Quote

People aim for the stars, and they end up like goldfish in a bowl. I wonder if it wouldn't be simpler just to teach children right from the start that life is absurd.

Muriel Barbery

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Muriel Barbery
Age: 55
Born: 1969
Born: May 28
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Anfa
Right
Absurd
Children
Aim
Life
Wouldn
Like
Wonder
People
Teach
Goldfish
Stars
Simpler
Start
Bowl
Ends
Bowls

More quotes by Muriel Barbery

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In the end, I wonder if the true movement of the world might not be a voice raised in song.
Muriel Barbery
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I won't get any better by punishing the people I can't heal.
Muriel Barbery
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When illness enters a home, not only does it take hold of a body. It also weaves a dark web between hearts, a web where hope is trapped.
Muriel Barbery
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A man who farts in bed . . . is a man who loves life.
Muriel Barbery
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I may know that the world is an ugly place, I still don't want to see it.
Muriel Barbery
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To beauty, all is forgiven, even vulgarity. Intelligence no longer seems an adequate compensation for things.
Muriel Barbery
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The raw tomato, devoured in the garden when freshly picked, is a horn of abundance of simple sensations, a radiating rush in one's mouth that brings with it every pleasure. . . . a tomato, an adventure.
Muriel Barbery
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But the world, in its present state, is no place for princesses.
Muriel Barbery
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People think that children don't know anything. It's enough to make you wonder if grownups were ever children once upon a time.
Muriel Barbery
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I may be indigent in name, position, and in appearance, but in my own mind I am an unrivaled goddess -
Muriel Barbery
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Civilization is the mastery of violence, the triumph, constantly challenged, over the aggressive nature of the primate. For primates we have been and primates we shall remain, however often we learn to find joy in a camellia on moss. This is the very purpose of education.
Muriel Barbery
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Melancholy overwhelms me at supersonic speed.
Muriel Barbery
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Tasting is an act of pleasure and writing about that pleasure is an artistic gesture, but the only true work of art, in the end, is another person's feast.
Muriel Barbery
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I know that they're all unhappy because nobody loves the right person the way they should and because they don't understand that it's really their own self that they're mad at.
Muriel Barbery
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. . . maybe that's what life's all about: there's a lof of despair, but also the odd moments of beauty, where time is no longer the same . . . [like] something suspended . . . an elsewhere . . . an always within a never. Yes, that's is, an always within a never.
Muriel Barbery
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We don't recognize each other because other people have become our permanent mirrors. If we actually realized this, if we were able to become aware of the fact that we are only ever looking at ourselves in the other person, that we are alone in the wilderness, we would go crazy.
Muriel Barbery
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..if you dread tomorrow, it's because you don't know how to build the present, you tell yourself you can deal with it tomorrow, and it's a lost cause anyway because tomorrow always ends up becoming today, don't you see?
Muriel Barbery
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We think we can make honey without sharing in the fate of bees, but we are in truth nothing but poor bees, destined to accomplish our task and then die.
Muriel Barbery
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Art is emotion without desire.
Muriel Barbery
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Poverty is a reaper: it harvests everything inside us that might have made us capable of social intercourse with others, and leaves us empty, purged of feeling, so that we may endure all the darkness of the present day.
Muriel Barbery