzzle, Bartlebooth has just died.”
― Georges Perec, Life: A User's Manual

“Life, young man, is a woman on her back, with swollen, close-set breasts, a smooth, soft, fat belly between protruding hips, with slender arms, plump thighs, and half closed eyes, who in her grandiose and taunting provocation demands our most ardent fervour.”
― Georges Perec, Life: A User's Manual

“these”
― Georges Perec, Life: A User's Manual

“Valen je ponekad imao utisak da je vreme stalo, da visi u vazduhu, da se zgusnulo oko njemu nepoznatog očekivanja. Sama ideja te slike koju je planirao da uradi i njeni izloženi i razloženi prizori koji su počeli da ga proganjaju u svakom trenutku, ispunjavaju mu snove i izvlače uspomene, sama ideja te zgrade kojoj je izvađena utroba i i koja pokazuje razgolićene naprsline svoje prošlosti i urušavanje svoje sadašnjosti, to nepovezano gomilanje veličanstvenih ili komičnih, ništavnih ili kukavnih priča, ličila mu je na groteskni mauzolej podignut u znak sećanja na statiste okamenjene u svojim poslednjim položajima, jednako beznačajnim kada su uzvišeni kao i kada su banalni, kao da je istovremeno hteo da predupredi i odloži te osporene ili živahne samrtnike koji su, od sprata do sprata, krenuli u osvajanje čitave zgrade: gospodin Marsija, gospođa Moro, gospođa De Bomon, Bartlbut, Roršah, gospođica Krespi, gospođa Alben, Smotf. I on, naravno, on, Valen, najstariji stanar zgrade.”
― Georges Perec, Life: A User's Manual

“I seek the eternal and the ephemeral.”
― Georges Perec, Life: A User's Manual

“He practically never talked about his travels. One day, Monsieur Riri asked him what was the most amazing thing he had seen in his life: he replied, a Maharajah sitting at a table all incrusted with ivory, dining with his three lieutenants. No one said anything, and the three fierce men of war seemed, in front of their leader, like little children. Another time, without anyone asking him anything at all, he said that the most beautiful, the most dazzling thing he had seen in the world was a ceiling divided into octagonal sections, decorated in gold and silver, and more exquisitely worked than any jewel.”
― Georges Perec, Life: A User's Manual

“La vita, giovanotto, è una donna sdraiata, con seni accostati e rigonfi, con una gran pancia liscia e molle fra i fianchi sporgenti, con braccia sottili, cosce piene e occhi socchiusi, che nella sua provocazione splendida e beffarda esige il nostro più fervido ardore.”
― Georges Perec, La vita istruzioni per l'uso

“Sometimes he imagined the building as an iceberg whose visible tip included the main floors and eaves and whose submerged mass began below the first level of cellars: stairs with resounding steps going down in spirals; long tiled corridors, their luminous globes encased in wire netting, their iron doors stencilled with warnings and skulls; goods lifts with riveted walls; air vents equipped with huge, motionless fans; metal-lined canvas fire hoses as thick as tree trunks, connected to yellow stopcocks a yard in diameter; cylindrical wells drilled into solid rock; concrete tunnels capped with regularly spaced skylights of frosted glass; recesses; storerooms; bunkers; strongrooms with armour-plated doors.”
― Georges Perec, Life: A User's Manual

“and at the very bottom, a world of caverns whose walls are black with soot, a world of cesspools and sloughs, a world of grubs and beasts, of eyeless beings who drag animal carcasses behind them, of demoniacal monsters with bodies of birds, swine, and fish, of dried-out corpses and yellow-skinned skeletons arrayed in attitudes of the living, of forges manned by dazed Cyclopses in black leather aprons, their single eyes shielded by metal-rimmed blue glass, hammering their brazen masses into dazzling shields.”
― Georges Perec, Life: A User's Manual

“Or from even further back, from as far back as she could remember, there rose the fascination she had felt as a little girl every time she saw her grandfather shaving: he would sit down, usually around seven in the morning, after a frugal breakfast, and with a serious air make up his lather with a very soft brush in a bowl of very hot water, a lather so thick and white and firm that even after more than seventy-five years it still made her mouth water.”
― Georges Perec, Life: A User's Manual

“   Let us imagine a man whose wealth is equalled only by his indifference to what wealth generally brings, a man of exceptional arrogance who wishes to fix, to describe, and to exhaust not the whole world—merely to state such an ambition is enough to invalidate it—but a constituted fragment of the world: in the face of the inextricable incoherence of things, he will set out to execute a (necessarily limited) programme right the way through, in all its irreducible, intact entirety.
   In other words, Bartlebooth resolved one day that his whole life would be organised around a single project, an arbitrarily constrained programme with no purpose outside its own completion.”
― Georges Perec, Life: A User's Manual

“Het trappehuis hield voor hem op iedere etage een herinnering, een emotie in, iets ouderwets en ongrijpbaars, iets dat ergens trilde in het flakkerende schijnsel van zijn geheugen: een gebaar, een geur, een geluid, een fonkeling, een jonge vrouw die opera-aria's zong waarbij ze zichzelf op de piano begeleidde, onhandig getik op een schrijfmachine, een hardnekkige cresollucht, geschreeuw, een kreet, geroezemoes, het geruis van zijde en bont, klaaglijk gemiauw achter een deur, geklop tegen muren, tot vervelens toe op krassende grammofoons gedraaide tango's of, op de zesde etage, het permanente gebrom van de decoupeerzaag van Gaspard Winckler, dat drie verdiepingen lager, op de derde etage links, nog altijd alleen beantwoord werd door een ondraaglijke stilte.”
― Georges Perec, Life: A User's Manual

“Wie heeft, staande tegenover een Parijs woongebouw, nooit gedacht dat het onvergankelijk was? Een bom, een brand of een aardbeving kunnen het natuurlijk vellen, maar afgezien daarvan? In de ogen van een individu, een familie of zelfs een dynastie lijken een stad, een straat of een huis zo onveranderlijk en ongevoelig voor de tijd en de wisselvalligheden van het menselijk leven, dat men de broosheid van ons bestaan en de onkwetsbaarheid van steen met elkaar denkt te kunnen vergelijken en tegenover elkaar meent te kunnen stellen.”
― Georges Perec, Life: A User's Manual