The Life of Elves Quotes

“My love, I walked for thirty years under the sky without ever doubting that I lived in glory; I never wavered; I never stumbled; I was a reveler and a loudmouth, if ever there was one, as stupid and useless as the sparrows and the peacocks; I wiped my mouth on the cuff of my sleeve, tramped into the house with mud on my feet and burped many's a time amid the laughter and the wine. But I always held my head high in the storm because I loved you and you loved me back, and our love mightn't have been all silk and poetry but we could look at each other and know we'd drown all our woes. Love doesn't save, it raises you up and makes you bigger, it lights you up from inside and carves out that light like wood in the forest. It nestles in the hollows of empty days, of thankless tasks, of useless hours, it doesn't drift along on golden rafts or sparkling rivers, it doesn't sing or shine and it never proclaims a thing. But at night, once the room's been swept and the embers covered over and the children are asleep - at night between the sheets, with slow gazes, not moving or speaking - at night, at last, when we're weary of our meager lives and the trivialities of our insignificant existence, each of us becomes the well where the other can draw water, and we love each other and learn to love ourselves.”
― Muriel Barbery, The Life of Elves

“Love doesn't save, it raises you up and makes you bigger, it lights you up from inside and carves out that light like wood in the forest. It nestles in the hollows of empty days, of thankless tasks, of useless hours, it doesn't drift along on golden rafts or sparkling rivers, it doesn't sing or shine and it never proclaims a thing. But at night, once the room's been swept and the embers covered over and the children are asleep -- at night between the sheets, with slow gazes, not moving or speaking -- at night, at last, when we're weary of our meager lives and the trivialities of our insignificant existance, each of us becomes the well where the other one can draw water ...”
― Muriel Barbery, The Life of Elves

“After a day spent running around outside, Clara never went home without first slipping through the orchard, where she would stop to pray to the spirits of enclosure to prepare her for her return within four walls.”
― Muriel Barbery, The Life of Elves

“Important decisions are made by those who are invisible, by the humble people.”
― Muriel Barbery, The Life of Elves

“True faith, it is a well-known fact, has little regard for chapels, but does believe in the communion of mysteries.”
― Muriel Barbery, The Life of Elves

“She was dark-haired, fierce; she wore two drop earrings made of crystal; her face was a pure oval tickled with dimples; her skin was golden; and her laugh was like a fire in the night. But on her face you could also read the concentration of a soul whose life is entirely inward, and a mischievous gravity which acquires a silver patina with age.”
― Muriel Barbery, The Life of Elves

“There are only two moments when everything is possible in this life," said Petrus, "when one drinks, and when one makes up stories.”
― Muriel Barbery, The Life of Elves

“The little girl spent most of her hours of leisure in the branches. When her family did not know where to find her, they would go to the trees, the tall beech to start with, the one that stood to the north above the lean-to, for that was where she liked to daydream”
― Muriel Barbery, The Life of Elves

“Then there was Jeannot, who was reminded of another war and who was discovering inside himself the roots of a mad hopefulness that made him want to believe that the present hour might appease the torture of memories, and he could again see the paths of his life opening up before him, paths that came to an abrupt end the day he saw his brother die. Every morning he got up to face this wound that no one could see, and he drank his wine and laughed at stories, and his soul was more bare than a rosebush in winter.”
― Muriel Barbery, The Life of Elves

“Do you know what a dream is? It is not a chimera engendered by our desire, but another way we absorb the substance of the world, and gain access to the same truths as those the mists unveil by concealing the visible and unveiling the invisible.... There are no limits to our powers to accomplish and our natural spirit is stronger than anything.”
― Muriel Barbery, The Life of Elves

“Do you know what a dream is? It is not a chimera engendered by our desire, but another way we absorb the substance of the world, and gain access to the same truths as those the mists unveil by concealing the visible and unveiling the invisible.”
― Muriel Barbery, The Life of Elves

“No one understands better than I do the feelings of people who are unsuited to the world into which they have been born. Some have ended up in the wrong body, others in the wrong place. Their misfortune is blamed on a flaw in their personality, when in fact they have merely gone astray in a place they shouldn’t have been.”
― Muriel Barbery, The Life of Elves

“She could have closed her ;eyes and known exactly where she was, as if guided by the stars, from the swelling of the field, the rushes in the stream, the stones on the pathways and the gentle incline of the slope”
― Muriel Barbery, The Life of Elves

“She set out as the mist was rising. She knew every clump of grass in a perimeter extending from the footshills of her father's farm all the way to Marcelot's”
― Muriel Barbery, The Life of Elves

“One evening as she sat on a lower branch of the middle oak, while the combe was filling with shadow and she knew they would come soon for her to return to the warmth, she decided for a change to cut across the meadow and pay a visit to the neighbor's sheep.”
― Muriel Barbery, The Life of Elves

“Always running through the fields or flinging herself upon the grass, where she would stay and stare at the too vast sky; or crossing barefoot through the stream, even in winter, to feel the sweet chill or biting cold, and then with the solemnity of a bishop she would relate to all assembled the highlights and humdrum moments of her days spent in the out of doors. To all of this one must add the faint sadness of a soul whose intelligence surpassed her perception and who—from the handful of clues, although weak, that were to be found everywhere, even in those protected places, however poor, in which she had grown up—already had an intimation of the world’s tragedies.”
― Muriel Barbery, The Life of Elves

“The time of man is coming, and of this I am certain: neither death, nor life, nor the spirits, nor the present, nor the future, nor the stars, nor the abyss, nor any creature: nothing will keep from love those who live in our land, and by our land. The time of man is coming─men who will know the nobility of forests and the grace of trees, men who will know how to contemplate and heal and, lastly, how to love.”
― Muriel Barbery, The Life of Elves

“For a few seconds Maria did not move, or even breathe, apparently. Then she gave a sorrowful gulp and, like all little girls, even those who speak to fantastical wild boars and mercurial horses, she collapsed in desperate sobs, of the kind that come so easily to a twelve-year-old, and so hard to a person of forty.”
― Muriel Barbery, The Life of Elves

“But the life he now led no longer resonated with the echo of past moments of exhilaration, other than the trilling of birds at dawn, or the grand calligraphy of clouds. Therefore, when the little girl began to play, the pain he felt courted a sorrow he no longer knew still lived inside him, a brief reminiscence of the cruelty of pleasure.”
― Muriel Barbery, The Life of Elves