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
Start
Bowl
Ends
Bowls
Right
Absurd
Children
Aim
Life
Wouldn
Like
Wonder
People
Teach
Goldfish
Stars
Simpler

More quotes by 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
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... they have never seen you ... I would recognize you anywhere.
Muriel Barbery
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Pastries . . . can only be appreciated to the full extent of their subtlety when they are not eaten to assuage our hunger, when the orgy of their sugary sweetness is not destined to full some primary need but to coat our palate with all the benevolence of the world.
Muriel Barbery
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We can be friends. We can be anything we want to be.
Muriel Barbery
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It would be so much better if we could share our insecurity, if we could all venture inside ourselves and realize that green beans and vitamin C, however much they nurture us, cannot save lives, or sustain our souls.
Muriel Barbery
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To be poor, ugly and, moreover, intelligent condemns one in our society to a dark and disillusioned life...to beauty all is forgiven.
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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Live or die: mere consequences of what you have built. What matters is building well.
Muriel Barbery
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What is writing, no matter how lavish the pieces, if it says nothing of the truth, cares little for the heart, and is merely subservient to the pleasure of showing one's brilliance.
Muriel Barbery
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That's what the future is for: to build the present, with real plans, made by living people.
Muriel Barbery
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The strong ones among humans do nothing. They talk and talk again.
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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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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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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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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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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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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Maybe that's what being alive is about: so we can track down those movments that are dying.
Muriel Barbery
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Melancholy overwhelms me at supersonic speed.
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