Quotes from Julien Gracq

Blood had long since ceased to beat from one end to the other, but one could sense, from passages marked with fresher traces of wheels and hooves, that once the meaning and even the very idea of a long journey was lost, sleep had not descended over it in one fell swoop: it had continued to steal a march here and there, in a discontinuous way, and over short distances, like a laborer who feels his cart jolt on a section of Roman road that crosses his field...

On its own, having escaped my grasp, the spool I had loosed was unwinding.

A history of literature, unlike history as such, ought to list only victories, for its defeats are no victory for anyone.

De nouveau il entendit la porte s'ouvrir, et, calme, du fond de la chambre, il vit venir à lui sa dernière heure.

a redoubtable alchemy was at work behind impenetrable veils as the forest prepared its nocturnal mysteries.

And what can still delight an inert stone except to become, once more, the bed of a raging torrent?

Tout ce qu'on introduit dans un roman devient signe.

but the force of traditions, as in all crumbling empires, grows proportionately with the explicit revelation, in the machinery of government and commerce alike, of the preponderant action of all principles of inertia...

There are cities that are damned for some people by the mere fact that they seem created to close off the distances that are the only reason for living.

Solitude and boredom. It's what happens to something that's felt itself gathered together too long, too...exclusively. The vacuum that occurs at its frontiers--a kind of numbness which is generated on its torpid surface as if it had lost the sense of touch--lost contact.

J'ai lu quelque part que la mort était une société secrète...Ce qui n'est qu'une fin, un pis-aller , et c'est peu dire, pour la plupart des êtres, ne peut-il devenir pour d'autres une vocation? - Quelquefois, et jamais autant que ce soir, je me le suis demandé. Et - comme toutes les vocations - contagieuse.

La verité est triste, comme vous le savez. Elle déçoit parce qu'elle restreint. Elle tient dans un poing fermé, puis dans le geste d'une main qui se délace et rejette. Elle est pauvre, elle démeuble et démunit.

I felt in complicity with the tendency of this country to absolute desolation.

Ce qui commence par : "Je me hâtais de déplaire exprès, par crainte de déplaire naturellement" (Mauriac) continue par : "Je me hâtais d'échouer exprès,par crainte d'échouer naturellement", et pourrait se terminer un jour par : "Je me hâtais de mourir exprès,par crainte de mourir naturellement" (une phrase d'excellent comique).

This stretch through the fogbound forest gradually lulled Grange into his favorite daydream; in it he saw an image of his life: all that he had he carried with him; twenty feet away, the world grew dark, perspectives blurred, and there was nothing near him but this close halo of warm consciousness, this nest perched high above the vague earth.

Nerede kald? diplomasinin 'öngörmek için bilmek, gere?ini yapmak için de öngörmek' kural?? Hareketsizli?in hafiflikten bir fark? var m??

There's nothing that people rebel more against, I told Jacques, than being forced to acknowledge the secret and immediate power their fellow human beings have over them. There's maybe nothing more common, routine. A savage power, as indifferent as a thunderbolt, where intellect, merit, beauty, language are nothing but animal electricity, a polarity that suddenly develops. Falling under the spell. Forever. We never talk about it—it's taboo.

Size bir devlet s?rr? verece?im. ?crac?lara verilmesi pek do?ru olmayan bir s?r ... " diye sürdürdü. "Bir zaaf s?rr?. Kötü bir duruma yol açan beklenmedik bir olay ba? gösterdi?inde, her ?eyin kendisiyle ba?lam?? oldu?u ki?i önce yerinde tutulur her zaman.

Tant de mains pour transformer ce monde, et si peu de regards pour le contempler.

Es gibt einen warmherzigen und sanften Spott, der auf engster Vertrautheit beruht, einer, die man nicht einzugestehen hat - einen Spott, der aus nichts anderem besteht als dem Bedürfnis, ein Übermaß an Sympathie aufzulösen.

He heard the dog bay two or three times, then the cry of the screech owl at the nearby edge of the forest, then nothing more: the earth around him was as dead as a plain of snow. Life fell back to this sweetish silence, the peace of a field of asphodels, only the faint rustle of blood within the ear, like the sound of the unattainable sea in a shell.