s.penkevich > Books: french‎ (19)

‘he associates his best friend’s wife with a summery, exotic fruit, acidic and ample…he married a clementine. He lives with a winter fruit, a banal and cheap fruit, a supermarket fruit. A small, ordinary fruit that has none of the indulgence of the orange nor the originality of the grapefruit. A fruit organized into segments, practical and easy to eat, precut, ready for use, proffered in its casing.’

‘the white of Sunday is not as simple as it seems. Optics teaches us that white is the result of a combination of every color (and not the absence of color, as I once thought). It’s not the purity of the bride or the emptiness of the blank page: Sunday is neither neutral nor naive. White is the synthesis of every color, just as Sunday is the synthesis of every day of the week. It’s the final result, the last chapter, the solution.’

‘Absorbed in my translation, I wonder if that expression, so difficult to translate into French, testifies to the fact that English-speakers love differently than us. Do they make more effort? For them, is it possible to make love last? To reignite a desire that’s been extinguished? How do they do it? ’

‘In reality, marriage didn’t calm me down. I realized at the very moment we said “I do” that my husband could still divorce me…I was constantly awaiting the next step. I discovered a world of proofs of love, with commitment everywhere and love nowhere. And fifteen years after our first date, I still sleep just as poorly.’

‘One day, I was already old, in the entrance of a public place a man came up to me. He introduced himself and said, “I’ve known you for years. Everyone says you were beautiful when you were young, but I want to tell you I think you’re more beautiful now than then. Rather than your face as a young woman, I prefer your face as it is now. Ravaged.’

‘The story of my life doesn’t exist. Does not exist. There’s never any centre to it. No path, no line. There are great spaces where you pretend there used to be someone, but it’s not true, there was no one. The story of one small part of my youth I’ve already written, more or less — I mean, enough to give a glimpse of it. Of this part, I mean, the part about the crossing of the river. What I’m doing now is both different and the same.’

‘poverty had knocked down the walls of the family and we were all left outside, each one fending for himself. Shameless, that’s what we were. That’s how I came to be here with you.’

‘he’s a man who must make love a lot, a man who’s afraid, he must make love a lot to fight against fear.’

‘We're united in a fundamental shame at having to live. It's here we are at the heart of our common fate, the fact that all three of us are our mother's children, the children of a candid creature murdered by society. We're on the side of the society which has reduced her to despair. Because of what's been done to our mother, so amiable, so trusting, we hate life, we hate ourselves.’

‘its while its being lived that life is immortal, while its still alive. Immortality is not a matter of more or less time, its not really a question of immortality but of something else that remains unknown’

‘My mother is a woman in green, untouchable, disappointing, infinitely mutable, very cold, able, by force of will, to become very beautiful, and able, too, not to want to.’

‘Atheistic existentialism, of which I am a representative, declares with greater consistency that if God does not exist there is at least one being whose existence comes before its essence, a being which exists before it can be defined by any conception of it. .... He will not be anything until later, and then he will be what he makes of himself…If God does not exist, are we provided with any values or commands that could legitimize our behavior.’

‘a man who commits himself, and who realizes that he is not only the individual that he chooses to be, but also a legislator choosing at the same time what humanity as a whole should be, cannot help but be aware of his own full and profound responsibility’

‘This is humanism because we remind man that there is no legislator other than himself and that he must, in his abandoned state, make his own choices, and also because we show that it is not by turning inward, but by constantly seeking a goal outside of himself in the form of liberation, or of some special achievement, that man will realize himself as truly human.

‘ this sordid scenario where she gave herself the lucky draw, proclaimed herself the hero, the stranger who descends from the sky, saves you and then slips away, ready to rack up self-convincing statements – I did my utmost, I did all that I could – all the while knowing she’s incapable of believing it: the worm of guilt is already lodging itself in her gut.’

‘You must be near Irkutsk by this time and, strangely, I like knowing you are that city--the "a" dark and deep, nearly a closed "0," the warm vibration of the "r”, rolled in the base of his throat; my love, soon you will see Baikal, make sure you leave the door of the compartment open, you can see the lake from the corridor for a full half hour, make sure you don't miss it, it's a treasure for the Russians, the country's pearl, but for me, for us, the men of Siberia, it's simply the sea--the labials that linger, the dentals that collide, the light hiss of saliva under the upper lip--yes, I said "us, the men of Siberia," I'm rediscovering my country, Hélène, and I am happy…’

‘I made this attitude my own with far more conviction, I think, than if I had immediately put it into practice. I believed I could base my life on it…I visualized a life of degradation and moral turpitude as my ideal.’

