Quotes by Muriel Barbery

Any game where the goal is to build territory has to be beautiful. There may be phases of combat, but they are only means to an end, to allow your territory to survive. One of the most extraordinary aspects of the game of go is that it has been proven that in order to win, you must live, but you must also allow the other player to live. Players who are too greedy will lose: it is a subtle game of equilibrium, where you have to get ahead without crushing the other player. In the end, life and death are only the consequences of how well or how poorly you have made your construction. This is what one of Taniguchis characters says: you live, you die, these are consequences. Its a proverb for playing go, and for life.

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

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

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

So if there is something on the planet that is worth living for, Id better not miss it, because once youre dead, its too late for regrets, and if you die by mistake, that is really, really dumb.

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

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

...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. Thats what the future is for: to build the present, with real plans, made by living people.

There are days when I feel I have been able to grasp all there is to know in one single gaze, as if invisible branches suddenly spring out of nowhere, weaving together all the disparate strands of my reading--and then suddenly the meaning escapes, the essence evaporates, and no matter how often I reread the same lines, they seem to flee ever further with each subsequent reading...

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

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

This pause in time, within time ... When did I first experience the exquisite sense of surrender that is only possible with another person? The peace of mind one experiences on ones own, ones certainty of self in the serenity of solitude, are nothing in comparison to the release and openness and fluency one shares with another, in close companionship ...

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.

Thinking back on it, this evening, with my heart and my stomach all like jelly, I have finally concluded, maybe that’s what life is about: there’s a lot of despair, but also the odd moment of beauty, where time is no longer the same. It’s as if those strains of music created a sort of interlude in time, something suspended, an elsewhere that had come to us, an always within never. Yes, that’s it, an always within never. Don’t worry Renée, 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.

I suddenly felt my spirit expand, for I was capable of grasping the utter beauty of the trees.

Then there was Jeannot, who was reminded of another war and who was discovering inside himself the roots of a mad hopefulness that made him want to believe that the present hour might appease the torture of memories, and he could again see the paths of his life opening up before him, paths that came to an abrupt end the day he saw his brother die. Every morning he got up to face this wound that no one could see, and he drank his wine and laughed at stories, and his soul was more bare than a rosebush in winter.

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

I have read so many books. And yet, like most Autodidacts, I am never quite sure of what I have gained from them. There are days when I feel I have been able to grasp all there is to know in one single gaze, as if invisible branches suddenly spring out of no where, weaving together all the disparate strands of my reading. And then suddenly the meaning escapes, the essence evaporates and no matter how often I reread the same lines they seem to flee ever further with each subsequent reading and I see myself as some mad old fool who thinks her stomach is full because shes been reading the menu.

But many intelligent people have a sort of bug: they think intelligence is an end in itself. They have one idea in mind: to be intelligent, which is really stupid. And when intelligence takes itself for its own goal, it operates very strangely: the proof that it exists is not to be found in the ingenuity or simplicity of what it produces, but in how obscurely it is expressed.