Beautiful quotes, de magnifiques citations

As a passionate book collector, I decided to share my favorite quotes daily. French and English.

[threefates]

Alexander McQueen AW17. #inspiration

[beautifullitteraryquotes]

Man is profoundly dependent on the reflection of himself in another man's soul, be it even the soul of an idiot.

Witold Gombrowicz, Ferdydurke

[beautifullitteraryquotes]

I cannot conceive any work of art as having a separate existence from life itself.

Antonin Artaud, The Theatre and its Double

[beautifullitteraryquotes]

The last thing in my life will be a picture, not a word. Words die before pictures.

Christa Wolf, Cassandra

[beautifullitteraryquotes]

Everything is more beautiful because we are doomed. You will never be lovelier than you are now. We will never be here again.

Homer, Iliad

[beautifullitteraryquotes]

Everything in life is just for a while.

Philip K. Dick, A Scanner Darkly

[beautifullitteraryquotes]

We felt the imprisonment of being a girl, the way it made your mind active and dreamy, and how you ended up knowing which colors went together. We knew that the girls were our twins, that we all existed in space like animals with identical skins, and that they knew everything about us though we couldn’t fathom them at all. We knew, finally, that the girls were really women in disguise, that they understood love and even death, and that our job was merely to create the noise that seemed to fascinate them.

Jeffrey Eugenides, The Virgin Suicides

[beautifullitteraryquotes]

So as long as you can forget your body you are happy and the moment you begin to be aware of your body, you are wretched. So if civilization is any good, it has to help us forget our bodies, and then time passes happily without our knowing it. Help us get rid of our bodies altogether.

D.H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover

[beautifullitteraryquotes]

She wanted to die, but she also wanted to live in Paris.

Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary

[beautifullitteraryquotes]

I need to be alone. I need to ponder my shame and my despair in seclusion; I need the sunshine and the paving stones of the streets without companions, without conversation, face to face with myself, with only the music of my heart for company.

Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

[beautifullitteraryquotes]

Love is like liquor, the drunker and more impotent you are, the stronger and smarter you think yourself and the surer you are of your rights.

Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Journey to the End of the Night

[beautifullitteraryquotes]

I think the devil doesn’t exist, but man has created him, he has created him in his own image and likeness.

Feodor Dostoyevsky, Brothers Karamazov

[beautifullitteraryquotes]

When will you learn that there isn't a word for everything?

Nicole Krauss, The History of Love

[beautifullitteraryquotes]

I'm a great poet. I don't put my poems on paper: they consist of actions and feelings.

Honoré de Balzac, Père Goriot

[beautifullitteraryquotes]

For women, the best aphrodisiacs are words. The G-spot is in the ears. He who looks for it below there is wasting his time.

Isabel Allende, Of Love and Shadows

[beautifullitteraryquotes]

If you want your life to be a small part of eternity, to be lucid even in the heart of madness, love... Love with all your strength, love as though it is all you know how to do, love enough to make the gods themselves jealous... for it is in love that all ugliness reveals its beauty.

Yasmina Khadra, What the Day Owes the Night

[beautifullitteraryquotes]

Girls can wear jeans and cut their hair short and wear shirts and boots because it's okay to be a boy; for girls it's like promotion. But for a boy to look like a girl is degrading, according to you, because secretly you believe that being a girl is degrading.

Ian McEwan, The Cement Garden