‘it was for this I reproached Anne: she prevented me from liking myself. I, who was so naturally meant for happiness and gaiety, had been forced by her into a world of self-criticism and guilty conscience, where, unaccustomed to introspection, I was completely lost. And what did she bring me? I took stock: She wanted my father, she had got him. She would gradually make of us the husband and step-daughter of Anne Larsen; that is to say, she would turn us into two civilized, well-behaved and happy people’

‘It occurred to me that writing should also aim for that—the impression conveyed by sexual intercourse, a feeling of anxiety and stupefaction, a suspension of moral judgment.’

‘It seemed to me that to put a name to this woman would allow me to construct, out of what is always awakened by a word and its sounds, a personality type: to hold an image of her—even if a completely false one—inside me. To know the name of the other woman was, in my own deficiency of being, to own a little part of her.’

‘I am writing jealousy as I lived it, tracking and accumulating the desires, sensations, and actions that were mine during this period. It’s the only way for me to make something real of my obsession. And I am always afraid to let something essential escape. Writing, that is, as a jealousy of the real.’

‘[Herman] came to think that vitality is in no way a necessity, nor is a certain sort of happiness made up of varied activities, heart-felt affections, and a comfortable, discreet wealth...for the moment he was drawn to the possibility of an indolent but not ignoble, serenely oblivious degeneration.’

I insist on knowing the names, on being interested only in books left ajar, like doors; I will not go looking for keys.

’we discover not ideas given in advance but valuesemanating from the linguistic system…. [T]hese concepts are purely differential, not positively defined by their content but negatively defined by their relations with other terms of the system. Their most precise characteristic is that they are what the others are not’
-Saussure, 1974

’Paper echoes and resounds, subjectile of an inscription from which phonetic aspects are never absent, whatever the system of writing. Beneath the appearance of a surface, it holds in reserve a volume, folds, a labyrinth whose walls return the echoes of the voice or song that it carries itself; for paper alsop has the range or the ranges of a voice bearer. Paper is utilized in an experience involving the body, beginning with the hands, eyes, voice, ears; so it mobilizes both time and space. Despite or through the richness and multiplicity of these resources, this multimedia has always proclaimed its inadequacy and its finitude.

’Even when he was not thinking of the little phrase, it existed, latent, in his mind, in the same way as certain other conceptions without material equivalent, such as our notions of light, of sound, of perspective, of bodily desire, the rich possessions wherewith our inner temple is diversified and adorned. Perhaps we shall lose them, perhaps they will be obliterated, if we return to nothing in the dust. But so long as we are alive, we can no more bring ourselves to a state in which we shall not have known them than we can with regard to any material object, than we can, for example, doubt the luminosity of a lamp that has just been lighted, in view of the changed aspect of everything in the room, from which has vanished even the memory of the darkness. In that way Vinteuil's phrase, like some theme, say, inTristan, which represents to us also a certain acquisition of sentiment, has espoused our mortal state, had endued a vesture of humanity that was affecting enough. Its destiny was linked, for the future, with that of the human soul, of which it was one of the special, the most distinctive ornaments. Perhaps it is not-being that is the true state, and all our dream of life is without existence; but, if so, we feel that it must be that these phrases of music, these conceptions which exist in relation to our dream, are nothing either. We shall perish, but we have for our hostages these divine captives who shall follow and share our fate. And death in their company is something less bitter, less inglorious, perhaps even less certain.’

’[E]ven though he probably valued the Florentine masterpiece only because he fount it again in her, nevertheless that resemblance conferred a certain beauty on her too, made her more precious…and he felt happy that his pleasure in seeing Odette could be be justified by his own aesthetic culture.’

‘I’m surrounded by lies and self-deception. But I’ve had enough of that; I wish men to live by the light of truth. And I’ve the power to make them do so. For I know what they need and haven’t got. They're without understanding and they need a teacher…’

'So long as there shall exist, by reason of law and custom, a social condemnation, which, in the face of civilisation, artificially creates hells on earth, and complicates a destiny that is divine, with human fatality; so long as the three problems of the age — the degradation of man by poverty, the ruin of woman by starvation, and the dwarfing of childhood by physical and spiritual night — are not solved; so long as, in certain regions, social asphyxia shall be possible; in other words, and from a yet more extended point of view, so long as ignorance and misery remain on earth, books like this cannot be useless.'