French Novelist Quotes

you should never marry a lot younger than you... never.... it never works... there is not a single case of its working..

Patrick Modiano

Only experience or example can rationally determine which way the heart should incline. Now experience is not an advantage that it is open to everyone to acquire, since it depends on the various situations in which, by chance, we find ourselves. For many people, then, this leaves only example that can offer any guidance as to how they should exercise virtue.

Antoine François Prévost

Classical education has deformed everything, and has imposed upon us as geniuses men of correct, facile talent, who follow the beaten track.

Mutual content is like a river, which must have its banks on either side.

Alain-René Lesage

Okay, I'm flattered, I appreciate your attempt at making me feel better after the fiasco with the pita rolls, but please ring up this beer I need it more than flattery.

Amanda Filipacchi

He hated the war; it threatened much more than his lifestyle or peace of mind. It continually destroyed the world of the imagination, the only world where he felt happy.

Irène Némirovsky

Mercury. Kills the patient with the disease.

Gustave Flaubert

The clever way death cuts us down, but makes it look like just a thinning-out. Generations never fall with one blow - that would be too sad and too obvious. Death prefers to do it piecemeal. The meadow is attacked from several sides at the same time. One of us goes one day; another some time afterwards; you have to stand back and look around you to take in what's missing, to grasp the vast slaughter of your generation...

Alphonse Daudet

Our rages, daughters of despair, creep and squirm like worms. Prayer is the only form of revolt which remains upright.

Georges Bernanos

Whatever our ignorance left to itself, and whatever the wounds that other human beings are, we ought to study ourselves with a sort of devotion.