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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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Muriel Barbery
Age: 55
Born: 1969
Born: May 28
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Anfa
Adequate
Forgiven
Intelligence
Longer
Beauty
Seems
Even
Vulgarity
Things
Compensation

More quotes by Muriel Barbery

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Most people, when they move, well they just move depending on whatever's around them. At this very moment, as I am writing, Constitution the cat is going by with her tummy dragging close to the floor. This cat has absolutely nothing constructive to do in life and still she is heading toward something, probably an armchair.
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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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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We can be friends. We can be anything we want to be.
Muriel Barbery
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Entrusting one's life is not the same as opening up one's soul.
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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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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Moments like this act as magical interludes, placing our hearts at the edge of our souls: fleetingly, yet intensely, a fragment of eternity has come to enrich time...When tea becomes ritual, it takes its place at the heart of our ability to see greatness in small things.
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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Don't worry Renee, I won't commit suicide and I won't burn a thing. Because from now on, for you, I'll be searching for those moments of always within never. Beauty, in this world.
Muriel Barbery
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If, in our world, there is any chance of becoming the person you haven't yet become...will I know how to seize that chance, turn my life into a garden that will be completely different from my forebears'?
Muriel Barbery
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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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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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... they have never seen you ... I would recognize you anywhere.
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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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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But the world, in its present state, is no place for princesses.
Muriel Barbery
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Beautiful things should belong to beautiful souls.
Muriel Barbery
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Melancholy overwhelms me at supersonic speed.
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