Blue Boy Quotes

“Remember, all of man's happiness is in the little valleys. Tiny little ones. Small enough to call from one side to the other.”
― Jean Giono, Blue Boy

“From the time we began to build houses and cities, since we invented the wheel, we have not advanced one step toward happiness. We have always been in halves. As long as we invent and progress in mechanical things and not in love, we shall not achieve happiness.”
― Jean Giono, Blue Boy

“It was easy for me to set out for the war without any great feeling or emotion, simply because I was young, and over all young men they were blowing a wind that sang of pirates and the ocean sail.”
― Jean Giono, Blue Boy

“Where I made a mistake, was when I wanted to be good and helpful. You will make a mistake, like me.”
― Jean Giono, Blue Boy

“Franchesc's stories never had any point or ending. They would wander at random like pigeons. They would fly, calling, in all directions, and the house was henceforth inhabited by these screaming tales. They never died. Sometimes they were found long after in some dark corner. There they were waiting, and sometimes they would leap up at one.”
― 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

“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

“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

“The angel!
It is the child of our flesh. It is molded by the hands of God: yes, and by our own. All those keen little hands of our eyes and ears, all those sensitive little hands by which our blood touches the world, as a child touches an orange; those little burning hands of our lips, the black hand of our spleen, the purple hand of our liver, the broad hand of our lungs, the musician hand of our heart, the laborer in mortar that toils in our belly, and the maker of wings that flaps gently like a fish between our legs, or throbs like a warm little frog: these are our hands.
And the angel is there, quietly seated at the summit of our neck, between our two ears.”
― 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

“I struggled no longer and the world burst like a sun.”
― Jean Giono, Blue Boy

“Fils, s'il t'est donné de vivre, tu rencontreras sur ta route des hommes qui sont suivis par des troupeaux de montagnes. Des hommes qui arrivent dans des pays, nus et crus. On remarque à peine que leurs mains ouvertes éclairent l'ombre comme des veilleuses. Quand on le remarque. Et voilà que les montagnes se lèvent et marchent à leur suite. Et voilà que tous les mécaniciens de raison tapent du poing sur leurs tables. Voilà qu'ils crient : « Il y a dix ans que je cherche des formules, dix ans que je noircis du papier, dix ans que j'use des arithmétiques. Dix ans que je cherche le bouton secret ». Et celui-là est arrivé et il a dit tout simplement : « Montagne » et puis la montagne s'est dressée. Où est la justice ?
« Elle est là, fiston la justice.
L'espérance… »”
― Jean Giono, Blue Boy

“Je me souviens de l'atelier de mon père. Je ne peux pas passer devant l’échoppe d'un cordonnier sans croire que mon père est encore vivant, quelque part dans l'au-delà du monde, assis devant une table de fumée, avec son tablier bleu, son tranchet, ses ligneuls, ses alènes, en train de faire des souliers en cuir d'ange pour quelque dieu à mille pieds.
Jean le bleu.”
― Jean Giono, Blue Boy

“The little girl was always dressed in red. She would flatten her shoulders and her folded arms on the windowsill, and her yellow and black head seemed to be floating in blood.”
― Jean Giono, Blue Boy

“My father loved wounds and the sick.”
― Jean Giono, Blue Boy