Muriel Barbery Quotes

Personally I think that grammar is a way to attain beauty.

The lines gradually become their own demiurges and, like some witless yet miraculous participant, I witness the birth on paper of sentences that have eluded my will and appear in spite of me on the sheet, teaching me something that I neither knew nor thought I might want to know.

I thought: pity the poor in spirit who know neither the enchantment nor the beauty of language.

The real ordeal is not leaving those you love but learning to live without those who don't love you.

I am going to die, but that is of no importance.

To be poor, ugly and, moreover, intelligent condemns one in our society to a dark and disillusioned life...to beauty all is forgiven.

So if there is something on the planet that is worth living for, I'd better not miss it, because once you're dead, it's too late for regrets, and if you die by mistake, that is really, really dumb.

Because beauty consits of it's own passing, just as we reach for it. It's the ephemeral configuration of things in the moment, when you can see both their movement and their death.

We can be friends. We can be anything we want to be.

...we have to surpass ourselves every day, make every day undying. Climb our own personal Everest and do it in such a way that every step is a little bit of eternity.
That's what the future is for: to build the present, with real plans, made by living people.

- Elle m'a pas recconue!
- C'est parce qu'elle vous a jamais vue.

When tea becomes ritual, it takes its place at the heart of our ability to see greatness in small things. Where is beauty to be found? In great things that, like everything else, are doomed to die, or in small things that aspire to nothing, yet know how to set a jewel of infinity in a single moment?

To the rich, therefore, falls the burden of Beauty. And if they cannot assume it, then they deserve to die.

...beauty consists of its own passing, just as we reach for it. It's the ephemeral configuration of things in the moment, when you can see both their beauty and their death.

There's so much humanity in a love of trees, so much nostalgia for our first sense of wonder, so much power in just feeling our own insignificance when we are surrounded by nature.

Talent consists not in inventing shapes but in causing those that were invisible to emerge.

Music plays a huge role in my life. It is music that helps me to endure ... well ... everything there is to endure.

Qui croit
Pouvoir faire du miel
Sans partager le destin des abeilles?

If you have but one friend, make sure you choose her well.

With her it's as if a text was written so that we can identify the characters, the narrator, the setting, the plot, the time of the story, and so on. I don't think it has ever occurred to her that a text is written above all to be read and to arouse emotions in the reader.